With that out of the way, the caucus now heats up.  The Iowa State Fair opened this week, and the campaigns take full advantage to opportunity to reach out and touch almost a million Iowans in 10 days.  If the campaigns have been just walking, they start jogging this week.

Naturally, this means that the Register's chief political columnist, David "Dean of the Iowa Press Corps" Yepsen, goes on vacation.
I wondered where the thin margin of victory for Huckabee came from last Saturday - and here it is.  Nominally, the campaigns rent out coach buses to get their supporters to Ames on the day of the poll, but apparently Huckabee's campaign trolled around Ames and the complex where the poll was and handed out more free tickets to give to the interested-but-not-voting. 

Ames is a Democratic town because of the large ISU faculty and staff population, as well as various industry and other manufacturing jobs.  However, the ISU student population and campus itself is more moderate to conservative and the county is conservative in nature.  So finding opportunities with shoppers and other day-in-Ames people would be easier than might be thought.  Standing in the supermarket mall 5 blocks away from the poll site probably got a hundred people to show up.

Huckabee owes one of his staff people, probably a student intern, a very big thank you for getting him 2nd place.  All by thinking like a ticket scalper.

  - - -

More on Huckabee - if those campaign hacks of Huckabee were also shucking his message while forking over tickets, it wouldn't surprise me if they were focusing not on the anti-abortion and anti-immigration messages in the speech stand on Saturday, but on Huckabee's rhetoric of economic populism.  (h/t to David Sirota, who goes into Huckabee's actual progressivism.)  We don't hear these Mainstreet Over Wall Street messages repeated often . . editors and/or reporters don't acknowledge economic issues well unless they're already packed into nice neat framing containers or issues that are widespread.  Speaking about health insurance will get you cameras and notepads; speaking about how labor and mainstreet are getting screwed over doesn't.  But if you're a guy in Iowa on hot day walking out after buying $100 of groceries and feeling pinched, a young man offering you a free meal and a message about how you're getting beat up by Wall Street is going to sound damn appealing.  Iowa loves economic populism.

When wrapped in a humorous style, good charisma, and a record worth talking up you can see why Kos and nonpartisan fear what the man could do if he jumps to lead the GOP field.  I know I've forgotten these points because his media reporting has been near nil.

BTW - John Edwards shares this rhetoric and problem with Huckabee, just with fewer jokes.

  - - -

Edwards takes risk staking run on Iowa

In an article that could be used to diagnose everything that's wrong with modern political journalism, like the stereotypes couched in painful, casual folksy assertions, the shorter version is: Edwards isn't giving us enough love money.

When we see discussions on the Iowa-New Hampshire primary schedule, they notoriously degenerate fairly quickly into name-calling and assertions that both state parties are a load of greedy assholes.  That includes the inevitable article(s) from one state's campaign insider attacking the other state's perceived importance over themselves.  Iowa and new Hampshire may be married to each other for 'first-in-the-nation', but it's a marriage of convenience, and the envy that other states have for the early positions certainly exists between Iowa and New Hampshire as well.  Through the 70's and 80's as the current system evolved, Iowa and N.H. probably sniped at one another more than everyone else sniped at them.

It makes certain sense for Edwards to focus campaigning in Iowa; I don't attribute his appeal in Iowa to "down-home folksiness", but rather appeal in his basic message.  New Hampshire has a longer and harder tradition of libertarian ideals - Iowa is a state that has had a longer belief in competent government and support for its farmers.  Thankfully, the article finally hits this, but it's 15 grafs in.  The reader may not like my opinion, but there it is.  If there's a more fertile ground for progressivism than Iowa in the early contests, I'd certainly like to discuss it.

  - - -

This week is been dense for candidate announcements, plans and positions as they all come into this 'start of the official campaign mode'.  Richardson just advocated raising all new teacher pay to $40,000/annually; Clinton wants new safeguards against the main complaints against insurance, namely poor service and high premiums; Dodd has announced that he'll making getting a community college Associates' degree free.

In comparison, McCain just stood next to Big Red, the State Fair's Big Boar this year, decried Washington pork and then in the next breath  . . . reaffirmed staying the course (and spending the billions of dollars it costs) in Iraq. 

Just call me Vizzini, standing over here and exclaiming, "Inconceivable!!"

Giuliani shot off Wednesday that, "It's OK to say a prayer," in public school graduation ceremonies.  The venue was right - a small, monocultural hamlet in the NW corner of the state.  Northwest Iowa is known for zealously supporting GOP reactionary Steve "Abu Gharib is just fraternity hazing!" King.  It's overwhelmingly populated with conservative Christians like the ultra-Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church and Roman Catholics.  Considering Giuliani's issues with the highly devout, I'm wondering why he's bothering to try and appeal to these voters.  Maybe it's only the baptists and other fundamentalist Christians that hate him so much . .

  - - -

Clinton had a nice trap sprung Tuesday; the ad her campaign started in conjunction with her message on health insurance was tone deaf to many voters, but pitched to elicit the response it got from the administration.  The White House fell for it & went on the defensive against a primary campaign advertisement attacking them.  Mission accomplished - news cycle dominated, portraying an out-of-touch administration (not a hard feat, I admit) and Sen. Clinton looking bold and like someone who will change the status quo in the news reports.

Underneath everyone's carefully worded statements of 'How Dare They!' and follow up defenses, there's also an unwritten acknowledgment: The White House has basically announced that Sen. Clinton is their chosen Democratic challenger.  Read into that what you will.

  - - -

Obama was also on the move, giving an interview with the Washington Post that was fairly confrontational with Clinton.  The campaigns have been trading shots for the last few weeks, and apparently the Obama campaign decided their best strategy from the Straw poll marker was to launch a new series of attacks on the front runner, instead of making new proposals.

Unlike his rivals, he's not in Iowa this week - he's in New Hampshire.  I've contrasted the traditional electorate of both Iowa and New Hampshire a few times, and Obama's rhetoric is definite better fit for the state considered more contrary and libertarian.

  - - -

Lastly, about the reports on the movement on the caucus and primary dates nationally - very little is being pushed in the corporate press.  The issue hasn't gone away, so it's fairly obvious that party insiders are in the smoke-filled teleconference suites wrangling over the changes and details.  However it works out, since the public isn't being included or even informed of the conversation, it's a sure guarantee that any changes will essentially keep the system, and their own butts, in power.

  - - -

This is a weekly diary published every Thursday as the Open Thread at Progressive Historians, and as a diary at My Left Wing.  Idiosynchronic is a native Iowan living in a small Republican town in Central Iowa.

Quite a lot, actually.  Though their topics are roughly connected, it's the style of the films that really strikes me: could they be saying much more under the surface?  What do these films say about us as viewers, and can we make some inferences about our culture(*) based on the way they present information?  I think we can, in fact.

(*) "our culture" interpreted broadly, since two of the three directors are British.
It's something of a truism (and maybe an overplayed one) that within each generation's output of art are encoded the politics of that generation, and a closer reading of that art can tell us more about those politics than all the newspaper pundits in the world.  I don't totally agree with that, but there's no doubt in my mind that art carries more messages than sometimes meet the eye, and generations certainly leave "stamps".

Since film is the most powerful and accessible (for audiences) medium for contemporary Americans, it should also be no surprise that some of the most compelling "messages" are there, even in places no one expects them.  For example, those of you who aren't familiar with horror might be surprised how political and - pardon the pun - dead-on horror tends to be in terms of measuring the cultural attitudes of the times.  Both the overtly political - like George Romero with his subtle gestures towards Vietnam, women's lib, race riots, militarization, etc. - and the seemingly non-political - like the AIDS-era boost in vampire films and the recent glut of torture porn - carry a lot of "baggage" that sometimes takes a little distance to recognize.

But tonight I'm going a slightly different route and address "real life" films, because there are some common tendencies that I think are really interesting.  For the purposes of our discussion, I'll be picking apart Syriana, United 93, and A Mighty Heart, all of which deal in some way with the clash between the West and fundamentalist Islam (either as a primary or secondary topic of interest).  That's a small sample to gauge an entire generation, but films about current events aren't plentiful, and the strong similarities between these very different films strike me as significant enough for discussion.

A quick and overly simplistic recap, minus any spoilers:

- Syriana (dir. Stephen Gaghan) discusses the dirty politics of oil in the Middle East
- United 93 (dir. Paul Greengrass) involves the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11
- A Mighty Heart (dir. Michael Winterbottom) deals with the abduction of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl

The trailers for each film are interspersed below.

so here's my question:

What common elements do these films have that might give us some insight into the way we view our political situation?

1. Increased stress on v?rit? filmmaking:

V?rit? is a style of filmmaking that aims for (the illusion of) real life over the more classically framed Hollywood drama:

Cin?ma v?rit? aims for an extreme naturalism, using non-professional actors, hand-held camera, genuine locations rather than sound stages, and naturalistic sound without substantial post-production mixing or voiceovers.

Two of these three films do have big-name actors, but their glamor is purposefully muted in order to make them seem like "ordinary" people: Oscar-winner George Clooney put on weight and grew facial hair to distract from his "Sexiest Man on Earth" reputation, and Greengrass didn't cast a single "known" actor.  In each case, the deemphasis on stars moves the drama away from people and more towards situations.

The hand-held camera mimics documentary-style, since documentarians rarely have time to set up steady-cams when big events are going on.  The effect also creates the illusion of the camera as a witness to live events rather than as part of a post-facto staging.

(Compare this to Oliver Stone's bombastic 9/11 tribute to see why each of these films is more effective in portraying their respective events.  Everything Stone does wrong was lauded by FOX news, which doesn't surprise me.)

2. Choppy editing and complex narrative

This is related to v?rit?, although the choice to cut into and out of situations without explanations or setups deserves its own discussion.  I remember hearing from people who saw Syriana that they lost track of the plot about halfway through; but even A Mighty Heart leapfrogs through so many locations and characters without providing the audience with clear guideposts.  On the other hand, United 93 keeps track of all the locations with helpful subtitles, but the range of people involved, the half-conversations, and the rapid editing create the illusion that what you're watching isn't so much a preconceived narrative as a documentary (that word again) splicing.

What I like about this is the de-stressing of expected narrative arcs (even when they do occur): it's admission on the part of the filmmakers that the politics they discuss cannot be crammed into an easily digestible Hollywood drama.  That's a little disingenuous (none of these, except maybe Syriana, takes many risks from a narrative point of view), but the illusion is strong. 

3. "Insider" information

Here's the one I love the most: All these films assume the viewer knows something about the situation, implying an increased respect for the audience, or at least heightened expectations.  In fact, the films even reward viewers who know more about the events and players: Greengrass slips important information into the nonchalantly casual conversation between the plane's passengers that is not vital to the film, but allows the more informed viewers to recognize who the passengers are supposed to be.  After all, does it really matter to the film's narrative whether one passenger mentions rugby while chatting with another?  Depends on what you're looking for, really.

(One film I don't discuss here, Joe Dante's awesomely perverse Homecoming, is heavy on references that only political junkies will understand.)

Likewise, Syriana doesn't care if you don't keep up with it, and the range of topics is so enormous that entire issues are glossed over with slight mentions.  There's no effort to "help" the audience with context or history; even A Mighty Heart's Karachi is left to its complex glory.  That leads us to

4. "Nexus" of issues

One of the most striking aspects of all these films is the way they discuss not one, but dozens of topics all at once.  Some of these are foregrounded, like the Oil war in Syriana or fundamentalist Islam in A Mighty Heart.  But all around the margins, other issues creep in with anything from a brief mention to a distinct subplot.  In Heart the politics of India-Pakistan relations register in only a few lines, while Syriana practically bursts apart with all the issues crowding the frame.  United 93 is much leaner in this respect, but the range of people followed in the story - passengers, hijackers, government officials, air traffic controllers, journalists - open it up from its more narrow focus to show the full-on clusterfuck that was September 11th.

Heart is especially interesting here, since the film's main character isn't Daniel or Mariane Pearl, but the city of Karachi.  Appropriately, the film allows time for city's mix of classes, ethnicities, and religions to develop against the maddening traffic and bustle of a city so large, no one can count the population. 

5. The Procedural Drama

Two of the three films we're discussing, United 93 and A Mighty Heart, find their narrative anchor in the procedural drama: they focus  on people attempting to piece together stories they don't quite understand.  Even Syriana makes some nods in this direction, but its canvas is so wide that it never coheres the way the other films' do (that's certainly not a bad thing).  As a narrative gimmick it's very effective, since it allows the audience to receive information at roughly the same rate as the "characters"; but it also creates a certain attitude toward research and information: the information is out there, and as each puzzle piece arrives, the audience needs to put the pieces together.

+++++

So what do we get out of this?  What do these films tell us about the times we live in?

I have some ideas of my own, but tell me what you think.

The duology is a literary science fiction work, drawing at the beginning from Homer's Illiad, and then spiraling into Shakespeare's sonnets and The Tempest, Proust's ? la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) and Nabokov's Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle.

Times and topics will be in the comments, should the community have any interest.  A warning for the unwary - both books are about 1500 pages in total.

The symposium question was suggested by frequent contributor Eugene:

"We should have a series of diaries reassessing September 11 and its historical impact (as well as its effect on progressive politics) on PH in time for the 6th anniversary. I think enough time has passed, and enough has changed politically, for us to be able to offer some fresh insights on how it affected American history and politics, and we can hopefully use the occasion to start to move beyond views of the event colored by immediate reactions in 2001 and toward more intelligent and reflective analysis."

How has September 11 impacted American or world history?  How should it be viewed historically?  Politically?  What good things came out of its aftermath?  What should have happened that didn't, either historically or politically?  How should we look to the event in future to inform our historical-political consciousness?  How has 9/11 defined our generation (whatever that may be) or our world?  How has it not defined us at all?

The symposium deadline is the end of the day on Sunday, September 9.  I'll put up the aggregate post on the morning of September 11.  Contributions by non-historians and non-progressives are accepted and encouraged.  I'll post periodic reminders to hold everyone's feet to the fire.

I expect to hear pens scratching digitally, or else.

I'm more interested in the ongoing role of nuclear weapons in the world. It's a truism that the Cold War wasn't a real war -- despite almost constant "conflicts" -- because nobody used their biggest weapons, which I think is absurd. It's such a truism that it's being cited by presidential candidates (emphasis added): "Presidents since the Cold War have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don't believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons," she said."She" is, of course, Hilary Clinton, here channeling Nixon's "Madman theory" -- the nuclear deterrent only works if they think you're crazy enough to use it.

As an historian, I have to question the bolded part of that statement. (Nonpartisan has already demolished the other part) I can think of two instances in which nuclear threats played a role in deterring non-nuclear military action -- Vietnam (in which we failed anyway) and Korea (in which we succeeded, as well as could be expected) -- but none in which nuclear threats actually accomplished any real deterrence against non-nuclear forces.

Am I missing something, and what should our presidential candidates (and president) be saying about nuclear weapons?

What's on your minds?

It's morning again in America, only instead of white picket fences we have houses with "For Sale" or "For Rent" signs or perhaps even the notice of a sheriff's sale. These homes have an eerie quiet to them, as if there were invisible yellow tape around them like the police use to mark the scene of an accident or crime.

THIS is Ronald Reagan's legacy not the myth that lead some to name an airport after him or is still pushing Reagan supporters to name an even more important building. The only building that should be named after Ronald Reagan is some run-down low-income high rise or a dilapidated inner city school or perhaps the wreckage site of the Minneapolis bridge.

Highway Spending

To understand the true heritage of Ronald Reagan you would need to turn the second graph upside down since it records a decline while the first records an increase. However, the evidence in these two graphs testifies to the impact on the United States of the Counterrevolution Reagan began. Highway spending has dropped as precipitously as mortgage foreclosures have increased. Note the dates on both graphs when things start to go bad--1980, the year Reagan became president.

Those two graphs weigh on America as if two giant boulders had been placed on our chest, one atop the other. The heritage of Ronald Reagan is not morning in America, but nightmares. Nightmares like bridges collapsing and families losing their homes. These are nightmares that do not seem to want to go away.

But no matter.  This week we get to jump back over 2,000 years to discuss one of my favorite ancient writers, the great tragedian Euripides, who had a penchant for dealing with the most difficult aspects of human existence. 

Can we learn important lessons about ourselves from someone so long deceased?  Join me below for an ancient dance with filicidal witches, fallen heroes, and insanity-inducing gods to find out...
Euripides is unsurpassed in his representation of actual human passion, and in depicting the casuistical sophistry with which men seek to palliate themselves or others offenses against the moral law. (link)

Very little is known about the life of Euripides, European antiquity's most popular playwright.  Dubious tradition holds that he was born on the same day as the Greeks' stunning victory over Persia at Salamis, but the major event of his lifetime was the disastrous Peloponnesian War (ably covered in the first half of this diary by Unitary Moonbat) and disintegration of the Athenian democracy.  A passionate writer about social issues in an age when everything fell apart, he died in self-imposed exile in Macedonia.

During his lifetime he was not a terribly successful playwright.  Despite writing scores of plays and receiving praise from his colleagues (Sophocles allegedly said, "I portray men as they ought to be, and Euripides portrays them as they are"), Euripides only rarely won accolades for his dramas.  He was a frequent target of Aristophanes' comedy for his artistically questionable rhetoric and melodrama, and Aristotle keeps him at a respectable arms-length for his clumsy use of the chorus and deus ex machina.

After his death, the appeal of his works eclipsed that of all the other ancient playwrights, and remained secure until the 18th century (when Aeschylus and Sophocles began to return in stature).

Style and Content:

Euripides was the youngest of the three great ancient Greek tragedians, and it's reasonable to suggest that he was the lesser artist but the greater thinker of them.  His work lacks the gorgeous, forceful poetry of Aeschylus or the classical perfection of Sophocles, though neither of those playwrights produced anything quite on the level of Euripides' Bacchae, which we'll discuss below.

His characters are more inclined to rhetorical speeches and debates than other playwrights, which is one of the reasons his contemporaries (and some moderns) found his works in poor taste.  However, this style also endeared him to later students of rhetoric, because Euripides at his best can be an effective and incisive speechwriter.  Check out this brief passage from The Trojan Woman, in which Cassandra rages against the pointlessness of Greece's (Hellas) expedition against Troy, ending with a poisonous barb of sarcasm:

And when they reached the shore where the Scamander flows,
What did they die for?  To thrust invasion from their borders
Or siege from their town walls? No!  When a man was killed,
He was not wrapped and laid to rest by his wife's hands,
He had forgotten his children's faces; now he lies
In alien earth.  At home, things were as bad; women
Died in widowhood; fathers sank to childless age,
Missing the sons they brought up - who will not be there
To pour loving libations on their graves.  Hellas
Has much, in truth, to thank this expedition for!

Another powerful tool in Euripides' arsenal is the clever use of audience expectations.  Like all the Greek playwrights, Euripides takes liberty with the stories from history and mythology - but where the others merely reshape these stories to fit their dramatic plans, Euripides turns them into an outright assault on the spectator.  He refocuses and reframes famous moments in the stories, turns heroes into villains, turns villains into sympathetic victims, and challenges the viewers to reassess the tales they thought they knew.

One of the reasons this works is because Euripides' rewritings aren't drastic: he merely takes well-known stories at uncommon angles, asking us questions like, "Was it really noble of Jason to abandon his wife for personal gain?"  We might compare Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which doesn't so much rewrite popular fairy tales as asks us to reassess them in the cold light of day: when you think about it Jack (of the Beanstalk) is really a thief and a murderer!

Let's take a closer look at three of Euripides' more popular plays, in the order that they were written.  Keep in mind that these blurbs contain "spoilers", although ancient audiences were expected to know the stories' details beforehand.  Otherwise Euripides' audacious rewritings would not have had such a powerful effect.

The Medea (431 BCE):

Have you only just discovered
That everyone loves himself more than his neighbor?

Nowadays, The Medea has eclipsed all Euripides' other plays in terms of popularity.  It has been adapted to the screen nearly a dozen times, most famously in a 1969 Italian version (with Maria Callas in her only non-singing film role) and in 1988 by future dogme auteur Lars von Trier from a posthumous screenplay by screen legend Carl Dryer.

The plot of The Medea is swift and brutal.  The title character learns that her husband Jason (of Argonauts and Golden Fleece fame) is leaving her for another woman, a well-connected princess who will guarantee him social advancement.  To make matters worse, Jason and his co-conspirators know that Medea is capable of great violence, so they banish her from the land.  Not to be outdone, Medea manages to murder the princess and her father.  As an added bonus, she hangs around the house long enough for Jason to come home and see his two children slaughtered at her hands.  She escapes with the bodies to Athens on a chariot driven by dragons, not allowing Jason even the comfort of burying his dead children.  Ouch.

The dialogue is among the nastiest Euripides ever wrote.  He doesn't skimp on the brutal back-and-forth between the two main characters, even at the tragic climax:

Medea: The children are dead.  I say this to make you suffer.

Jason: The children, I think, will bring down curses on you.

Medea: The gods know who was the author of this sorrow.

Jason: Yes, the gods know indeed, they know your loathsome heart.

Medea: Hate me.  But I tire of your barking bitterness.

Jason: And I of yours.  It is easier to leave you.

So what are we supposed to get out of this story?  Well, keep in mind that Jason is a great hero of Greek literature, here portrayed as a coldly calculating jerk with no regard for common decency.  On the other hand, he was exactly right in predicting the violent savagery of his wife.

There are a number of directions we can go with this.  Often The Medea is reread as a form of proto-feminist tract, with the beaten-down woman rising up against the men who torment her (this somewhat accounts for its contemporary popularity, and it makes a more convincing presentation of women's issues than Sophocles' Antigone).  I'm not sure I agree entirely, given the play's culmination, but it certainly speaks to modern audiences.  Also significant is the relationship between physical space (Medea = foreign, Jason = Greek) and ideas (Medea = irrational, Jason = rational), and the way these irreconcilable impulses cannot help but clash. 

What's always struck me most about The Medea is its emphasis on regret as a fundamental motif.  Compare the opening line:

Nurse: How I wish the Argo never had reached the land
Of Colchis...

With the final non-chorus line:

Jason: I wish that I had never begot [the children] to see them
Afterward slaughtered by you.

Regret for time past runs throughout the play as a reminder that things never had to come to this point.  As such, The Medea is less a play about what is fated to happen than a raging against choices made long before the play's action begins.  All the characters look backwards rather than forwards, and although this helps explain their moral shortcomings, it also helps us understand the deeply tragic situation that Medea is in.  She sacrificed her home, her family (literally), and her dignity for a man who couldn't care less, and in return she is tortured by the knowledge that none of these can ever be regained.  Whatever Jason loses by the end of the play, it's nothing compared to what Medea has sacrificed on his behalf.  For this reason, she elevates herself to the status of tragic heroine, even if her actions are so brutal that they prevent us from sympathizing with her.

So we can view the play as less a moral lesson or even a catharsis, and more a detached portrait of a woman driven to extremes.  As Richmond Lattimore wrote of Euripides' plays:

Euripides was basically a realist, despite contrary tendencies toward fantasy and romance... He used [old heroic sagas] as if they told the story not of characters heroic in all dimensions, but of real everyday people.  From the high legends of Jason and Heracles he chose to enact the moments of the heroes' decay and disintegration.  What, he asks, does it feel like to have your wife die for you, and what kind of man will let her do it?  What does it feel like to have murdered your mother?

Likewise, the real subject of The Medea is this: what does it take to drive a woman to kill her own children?  The question is asked without moral condemnation (or praise), as a source of detached interest.  When do conditions become so bad that people are driven to violent extremes?

The Trojan Women (415 BCE):

A job like this
Is fit for a man without feeling or decency;
I'm not half brutal enough.

The Trojan Women may be my favorite of all ancient Greek plays, both for its stunning audacity and for its reckless rewriting of the mythology.

There isn't much plot to speak of.  The women of Troy sit on the beach, awaiting news of their fate from the Greeks who've just conquered them.  Naturally the news isn't good, so the play becomes an extended meditation on suffering, especially as the news turns out to be much worse than expected.

Why was this so audacious?  Two things need to be kept in mind:

1. The defeat of Troy by the combined Greek armies was still considered a high-water mark in Greek glory, being the subject not only of Homer's Iliad, but also of multiple threads of the ancient mythology.  Granted, the Greeks never idealized their victory the way that contemporary nationalists do theirs (remember that the Trojan Hector is as much a hero of The Iliad as any of the Greeks), but Euripides actively paints the conquering heroes as morally repulsive.

2. The play was written shortly after Athens' decision to execute, for no reason whatsoever, all the adult male inhabitants of Melos, then making slaves of all the women and children.  The Melians had tried to stay neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta, and Athens had responded by wiping them out completely.  In the play, the casual cruelty of the conquerors of Troy and the sufferings they inflict cannot but be read as a vicious indictment of the Euripides' contemporaries who allowed the Melian campaign to take place.

What would a comparable American play look like?  How about the generals in the American Revolution subjecting British prisoners to Abu Ghraib-style humiliations?  Euripides' rewriting is roughly that audacious, so you can imagine the impact these lines had:

Hecabe: We are driven like cattle far from home,
Away to a house of slavery!
Dead Priam, do you hear,
Unburied and unwept?
No, your ghost knows nothing of my agony.

Chorus: Though he died
By unholy murder,
Holy Death
Darkly closed his eyes.

The righteous anger of Euripides drips like venom from every line of The Trojan Woman.  A surprisingly sympathetic audience awarded him second prize for the play, one of the few times he was honored with a victory.

The Bacchae (405 BCE):

This man is walking into the net.  He will
Visit the Bacchae; and there death shall punish him.

I'm not sure I have anything constructive to say about The Bacchae, which is such a dense and confusing text that even the best scholars on Classical literature disagree about its "meaning".  But what most people do agree on is the play's stunning effect, which is among the most powerful you'll ever read. 

The Bacchae commands, as D.H. Lawrence once said about Moby Dick, "a stillness in the soul".  There are no heroes in this play.  There are no moral lessons.  All we are left with is death and despair, and the mocking grin of a god who comes to represent the cruel indifference of the universe. 

Here's the plot in a nutshell: the "new" god Dionysus comes to Thebes to confront the king, who rejects his godliness.  Dionysus (also known as Bacchus) commands a coterie of mostly female worshippers who frolic in the woods, commune with nature, and occasionally descend into violent swarms and rip animals apart with their bare hands.  Torn between his disgust at this barbarian cult and a secret desire to see naked women frolicking in the fields, King Pentheus is put under a trance by the god and finds himself at the receiving end of the Bacchae's swarm.  In an act of brutality shocking even for ancient Greek audiences, Pentheus is ripped apart by his mother, who is so absorbed in the religious frenzy that she doesn't recognize her own son. 

It's hard to know what to make of this.  Dionysus makes frequent references to his vengeance for being ignored, but his worshippers hardly end up better for following him.  On the other hand, if this is an anti-religion play, why the snide portrait of Pentheus, and why are those opposed to Dionysus the most brutally punished? 

The most convincing argument I've heard comes from Jan Kott (with further exposition here, in an article by Ian Johnston).  Johnston summarizes The Bacchae as

a particularly despairing vision of the destructiveness inherent in the ambiguities of human existence, contradictions which simply cannot be reconciled into some harmonious creative whole.  Rather than being a cautionary tale, the play is a passionate vision of total despair.

Comparing Euripides' insight to Joseph Conrad's, both authors note that the ancient Greek playwright had managed to peer into humanity's heart of darkness and find nothing optimistic to say about it.  The comparison is an apt one, since one of the play's main concerns is the infiltration of a foreign religion into Greek culture: the cult of Dionysus comes from the east and threatens to overrun the much more secular Greek city-states. (Comparisons to perceptions of the West's tango with Islam are tempting, but too easy)  On the one hand, Pentheus is trying to prevent an anti-rational, violent cult from overrunning his kingdom.  On the other, Pentheus' disdain for the Bacchic rites is mixed with an unhealthy dose of xenophobia:

Pentheus: Is Thebes the first place where you have introduced this god?

Dionysus [in disguise]: No; every eastern land dances these mysteries.

Pentheus: No doubt.  Their moral standards fall far below ours.

To further confound matters, the Theban men who support the Bacchic mysteries are exposed as doddering old fools, interested more in self-preservation than in legitimately religious worship.  Even the honest and enthusiastic worshippers are left with murder on their hands and a future in bleak exile.  Again, no one wins. 

The final lines of The Bacchae are almost comical in their understatement, and - interestingly enough - they are almost identical to those of The Medea:

Chorus: The things we thought would happen do not happen;
The unexpected God makes possible;
And that is what has happened here today.

And I suppose that's the best we can hope for in terms of moral resolution from Euripides: a sad acknowledgment that, best laid plans notwithstanding, the universe is simply not in our control.

Euripides died in self-imposed exile after finishing this play, his most bitter indictment of the human race.  But no more fitting epitaph can be found than the words he wrote a quarter century earlier in The Medea:

O country and home,
Never, never may I be without you,
Living the hopeless life,
Hard to pass through and painful,
Most pitiable of all.
Let death first lay me low and death
Free me from this daylight. 
There is no sorrow above
The loss of a native land.

In his native land, Euripides was awarded first prize for The Bacchae... posthumously. 

Links:

- Euripides at Tufts U's Perseus Encyclopedia
- Works of Euripides at the Internet Classics Archive
- Project Gutenberg (scroll down the page)
- The Euripides Homepage

Note: All images courtesy wikimedia commons (see embedded links) except for Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne, scan by Mark Harden.  Selections from The Women of Troy and The Bacchae from the Penguin Classics edition, translation by Philip Vellacott.  Selections from The Medea and the essay by Richmond Lattimore from the Complete Greek Tragedies series, University of Chicago Press, translation by Rex Warner.

Thanks for reading!

Up for grabs (in the Arctic), as much as a quarter of the world's oil and gas reserves; as well as nickel, gold and diamond.

Miller: A 'new world' to claim - the Arctic

Recent news reports state that global warming and the shrinking Arctic ice caps are opening sea lanes, making islands accessible and causing the international community to engage in a new race to acquire this ''new world.'' Conflicts have already arisen over shipping, islands, fish, minerals and oil that are now becoming exploitable.



Miller: A 'new world' to claim - the Arctic

Governments are even now engaged in asserting sovereignty over these assets. Canada, Denmark and the United States are already involved in disputes over these issues.
For example, Canada and Denmark have sent diplomats and warships to plant flags on Hans Island near Greenland.

Manifest Destiny is alive as it aims itself at the Arctic, once again placing human greed above human beings.

Source

Inuit

In the 2001 Census, about 46,000 people living in non-reserve areas reported having Inuit identity. This group represented about 6% of the total non-reserve Aboriginal population. The majority of Inuit lived in the following four Inuit regions of the Canadian Arctic as defined by the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami:
 

the northern coastal and southeastern area of Labrador, home to 7% of Inuit
 

Nunavik, which lies north of the 55th parallel in Quebec, where 19% of the Inuit population lived
 

the territory of Nunavut, home to about one-half of the Inuit population
 

the Inuvialuit region in the northwestern corner of the Northwest Territories, home to about 7% of the Inuit population.

(Emphasis and illustrations mine)

Source

For thousands of years, Inuit people made their homes from natural materials native to their Arctic surroundings. They built snow shelters known as igloos to house entire families through the long winter. Igloos were complete with snow benches and beds, warm furs for blankets, and long entry tunnels to keep out the wind and cold.

The inside of an igloo was often quite comfortable, with temperatures at or just above freezing. In the summer months many families built skin tents framed with whalebones for structure. The tents were easy to set up and take down as the Inuit lived nomadically, following the animals that provided their main food source. While modern day Inuit may still use an igloo for shelter during a winter hunt, pre-fabricated houses have replaced the igloo as permanent housing.
  These houses sit on the permafrost -- a layer of earth that remains permanently frozen throughout the Arctic year. Today's Arctic villages have elaborate systems adapted to the permafrost with water and sewage piped above ground. Global warming threatens to melt the permafrost and disrupt the very foundation on which the modern Arctic infrastructure rests.

What are the Inuit going to build their homes on when the ice melts underneath them? They will be forced to relocate.

Here is a message from the Inuit leader, Aqqaluk Lynge.

We ask you to be responsible.

Action Call!

Manifest Destiny being alive and operating is a moot point now. That is the flashlight; here is the laser beam: the Senate Republican Steering Committee.


Source

The Senate Republican Steering Committee has put secret holds on everything from Indian health care to methamphetamine funding to amendments to the Adam Walsh Act. NCAI President Joe Garcia tribes are shocked by the obstructionism.

- snip-

The Senate Republican Steering Committee is composed of some of the most conservative Republicans. The group is led by Sen. James DeMint (R-South Carolina) and its members include Sens. John Kyl (R-Arizona), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama).

In addition to emailing the Senators that compose the Senate Republican Steering Committee, which I provide links to below below, this is a broader action call and request.

My request is that "Sen. James DeMint (R-South Carolina) and its members  (that)include Sens. John Kyl (R-Arizona), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama)" all receive the negative attention they deserve in at least one diary by at least some of the people that are reading this now in the future.

Please expose them, for I firmly believe that only
Democratic elected officials will serve the best interests of the Indigenous People, especially including a Democratic president.
What is one huge reason why I say that?

The Democratic Party is the party that wants the Indigenous People to vote, and who recognize that the Republican Party tends to seek to prevent the Indigenous People from voting.

Imagine that, the corrupt Republican Party does not want Native Americans to vote.

So, here's something about Sen. James DeMint to get the ball rolling.

Republican Asshole: James DeMint (South Carolina)

My wife has a job that requires her to work in Sam's Warehouse & today she came in contact with Sen. Jim DeMint, and one thing she asked him was his opinion on the "lady down in Texas" as I think she recounted it.

His answer: "those people are the enemy"
.

Here is the link to email with Sen. Jim DeMint

Here is the link to contact John Kyl

Here is the link to contact John Cornyn

&,

Here is the link to contact Jeff Sessions

Finally, I leave you with these last thoughts.

Source

When asked why most of the less than two dozen protesters were white, she said First Nations people actually want more non-natives to participate in resolving native claims.

Vickers said First Nations need land and wilderness to survive as a people and to recover from decades of abuse they have suffered.

Apology resolution faces additional delays under Bush

Near the end of the Clinton administration, former assistant secretary Kevin Gover offered an apology for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "Never again will we allow policy to proceed from the assumption that Indians possess less human genius than the other races," he said in August 2000. "Never again will we be complicit in the theft of Indian property. Never again will we appoint false leaders who serve purposes other than those of the tribes."

At the time, Gover said his apology was not on behalf of the U.S. "That is the province of the nation's elected leaders, and I would not presume to speak on their behalf," he said.

Houston official: Stop apologizing to Indians

The United States needs to stop apologizing to American Indians and stop giving them money, a city council member in Houston, Texas, said on Tuesday.

"Why are we still giving Indians exclusive rights to gamble, exclusive rights to print money, which is also known as a casino,"
he added.

Here is how to contact Micheal Berry

...and this is the last you'll hear from me for a week or so, while I get settled in at grad school.  Ahistoricality has graciously agreed to take the reins until then.  Don't do anything to him you wouldn't do to me (TPing the blog in my absence house NOT allowed!).

See you all on the flip side.

Until then...what's on your mind?

John Witherspoon
? President of College of New Jersey (Princeton University)
? Delegate to Continental Congress
? Signer of the Declaration of Independence
? Delegate to the New Jersey ratification convention
? Statue of Witherspoon erected in Washington, D.C.

Casimir Pulaski
? Cavalry general of Pulaski's Legion
? Three U.S. Naval vessels, communities in 13 states and seven states' Pulaski Counties are named in his honor
? Oct. 11 is General Pulaski Memorial Day
? Statue of Pulaski erected in Washington, D.C.

FORGOTTEN FOUNDING FATHERS TOURNAMENT BRACKET
Washington Bracket
1. George Mason 75%
8. Caesar Rodney 25%
*
4. John Witherspoon
5. Casimir Pulaski
*
3. Daniel Morgan
6. Frederick Muhlenberg
*
2. William Penn
7. William Blount
*
Jefferson Bracket
1. Nathanael Greene
8. Robert R. Livingston
*
4. William Paterson
5. Edmund Randolph
*
3. John Carroll
6. Henry Muhlenberg
*
2. Richard Henry Lee
7. John Trumbull
*
Madison Bracket
1. Roger Williams
8. David Rittenhouse
*
4. Isaac Shelby
5. Joseph Warren
*
3. Henry Knox
6. George Wythe
*
2. Roger Sherman
7. George Clinton
*
Franklin Bracket
1. John Jay
8. Pierre Charles L'Enfant
*
4. James Otis
5. John Dickinson
*
3. John Paul Jones
6. Abraham Baldwin
*
2. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben
7. Samuel Nicholas

FFFs and match-ups are determined by my interpretation of who I believe were the 32 greatest FFFs. Personal politics, favoritism and reader response was NOT a factor in selection or seeding. As for the tournament itself: each match-up will be conducted every 48 hours with a synopsis written by yours truly and readers can determine using the poll function who the winner should be for that match-up; there is no #1 overall seed; FFFs retain their seeds throughout; the winner of the Washington bracket will face the winner of the Jefferson bracket, and the winner of the Madison bracket will face the winner of the Franklin bracket. I am not voting nor will I pick sides in discussion. I wish I could somehow do a more rigid time duration period for each round but there's no guarantee I'll be on a computer or awake at that time so I'm gonna say polling lasts until I post the next match-up, or roughly 24 hours later. Readers may choose whichever FFF contestant they wish, but the point of the tournament is to select the greatest Forgotten Founding Father - the most influential, most important, most impactful, who contributed the most to the Revolution and/or seeds of American liberty. Have fun!

Also, check out the new buttons at the bottom of each diary.  They allow you to submit worthy articles to Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, and/or Newsvine (provided you have a free account at these places) or to check response to your posts on Technorati.  Cool, huh?  Thanks to Soapy for letting me copy his code for these handy buttons.

What's on your mind?

You guys win.  I capitulate.  I was wrong to ever believe that arresting our nation's perilous experiment with totalitarianism was more important than the next election cycle. After all, who am I, a mere citizen and historioranter, to question your focus groups, your polls, and your Shrums?  I have now come around to your way of thinking: the writ of habeus corpus was so stupid and old that it took a whole sentence to define it in English, and the Constitution really is pretty vague about defining a right to privacy; I, like you, have come to grudgingly appreciate the Decider's streamlining of our hoary, ancient laws.  From now on, I'll follow your lead and won't adopt any viewpoint not approved by legal scholars like Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers.

In celebration of my newfound ability to stick my fingers in my ears and shout "nahnahnah" for the next seventeen months, please enjoy this diary about a civilization that may have been nothing more than the product of a philosopher's imagination.  Don't worry - there's not a single analogy or metaphor to be found anywhere within.

Historiorant:  Is it a Conspiracy Theory to say that Atlantis existed?  Is it a Conspiracy Theory to say that it didn't?  Will (should) I be banned for talking crazy talk about sinking continents and hubris of a magnitude so great that it destroys civilizations?

I don't know about any of that (though I don't think initiating conversations about Atlantis, Sasquatch, Nessie, et. al., should be grounds for banning, if ever they were)  - but what I do know is that your resident historiorantologist is frustrated past of the point of being able to write yet another diary about impeachment, immigration, or even how 6th-century Byzantine riots relate to space elevators.  So while the Iraqi Parliament takes the month off from being strong-armed by Bushco, and while our own nattering nabobs of negativism come home to rationalize explain just why they're letting the Executive Branch have its way with them, I'm going to take a short break from the tough stuff, too, and flitter off to the true fringes of relevance - out to presidential candidate territory, where hopefully I can provoke a White House hopeful to convene a focus group in order to see where they should stand on the Atlantis Question.

Though now that I think about it, I don't know where any of the candidates stand in the existence-of-Atlantis debate - but I'd guess that Kucinich, Gravel, and Paul, at least, are believers?

Plausible Deniability

If one is an anti-Atlantean, there's certainly plenty of skepticism to be found in the first written mentions of the lost continent "beyond the Pillars of Heracles" - the story is as full of holes as testimony from Monica Goodling, the documentation as skimpy as Karl Rove's e-mail account.  It was none other than Plato himself who scribed humanity's initial inkling of Atlantis, writing in a Dialogue called Timaeus, and as part of the tale, he ensures that he covers the history of why no one had ever heard of the place before.  Still, the crypticness of the story's origin is nearly Rovian in its obfuscation and unverifiability:

?listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvelous actions of the Athenian city?

Timaeus

Historiorant:  Coupla notes on this: first, given the birth and death dates of the names dropped, Critias the Elder would have been a child to have heard the tale from Solon himself - if so, his memory was suspiciously good, or the tale suspiciously embellished.  Secondly, I should point out that this is one of those issues that can be side-stepped by candidates willing to get in bed with ultraconservative Christians (ew) - Atlantis could not have existed, because Plato was describing a kingdom that would predate the Creation of the Earth by about 5000 years.

Plato wrote Timaeus as part of what some scholars think may have been intended as a trilogy, though he was only able to partially complete the second volume, Critias (which also mentions Atlantis), before his death in 347 BCE.  The books were Dialogues, in which Plato records the ostensible wisdom of Socrates as the great teacher inflicts his famed method of annoying questioning upon three other thinkers: fellow philosopher Timaeus, and the politicians Critias and Hermocrates (these could be composite characters or semi-biographical depictions of Plato's buddies; it's hard to say).  They are gathered to speak of the "perfect society" - see Plato's The Republic - and Socrates gets the conversation started by asking if anybody knows of an historical example of such a place.  That's when Critias (the only character who mentions the Atlantean example) pipes up with his conveniently-hidden-until-now lost kingdom of 9000 years before.

Plato's story of Atlantis - through Critias, he claimed that the Athenian leader Solon, who lived two centuries earlier, had heard it from a trustworthy Egyptian priest of the city of Sais, whose temple had kept the secret down through the millennia - enters the literary lexicon without a great deal of corroborating evidence.  There are (debatably) no ruins to study, no primary documents written by an Atlantean hand, and no more than oblique references in even the most ancient of folktales and legends.  This has led some scholars of Plato to pooh-pooh the notion of Atlantis entirely; the Wikipedia article quotes Dr. Julia Annas of the University of Arizona:

The continuing industry of discovering Atlantis illustrates the dangers of reading Plato. For he is clearly using what has become a standard device of fiction - stressing the historicity of an event (and the discovery of hitherto unknown authorities) as an indication that what follows is fiction. The idea is that we should use the story to examine our ideas of government and power. We have missed the point if instead of thinking about these issues we go off exploring the sea bed. The continuing misunderstanding of Plato as historian here enables us to see why his distrust of imaginative writing is sometimes justified.

?and even the priests of Sais seemed a little dubious of Solon's worth in hearing the tale, at least at first, but they relented because both Sais and Athens were dedicated to different versions of basically the same goddess.  They chided his ignorance the way William Kristol patiently explains the complexities of the world to us ignerint nutrooters:

In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word.

Timaeus

But those ghostly ancestors of ours did, of course, leave enough blank pages in the history books that storytellers, prophets, and archaeologists have ever since been compelled to try to fill them.  I'm not going to try to find it for him, but the Preznit might be able to learn a lesson about selling a vision from Plato; fictional or not, Atlantis has fired the imaginations of generations of people, all over the world, and inspired everything from grand scientific endeavors to nothing less than the founding of religions.  Something tells me the "Global War on Terra" and the "Bush Doctrine" aren't going to have quite that kind of staying power.

I Want to Believe

Okay, so let's say you make the leap of faith (at least for the time it takes to finish reading this diary) and placed yourself in the hands of Plato's sourcing.  In the absence of independent, corroborating records from antiquity, we have to accept the fact that virtually all Atlantis-speak is Plato-derivative.  Even so, we can start seeing that he might've been on to something.  After all, inexplicable similarities between widely-dispersed civilizations (e.g., the proclivity of both ancient Mexicans and ancient Egyptians to build pyramids) could point to a Neolithic super-culture, which somehow binds us together and gives our own modern societies a kind of shared subconscious history.  Likewise, the universality of Atlantean metaphors are something that strike the Joseph Campbell chord in many of we modern types - it's nice to think there might've once been an Eden where more than two people got to live, and gratifying to know that the gods really do sometimes intervene and visit their wrath upon the haughty and tyrannous.

Speaking of gods, the continent belonged to Poseidon, though it was named for his son Atlas (not the titan you're thinking of; this Atlas was mortal and didn't have to shoulder the weight of the world).  Atlas and his twin brother, Eumelus - the first of five sets of twins born to Poseidon and a native woman named Cleito, who lived on a mountain "not very high on any side" a little ways in from the Atlantean coast - were given dominion over the continent, with Atlas (the eldest) getting the choicest terrain.

From the descriptions of the priests, Atlantis lay in what's now the middle of the ocean which bears its name:

there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent.

ibid.

Further descriptions place the bulk of the continent in temperate climes with abundant rainfall, though mountains lay along the northern coast.  It was about 700 kilometers long; south of the mountains lay an oblong plain of special verdant-ness that ran predominantly east-west and was about 600 kilometers in length, 400 in breadth.  (the map was published in the 17th century in Amsterdam; note that it's oriented with south toward the top - u.m.

(another cool artist's conception of Atlantis is under copyright here)

Poseidon carved his mate's mountain into a mighty palace, which was later improved upon by Atlantean kings trying to outdo one another's contributions to what became the Temple of Poseidon and Cleito.  Eventually, the city at the heart of the Atlantean Empire was connected to the sea by a long channel, which brought ships inland to a series of three wide, concentric moats and walls, and by bridges to the Temple and between the rings.  Docks were carved into the rock sides of the moats, and enormous tunnels allowed for seagoing craft to circumnavigate the mountain.  The walls which protected the rings of city, palace, and the awesome, three-walled Temple of Poseidon and Cleito were red, white, and black, and were made of rock quarried from the moats.  The walls were decorated, too, with brass, tin, and orichalcum, a mysterious metal that was, even by Critias' time, "only a name."

Weird Historical Sidenote:  Orichalcum ("mountain metal" or "mountain copper") might have been a gold/copper alloy, or it might have simply been a finite resource that got mined out; either way, it doesn't exist any more.  It was apparently a reddish-gold color, and was second only to gold in value.  It found its way into some unusual places, too - the Roman historioranter Josephus, in Antiquities of the Jews - Book XI, states that some of the vessels in the Temple of Solomon were of orichalcum, and the Golden Plates of Mormon were described by Joseph Smith's brother, William, as being a mixture of copper and gold, and having "the appearance of gold," though he never used the term "orichalcum" to describe their composition.

Poseidon's ten sons established the royal houses of ten kingdoms around the island, with Atlas' line being the preeminent one.  For many generations, Atlantis had the benefit of wise leadership

as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another?

Critias

But even so, the seeds were planted for Atlantis' later decline into decadence.  The land was so bountiful that the 10 kingdoms were self-sufficient - trade was gravy, and there was lots of it.  Like certain Apprentice-drivers we know, functional beauty in architecture gave way to gaudy ostentation.  Critias spares no expense in describing what the mountain/palace/temple at the heart of the Empire came to look like:

a stadium in length, and half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height, having a strange barbaric appearance. All the outside of the temple, with the exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum. In the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing in a chariot-the charioteer of six winged horses-and of such a size that he touched the roof of the building with his head; around him there were a hundred Nereids riding on dolphins, for such was thought to be the number of them by the men of those days.

ibid.

The move toward Paleolithic Neo-Garish artistic styles seems to have been reflective of a general decay of the moral fiber of the once-noble Atlanteans.  The height of their power represented the nadir of their morality; they might have been cladding their city and temple in precious metals, but they were doing so at the expense of the folks living inside the Pillars of Heracles.  Atlantis had conquered North Africa as far as the borders of Egypt, and Europe from Iberia to Tyrrhenia (a/k/a Etruria, homeland of the Estruscans of Roman origins fame); they had then enslaved the populations and begun oppressing them.  Even Zeus, when he starts looking into the possibility of divinely intervening, admits the Atlanteans were an "honorable race [in] a woeful plight,"

but when the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.

ibid. (that last line is a better description of a post-Katrina Bush supporter than any I've heard in the?ahem?drive-by media - u.m.)

Now here's where things get tantalizing.  Elsewhere in Timaeus and Critias, the narrator indicates that Atlantis had launched an ill-advised invasion of Athens (or, rather, Proto-Athens), which the Athenians had beaten back at great cost.  They had assembled a mighty alliance to rise up against the Stone Age Atlantic superpower, and apparently kept fighting even as their allies dropped away or were crushed in a Mediterranean fight to the death.  The men of Proto-Athens may have even gotten the worst of it - the priests had said there were few Athenian survivors to carry forth the culture of the Hellenes - because we're treated at one point to that most evocative of throwaway lines:

"But later there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea."

?which may indicate the subtle influence of the Olympian Thunderbolt strategy - shock and awe on a tectonic scale.  Zeus certainly did seem about through playing nice with the arrogant Atlanteans:

wanting to inflict punishment on them, that they might be chastened and improve, collected all the gods into their most holy habitation, which, being placed in the centre of the world, beholds all created things. And when he had called them together, he spake as follows:

ibid.

And that's it.  The rest of Critias has been lost, so we can't really know what Zeus may or may not have advocated.  It's one of history's greatest cliffhangers - rather like what's going to happen when earnest researchers actually wait out the Bush sealings of documents related to his and his father's presidencies, only to find that everything was shredded and burned way back in the days when a simple assertion of Congressional oversight could have brought the Cheney Administration to its knees.

Fill-In-The-Blank

Whether or not Plato was relating a true tale has been the subject of centuries of historical debate, and it began not long after the philosopher's death.  His student, Aristotle, thought Atlantis fiction, but a grand-student of his, Crantor (by way of Xenocrates), went so far as to travel to Egypt seeking proof that it had been real.  Though he returned claiming to have read hieroglyphs on a column which verified the tale, the fact that he couldn't produce the column worked against him.  Still, his belief helped to convince other historians in antiquity, among them Proclus, Strabo, and Posidinius (but that last one has an obvious name-bias, so we can toss him out).

Plato's work on Atlantis inspired everything from satire - one author had a 10-million-man army invading Hyperborea, only to call off the attack when they realized the Hyperboreans were the luckiest people on Earth - to epic poems by Neoplatonists, to similar utopias (Panchaea) being set up in the Indian Ocean, to a theory on the origin of the Gaulish Druids that some had been refugees from a sinking Atlantis (theory debunked a century later).  Debate about the continent seemed to languish after the Fall of Rome; the story doesn't really pick up again until the publication of Francis Bacon's novel The New Atlantis in 1626.  In it, the philosopher/scientist describes Bensalem, a utopian society off the western coast of America (unclear whether North or South) which promotes "conversion" to secularism and describes what we would later come to know as the scientific method.

The Victorian Era saw a surge in interest in all things related to (or hinted at in) antiquity, and Atlantis was no exception.  Mesoamerican scholars (there weren't many then, and trust me: there still aren't now) couldn't help but notice the linguistic and pyramidical similarities between a few Aztec and Ancient Mediterranean words; to this day, some folks ("scholar" doesn't seem to apply) still base entire theories upon this somewhat flimsy base:

Matlock, in his defence of the Yucatan Straits as the site of
  Atlantis, cites place names as one of his compelling proofs. He
  points to:
 

Atlas - or his substitute - is also encountered in diverse places
  performing his function of holding up the world. Quetzalcoatl is
  shown in paintings and in an engraving holding up the world.

(regrettably, this linguist failed to explore some of the world's other great verbal mysteries, like why "Spiro Agnew" anagrams to "Grow a Penis," or how it came to be that the Koreans use the same word for both "snow" and "eyeball."  He also got his Atlases mixed up. - u.m.)
Atlantis - above the waves


The Postbellum, Antediluvian World

It fell to an old-school Plains Progressive from Minnesota named Ignatius Donnelly to vastly expand upon Plato's sketchy report, and he did so with the zeal of Dick Cheney uncovering the hidden knowledge of the heretofore-only-rumored Fourth Branch.  Donnelly assembled a massive tome entitled ATLANTIS THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD (the entire text, which resides in the public domain, is available through the link), in which he postulated that Atlantis had not only existed, but had been the culture hearth for most of the civilizations of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.

Weird Historical Sidenote:  Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901) left his native Pennsylvania for Minnesota in 1856, and there helped to found a utopian community called Nininger City a few miles south of St. Paul.  The exploding real estate bubble of 1857 shut down the dream, left him in debt, and forced him to take up politics, eventually resulting in stints as Minnesota's first lieutenant governor, a Radical Republican representative to Reconstruction-era Congresses (he was an early supporter of abolition and of the enfranchisement of women), and as Vice Presidential nominee for the Populist Party in the election of 1900.  In addition to his Atlantis studies - which scholarship did not, it must be said, further his career much - Donnelly also wrote extensively on Shakespeare and penned the preamble to the Populist Party's Omaha Platform in the 1892 elections.  He died on January 1, 1901, and is buried in St. Paul.

Donnelly's ambitious work proposed to connect dots (and conveniently ignore others) based on reasoning that occasionally approaches Rush "how can there be global warming when it's cold outside today" Limbaugh levels of absurdity, but one has to remember that this was the same era in which an English preacher was able to amend the very Bible with the notion of a Rapture that nearly two thousand years' worth of theologians had missed.  Though disputed by historians and other enthusiasts of a documentable past, the public, ever prone to arguments that make the science seem based upon common sense, responded well to the new research on Atlantis.  Donnelly thus established in the modern era many of society's baseline ideas about the lost continent.  From "Chapter 1 - The Purpose of the Book":

3. That Atlantis was the region where man first rose from a state of barbarism to civilization.

4. That it became, in the course of ages, a populous and mighty nation, from whose overflowings the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of South America, the Mediterranean, the west coast of Europe and Africa, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian were populated by civilized nations.

5. That it was the true Antediluvian world; the Garden of Eden; the Gardens of the Hesperides; the Elysian Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the Mesomphalos; the Olympos; the Asgard of the traditions of the ancient nations; representing a universal memory of a great land, where early mankind dwelt for ages in peace and happiness.

6. That the gods and goddesses of the ancient Greeks, the Ph?nicians, the Hindoos, and the Scandinavians were simply the kings, queens, and heroes of Atlantis; and the acts attributed to them in mythology are a confused recollection of real historical events.

?et cetera (oh, and incidentally, Latin was derived from the language of Atlantis).  It's a good read, if you're a fan of van Daniken-style reasoning (I am); especially poignant is Donnelly's last paragraph, in which he issues something of an unanswered challenge to those of us who lived in the late 20th century:

We are but beginning to understand the past: one hundred years ago the world knew nothing of Pompeii or Herculaneum; nothing of the lingual tie that binds together the Indo-European nations; nothing of the significance of the vast volume of inscriptions upon the tombs and temples of Egypt; nothing of the meaning of the arrow-headed inscriptions of Babylon; nothing of the marvellous civilizations revealed in the remains of Yucatan, Mexico, and Peru. We are on the threshold. Scientific investigation is advancing with giant strides. Who shall say that one hundred years from now the great museums of the world may not be adorned with gems, statues, arms, and implements from Atlantis, while the libraries of the world shall contain translations of its inscriptions, throwing new light upon all the past history of the human race, and all the great problems which now perplex the thinkers of our day?

Well, Ignatius, my brother, since I come from more than a hundred years in your future, I shall say: No museum floors are threatening to collapse due to an overstock of Atlantean artifacts, and the libraries contain about as many Atlantean translations as the ones you knew.  Further, if great problems perplexed the thinkers of your day, they positively stymie the ones in mine.  We have taken to examining our would-be leaders on the basis of boob and haircut, and you will never, ever, hear one of them say anything about being crucified upon a cross of gold.

The Paleo New Age

Helena Petrovna Hahn, better known as Madame Blavatsky, was an Industrial Age woman with a decidedly Aquarian outlook.  Born in the Ukraine, she fled an early arranged marriage and became a world traveler (in the mid-1800s, this was not a common thing for a woman in her 20s to do), and converted to Buddhism while visiting India, Tibet, and Indonesia.  Later adventures landed her in New York, where she explored spiritualism and became a founding member of the Theosophical Society.  She also wrote two volumes of The Secret Doctrine, which - outside of its extraordinarily casual racism - contained many themes that would be recognizable to a shopper in a Sedona crystal emporium.

One of these was at Atlantis, which Madame Blavatsky said was inhabited by the fourth of seven "Root Races."  Her Atlanteans were a people of high culture; gone was the militarily threatening empire of Plato.  She also mentioned the Lemurians of the Indian (or maybe Pacific) Ocean as a Root Race - Lemuria being the name of a theoretical continent meant to explain why there were lemurs in Madagascar and India, but not in Egypt and Southwest Asia.  Though rendered wrong by modern understanding of plate tectonics, the "sunken continent" theory was used as a convenient crutch by many a 19th-century naturalist trying to explain species distribution.

Weird Historical Sidenote:  Madame Blavatsky's Lemurians were reptilian, about seven feet tall, hermaphroditic, mentally undeveloped, and spiritually more pure than the following "Root Races," though these "dragon-men" eventually succumbed to the temptations of the Dark Side.  They were sunk and supplanted by the Atlanteans, who were endowed with intellect.  In 1894, Lemurian survivors (who presumably didn't look like Blavatsky's) were outed as living in or on Mount Shasta in California; this belief is perpetuated by some New Age churches today.

Another Weird Historical Sidenote:  Lemuria often gets tied up with the idea of Mu, a kind of Pacific counterpart to Atlantis.  Mu was "discovered" when one of those previously-mentioned Mesoamericanists prematurely announced that he had deciphered the hieroglyphs of the Maya, and that they told him the Maya thought they were descendents of refugees from a sunken island to the west.  Like Atlantis, however, the idea of Mu is persistent: H.P. Lovecraft referred to the place in a Cthulu context, and more recently, a submerged ruin - or weird, naturally occurring geologic formation - off Yonagumi, Okinawa, has been controversially identified as Mu.

The Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce, mentioned Atlantis on more than a few occasions, and added even more grist for the New Age mill: his Atlanteans had airplanes and ships that were powered by some kind of crystal.  This, of course, neatly explains the Bermuda Triangle, as well: a malfunctioning Atlantean power crystal occasionally creates some kind of geomagnetic trans-dimensional vortex, or something like that.  In one of the more famous prophecies of the 20th century, Cayce said:

"A portion of the temples may yet be discovered under the slime of ages and sea water near Bimini... Expect it in '68 or '69 - not so far away."

He died in 1945, but 23 years later, a mysterious road-like formation was indeed spotted off the coast of Bimini, and believers in all things prophetic and Atlantean thought they had found the lost city.  Alas, the Bimini Road turned out to be many things to many people - geologists say it's a natural formation called tessellated pavement, and (even though some of my favorite people at Progressive Historians will probably take me to task for mentioning the guy's name) Gavin Menzies claims it's an emergency slipway built by Chinese explorers who needed a drydock after their round-the-world-sailing junks were damaged by a hurricane.  The debate still rages on the Bimini Road, but undeniable is the influence upon the Atlantis story (and the New Age movement in general) of Edgar Cayce and the idea of guided-tour-by-channeling.

I Know That Enormous, Powerful City Is Around Here Somewhere?

Scholarship on Atlantis in the 20th century has been a little less guess-based than Ignatius Donnelly's early work, even as nationalists in several countries went off the deep end trying to prove their people's descent from the god-kings of yore.  Like most stuff, the Nazis found an evil purpose for Atlantis, claiming it had been the home of the Aryan supermen from whom the Nazis themselves were descended.  Similarly, some British nationalists, seeking to justify ruling a third of the world's population, said their people's mandate extended back to the mists of prehistory.

By altering one or two components of the Atlantis story, the lost continent can be made to appear in any number of locations in the Mediterranean Basin and around the world.  Candidates have included Sardinia, Santorini, Cyprus, Malta, Ponza, Troy, Tartessos, Tantalus, and possibly even Canaan in the Med; outside-the-Pillars sites include Sweden, the North Sea, Ireland, a couple of places around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, Cuba, Bermuda, Indonesia, Bolivia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and - in a theory that relies on concurrent belief in cataclysmic magnetic pole shifts that precipitate very fast tectonic changes - Antarctica.  Some of the more plausible of these, in no particular order:

• Canary Islands - once inhabited by a fair-skinned group of tribesmen called the Guanches who, upon meeting the first Spanish explorers to reach their islands, asked the newcomers to translate the weird writing on an ancient stone of theirs.  The Spaniards slaughtered them instead.




• Azores - perhaps the mountaintops of Atlantis' fabled ranges?  The Golden Age Project seems to think so, and even has computer-generated reconstructions of Plato's island.




• Minoans - flourished on Crete around the 17th century BCE; destroyed by tsunami created when the nearby island of Thera/Santorini (also a candidate for Atlantishood) exploded.  Interesting note: if you divide all of Plato's numbers by ten - like what might happen if a careless translator missed some math in going from Egyptian to Greek and back - the dimensions of the island and time frames involved (the volcano blew up 900 years before Solon, etc.) start to make sense.




• Spartel Bank - is a submerged island in the Strait of Gibraltar, in places only 56 meters below the surface.  It sank around the right time - 12,000 years ago - but the cause seems more like ice cap melting than sudden tsunamification (though a theorized magnitude 9 earthquake may have contributed to the island's demise.

And the search goes on in the astral realm, as well - there is no shortage of websites and New Age periodicals and books in which one can find the teachings of an Atlantean who's been channeled through a medium.  In most of these visions, Atlantis is a blessed, alien-influenced Eden whose end is brought about by dreaming too big, or by outright ascension to a higher plane of existence (a great place to start looking into this is Crystalinks, a compendium of New Age knowledge and lore). 

In that sense, perhaps the makers of Stargate: Atlantis, a show which includes both lost cities and ascended beings, have been right all along.  Or perhaps those who say the Atlanteans chose a darker path and went the way of Icarus are correct; it's hard to know.  With input coming from sources as diverse as L. Sprague de Camp and the Walt Disney Corporation, it's difficult to say anything with certainty about the Lost Continent, except, perhaps, for one's personal feelings about it.

Historiorant:

Which brings us full circle, and thus (to mix metaphors once again) back to the matter at hand:  Where do you, Democratic leadership-people, stand on the existence of Atlantis, and more importantly, explain how and why you arrived at the conclusion you did?

Answer me that, and I'll be happy.  I've given up on hearing your excuses as to why this damn war isn't over, why a cadre of criminals is still in charge of our government, and why we should keep our powder dry for some mythic showdown that none of you is ever going to have the cajones to force.  Just tell me, Senator Reid & Speaker Pelosi; Senators Biden, Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Gravel, & Obama, Representative Kucinich, and Governor Richardson; Senator Salazar and Representative Udall: tell me, in the same way you'd answer a high school essay question: Did Atlantis exist?  Why or why not?

First one with a satisfactory answer gets the full support of one moonbat in the next capitulation to the Will of the Decider, or in the next primary election, whichever comes first.

Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Progressive Historians, and Never In Our Names, and Bits of News.

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal as well as the Independent Bloggers Alliance, The Peace Tree and Worldwide Sawdust.

"There is a culture war in America, but it is not between liberals and conservatives, who in fact share a great many core values - including a commitment to children, family, community, personal responsibility and democracy. It is between the lower and higher orders of our human nature. It is between an imperial politics of individual greed and power and a democratic politics based on principle and the common good. It is between Power Seekers at the extreme political fringes who remain imprisoned in an Imperial Consciousness and the realists of the political mainstream who truly want to solve the problems that beset us all."

David Korten wrote those provocative words in his book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community published last year by Berrett-Kohler.
Korten worked for more than thirty-five years in preeminent business, academic, and international development institutions. He eventually turned away from the establishment and instead worked with public interest citizen action groups. He is the co-founder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network and Yes! A Journal of Positive Futures, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization and a member of the Club of Rome. He serves on the boards of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economics and the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

In his early career, Korten set up business schools in low-income countries starting with Ethiopia, hoping to help establish a new class of professional business entrepreneurs would be the key to ending global poverty. He also completed his military service stateside during the Vietnam War as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, with duty at the Special Air Warfare School, Air Force headquarters command, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Following his service in the military, Korten was a faculty member of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business where he taught in Harvard's middle management, M.B.A. and doctoral programs. Korten also served as Harvard's adviser to the Central American Management Institute in Nicaragua and later joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.

When Korten left academia in 1970 he moved to Southeast Asia where he lived for almost fifteen years, serving as a Ford Foundation project specialist and later as Asia regional advisor on development management in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). His work there earned Korten international recognition for helping to engineer the development of intervention strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water and forestry resources.

Korten ultimately broke with the international aid system when he became convinced they were actually increasing poverty and environmental destruction and impervious to change. During the last five years of Korten's work in Asia he coordinated with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to better facilitate positive global level change.

Korten's life experience abroad convinced him that the United States was actively promoting both at home and abroad - the very policies responsible for, inequality, environmental devastation and social disintegration. At that point a friend advised Korten he would best serve the cause of ending global poverty by returning to the United States and educating his fellow Americans about the destructive role of corporate imperialism. Hence, Korten returned to the United States in 1992 to share with his fellow Americans the lessons he had learned abroad.

Ironically, Korten's original motivation for international travel as a college senior in 1959 was to persuade the world's poor to reject revolution in favor of America's political and economic system. Instead, as he writes, Korten found himself learning far more from the people he hoped to teach:

"The subsequent experience of working for some thirty years as a member of the international development establishment profoundly changed my worldview. I had gone abroad to teach. Far more consequential than what I taught was what I learned - about myself, my country, and the human tragedy of unrealized possibility. Ultimately, I realized I must return to the land of my birth to share with my people the lessons of my encounter with the world."

In 1995 Korten published an international bestseller, When Corporations Rule the World and followed that up with The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism several years later. Korten agreed to a podcast interview with me about his current book, life experience and worldview. Please refer to the media player below. The interview is approximately fifty-six minutes.

This interview can also be accessed via the Itunes store by searching for Intrepid Liberal Journal. Another option is to access the media player for this podcast on my blog.

In 1974, at the height of the Nixon controversy, legal scholar Raoul Berger-already a rather elderly man at that time-published his second book, Executive Privilege: A Constitutional Myth. Berger was both a lawyer and a professional classical violinist. He was also an immigrant, giving him the kind of reverence for American institutions that only adopted children, at times, seem to have (though I hardly think it is unique to them.) I have been rereading it, and it is indeed a very sad commentary on what has happened to American government in the second half of the twentieth century. ...

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think that the world we live in demands it," Vice President Cheney has stated. That is exactly what other post-1945 Presidents have claimed-that they need unaccountable authority in a dangerous world, including the right to violate the laws of other countries and, at times, our own. That is exactly the kind of arbitrary authority our revolution was fought against. More important is the exact nature of the controversy now raging in Congress. The firing of the U.S. Attorneys does not seem to have been a trivial matter, a normal exercise of Presidential power, as one comment on this blog seemed to suggest. Ample evidence suggests that it was a means of insuring that vote fraud cases and corruption cases would be brought against more Democrats to help shift the political balance of power, an attempt, in short, to corrupt the electoral process, which would in my opinion fully warrant the impeachment and Senate trial of any officer of the U.S. government that turned out to be involved in it. President Bush, it seems, had a telephone conversation with a Senator about one of the firings-in New Mexico-a fact which, as far as I can tell, the White House press corps has been too discreet to ask him about in recent press conferences. (Please correct me if I am wrong about that). "Executive privilege," a recent creation without real legal foundation, is rapidly becoming customary law. Once again, as Madison and Jefferson foresaw, we are faced with a struggle to confirm the liberties they secured for us.

An excellent, excellent piece.

What's on your mind?

As it turns out, Mr. Lincoln has plenty of experience with stubborn, clueless presidents and 'endless wars.'  Recalling his own, frustrating days in Congress, he will now address the members of the 110th Congress on the subject of 'mentally perplexed' presidents... and war.

I have once again offered to take this letter down as dictation (I serve at the pleasure of the president.) My words will be identifiable as regular type; anything written by Mr. Lincoln will be in

blockquotes;

with the addition that I will make use of strikeouts to enhance readability ( Mexico becomes Iraq; it should be clear.)

Sincerely, feduphoosier

Gentlemen and Ladies of the Congress:

I would be remiss in my responsibility as former president of this great nation if I did not write to you today; and speaking on behalf of all who have died for the honor of this nation, I must address your abysmal record with regard to the continuation of this illegal and immoral war with the once sovereign nation of Iraq. 

That you have so far failed in your duty to end this blatantly illegal war; and that you have so willingly ceded your rightful powers to control the flow of money to said war, and in that you have abdicated your other constitutionally given powers of oversight which are your rightful duties as the legislative branch of this government -- all of this surprises and confounds me.

It is your responsibility to control the monies that will be used for this war, and so ensure that the public interest has not been abused.  Ladies and gentlemen of Congress:  this is your duty to the people of this nation, and to future generations.  May I also suggest that it is also your duty to those who came before you; those of your ancestors who have given so much that you might enjoy the freedom and prosperity in which you live today.

The people of this nation do not want war.  It is your duty as representatives of the citizenry to uphold their faith and put an end to it.  You must find the means, and with all possible haste, to bring this loss of life, money and national honor to an immediate close. 

As for the irregularities that have taken place within this administration; the responsibility rests with Congress to protect and defend the Constitution, from all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC.  As you have all sworn oaths to defend our Constitution, you must not waver from this duty; for history will assail you, and your children's children curse your names if you do not rescue the rule of law and justice from the grasp of an expanded, presidential tyranny.

In short:

I am not concerned that you have fallen. I am concerned that you arise.

When the war began, it was my opinion that all those who, because of knowing too little, or because of knowing too much, could not conscientiously approve the conduct of the President, in the beginning of it, should, nevertheless, as good citizens and patriots, remain silent on that point, at least till the war should be ended.My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there, I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me, that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President's struggle in this case.I more than suspect already, that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong---that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. That originally having some strong motive---what, I will not stop now to give my opinion concerning---to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory---that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood---that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy---he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico Iraq might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.

How like the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream, is the whole war part of his late message! At one time telling us that Mexico Iraq has nothing whatever, that we can get, but teritory WMDs and terrorists; at another, showing us how we can support the war, by levying contributions on Mexico Iraq at one time, urging the national honor, the security of the future, the prevention of foreign interference, and even, the good of Mexico Iraq herself, as among the objects of the war; at another, telling us, that to reject indemnity, by refusing to accept a cession of teritory "to cut and run, and fail to support democracy would be to abandon all our just demands, and to wage the war, bearing all it's expenses, without a purpose or definite object."Again, the President is resolved, under all circumstances, to have full teritorial indemnity black check funding for the expenses of the war; but he forgets to tell us how we are to get the excess, after those expenses shall have surpassed the value of the whole of the Mexican teritory Iraqi oil.So again, he insists that the separate national existence of Mexico Iraq shall be maintained; but he does not tell us how this can be done, after we shall have taken all her teritory destroyed her infrastructure. Lest the questions, I here suggest, be considered speculative merely, let me be indulged a moment in trying to show they are not.If the prosecution of the war has, in expenses, already equaled the better half of the country our national budget, how long it's future prosecution, will be in equaling, the less valuable half entire rest of our treasury, is not a speculative, but a practical question, pressing closely upon us. And yet it is a question which the President seems to never have thought of. As to the mode of terminating the war, and securing peace, the President is equally wandering and indefinite.

First, it is to be done by a more vigorous prosecution of the war in the vital parts of the enemies country; and, after apparently, talking himself tired, on this point, the President drops down into a half despairing tone, and tells us that "with a people distracted and divided by contending factions, and a government subject to constant changes, by successive revolutions, the continued success of our arms may fail to secure a satisfactory peace."

Then he suggests the propriety of wheedling the Mexican Iraqi people to desert the counsels of their own leaders, and trusting in our protection, to set up a government from which we can secure a satisfactory peace; telling us, that "this may become the only mode of obtaining such a peace." But soon he falls into doubt of this too; and then drops back on to the already half abandoned ground of more vigorous prosecution.

All this shows that the President is, in no wise, satisfied with his own positions. First he takes up one, and in attempting to argue us into it, he argues himself out of it; then seizes another, and goes through the same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing same process; and then, confused at being able to think of nothing new, he snatches up the old one again, which he has some time before cast off.

His mind, tasked beyond it's power, is running hither and thither, like some tortured creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle down, and be at ease.

Again, it is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate.Every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do,---after all this, this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has, even an imaginary conception.

As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscience, more painful than all his mental perplexity!I carefully examined the President's messages, to ascertain what he himself had said and proved upon the point. The result of this examination was to make the impression, that taking for true, all the President states as facts, he falls far short of proving his justification; and that the President would have gone farther with his proof, if it had not been for the small matter, that the truth would not permit him.Let the President answer the interrogatories, I proposed, as before mentioned, or some other similar ones. Let him answer, fully, fairly, and candidly. Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments. Let him remember he sits where Washington sat, and so remembering, let him answer, as Washington would answer. As a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion---no equivocation.

Yours truly,

Through it all, government secrecy and disinformation - both Canadian and American - were de mise. For instance, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) initially denied any knowledge and involvement in Mr. Arar's rendition by the U.S., in addition to their blatant lack of cooperation in shedding light in the matter. They even purposely "edited" documents more or less to this effect. CSIS went as far as to release a heavily censored portion of a classified report which, conveniently enough, stipulated that the agency was not aware the U.S. planned to arrest and deport Mr. Arar to Syria. Meanwhile, U.S. officials floated the notion that Mr. Arar was simply "deported" to Syria (despite him pleading to be sent back to his country of citizenship - Canada) because he had been put on a terrorist watch list after information from "multiple international intelligence agencies" linked him to terrorist groups. Even after his release, "senior government officials" circulated the information that Mr. Arar had provided much information on terrorists through his "interrogations" (re: enhanced interrogation techniques) while jailed, thus obliquely implying that he was indeed involved - regardless of the fact that he had been released without charges. In addition, the then Solicitor General (Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Attorney General) refused to hear the calls for a public inquiry into what had become known as the Arar affair - quite a dubious stance on his part, considering that he was in charge of CSIS at the time of Mr. Arar's initial detention and rendition. Likewise, the Prime Minister of the time, Jean Chr?tien, resisted calls for a full, public inquiry.

But by January 2004, public pressure had continued to mount in support of such an inquiry. Leaks began to occur - the RCMP even raided the home of a journalist to recover leaked "secret documents" related to the Arar affair, in an obvious bid to protect itself. Ottawa finally relented, then Prime Minister Paul Martin promising at last a public inquiry about the same time Mr. Arar launched a lawsuit against the American government.

The public inquiry opened on June 21, 2004, headed by inquiry commissioner Justice Dennis O'Connor, and concluded its main phase of public hearings on October 27, 2005. Not surprisingly, the U.S. flatly refused to cooperate through it all.

As it turned out from the public hearings, the RCMP and CSIS were actively responsible for providing faulty intelligence concerning Mr. Arar, intelligence which was (and remains) fully available to U.S. officials - such a database was furthermore revealed to contain the names and information of many innocent people. U.S. officials initially offered to return Mr. Arar back to Canada, but solely on the condition that he be charged and incarcerated - without solid evidence to even charge him, Canada understandably refused to do so ... and thus the U.S. turned around and sent Mr. Arar to Syria because they were convinced (wrongly) of his guilt. Thereafter, Canadian officials were very much in the know that Mr. Arar was being "interrogated" in Syria - the Canadian Ambassador to Syria at the time even reporting on the progress of this and passing on the intelligence thus gained to the RCMP and CSIS - most likely to this effect, the RCMP even went as far as to hamper as best as it could the efforts of the Foreign Affairs ministry to bring Mr. Arar back to Canada. Furthermore, Canadian officials were quite aware that the U.S. had already embarked on a path of using extraordinary renditions, of which Arar was but one unfortunate victim. Of course, the Bush administration (largely via Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice) first denied that such a process was used, but thereafter put aside any pretensions and actually defended such a practice. And despite the continued claims that extraordinary renditions were not used to outsource torture, let alone actually using torture in enhanced interrogation techniques (to this very day), the public inquiry's fact-finder report proved otherwise.

In September 2006, Justice Dennis O'Connor released his first report on Canada's involvement in the detention, deportation and torture of Maher Arar. Months before, Mr. Arar's lawsuit against the U.S. government was dismissed by a U.S. Federal Court Judge on the basis for the need to maintain secrecy of the U.S. government's tactics in the Global War on Terrorism(TM). Interestingly, and in sharp contrast, Justice O'Connor's second report of December 12, 2006, stressed the critical need for independent oversight of the RCMP and CSIS (among other crucial recommendations) in order to avoid any other such tragic injustices as suffered by Mr. Arar. The full inquiry report can be read here.

Not surprisingly, the arrogance and hubris of the Bush administration quickly reared its ugly head: "(...) we're going to have to respectfully but firmly go our own way and the Arar matter, at least for now, is one of those", said Paul Rosenzweig, acting assistant secretary for international affairs for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), on December 20, 2006. In this respect, and even to this day, the DHS stubbornly refuses to remove Maher Arar from its terrorist watch list, despite a public pledge to look into the matter by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in December 2006 - which turned out to be nothing more than empty air, considering her subsequent infamous words in February 2007: "Well, we respect the decision of the Canadian Government concerning Mr. Arar. The United States, of course, makes decisions based on information that we have and based on our own assessment of the situation (...) But sometimes, we will have different assessments of situations." In addition, at the insistence and public expression that there is nothing in the DHS files which indicate that Mr. Arar is a threat and therefore should be removed from the U.S. terrorist watch list, the ugly U.S. ambassador to Canada fired back at (current) Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day on January 24, 2007: "It's a little presumptuous of him to say who the United States can and cannot allow into our country."

Nevertheless, two days later, (current) Prime Minister Stephen Harper did the right thing and officially apologized to Mr. Arar on behalf of the Canadian government for all he had gone through, in addition to granting $10.5 millions in compensation.

End of the story? For Mr. Arar, perhaps. But for the exposure of the full ugly truth as to how far the Americans have gone into appropriating for themselves Canada's intelligence gathering and databases, along with the complicit consent of the RCMP and CSIS - one last chapter remained.

You see, numerous omissions and "blacked out" portions were to be found in Justice O'Connor's public inquiry reports - a decision made by the Harper government with the claim that the hidden words could damage Canada's national security or foreign relations. A court challenge was issued for the full disclosure of the missing words and sentences - a challenge which the Harper government finally gave up on fighting. Thus, Federal Court Justice Simon Noel's order for disclosure was respected - the uncensored documents can be read here (pdf file).

And what do these reveal? Among other things:

1) CSIS suspected all along that the U.S. would "deport" Mr. Arar to be tortured;

2) Although CSIS knew of extraordinary renditions and torture by the U.S., including that this was what occurred to Mr. Arar, they willfully left the government in the dark about such knowledge;

3) The CIA was responsible for Mr. Arar's extraordinary rendition and torture;

4) The RCMP and CSIS knew of the CIA's involvement, as they all kept constant contact;

5) Information gleaned under torture of another Canadian in Syria, Ahmad Abou El Maati, was used by the RCMP to persuade a judge back in Canada to let it tap someone's telephone (Mr. El Maati was detained by the U.S. on 08/16/2001 and thereafter rendered to Syria, whereby he "confessed" to many a thing and then released in 2004, without charges - this is the subject of another inquiry) - in fact, the RCMP regularly failed to inform judges who granted the warrants that they were relying on information that was likely the product of interrogations involving tactics forbidden in Canada;

6) Mr. Arar had been "fingered" to the RCMP and the CIA by the same Ahmad Abou El Maati, again under torture;

7) Even though the RCMP was made aware that the confession of Mr. El Maati was extracted by "extreme coercion," they insisted that it was "still accurate and continues to be true";

8) Some Canadian (RCMP/CSIS) agents came to believe on their own that jurisdiction walls which had separated their investigations from U.S. ones had to come down - and acted accordingly, without oversight;

and 9) The RCMP and CSIS kept silent on the CIA role, as well as its rendition of Mr. Arar without Canadian permission, on account of a cardinal rule in intelligence gathering - namely the Third-Party Rule, whereby the work of foreign spies must not be compromised through public mention of their work.

Altogether, here is how this boils down to: through incompetence on the part of Canadian security agencies and lack of oversight upon their activities, the CIA was given free reign in rendering and torturing an innocent Canadian - and despite his demonstrated innocence, the U.S. government says "we do what we want, when we want, we know more than you do and won't tell you what, and even if we do actually make mistakes, we say STFU and go fuck yourselves".

And all of this nauseatingly nightmarish litany of incompetence, injustice, barbarity, arrogance and mendacity brings me to this:

Considering A) the propensity of the current Canadian (neocon) government to not only follow in the footsteps of the Bush administration, but to actually emulate it; B) the clearly established propensity of the Bush administration to spy and monitor (illegally or not) and, as in many other things, lie and lie about it, then ask for more; C) the demonstrated stance of the Bush administration to demand full information-sharing from Canada and yet arrogantly refusing to disclose all its knowledge (if it really has any) concerning Maher Arar in support of its decision to keep him on the terrorist watch list; D) the demonstrated propensity of the RCMP and CSIS to unquestioningly share data with the FBI and the CIA; E) the still remaining lack of oversight of the RCMP and CSIS; F) the fact that the Canadian Security Establishment (CSE) - the functional equivalent of the NSA - may be authorized once again to perform the same kind of domestic spying in Canada as in the U.S.A., as it was authorized before; and G) the now-apparent primacy of the Third-Party Rule in Canada;

I am now compelled to ask the following questions:

I) To which extent is the privacy of Canadian citizens being illegally invaded, through indiscriminate sharing of private information and data, for the benefit of the FBI and CIA - in clear violation of our privacy of information laws?

II) To which extent Canadian citizens are being illegally spied and monitored, either by the RCMP, CSIS, the CSE, the FBI, the CIA or the NSA, in clear violation of our constitutional rights?

And last, but not least, III) Why is there not a single Canadian MSM journalist asking these questions?

The Arar affair uncovered the banality of injustice, incompetence and mendacity - on both the Canadian and American sides of the 49th parallel.

Furthermore, it is what lies beyond the Arar affair, that which still hides in the deepest reaches of the darkness of secrecy and which begs the unsettling question: what else is there?

These questions are critical because - and regardless of claims to the contrary - the security agencies of Canada and the U.S.A. have been exposed not as seekers of truth, but as seekers of guilt.

And this altogether constitutes a drastically different game from the innocent until proven guilty one that we cherish so - Canadians and Americans alike.

More than ever, it appears that Canadians and Americans are riding fast down the same road to perdition with regards to their human rights, their civil liberties and their constitutions.

All in the sacro-sanct name of Security.

(Cross-posted from APOV)

In the first match-up, we've got two Founding Fathers who are icons of independence and liberty in their own states if not in history textbooks: George Mason of Virginia and Caesar Rodney of Delaware.
Both men spoke out early and often about Parliament's unfair and unjust policies governing the colonies - Rodney attended the Stamp Act Congress, and Mason wrote an open letter to Parliament as a state legislator denouncing the Stamp Act - and both acted quickly after Lexington and Concord to advance the Patriot cause. Rodney was speaker of the Delaware Assembly when it declared independence from Great Britain on June 15, 1775, and Mason drafted the Declaration of Rights for the new Virginia constitution in May 1776. Despite these contributions, their greatest achievements are generally unnoticed today. To secure Delaware's ratification of the Declaration of Independence, Rodney rode 80 miles on horseback in a night rainstorm on July 1, 1776, from Dover to Philadelphia. Mason's refusal to sign the U.S. Constitution, despite being one of the Constitutional Convention's most vociferous delegates, because it lacked a bill of rights helped push the anti-Federalist movement for the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791. Where Rodney fought on the battlefield as a militia commander for the Revolution, Mason helped to shape the spirit of the Revolution with his words.

George Mason
? Member of the Virginia House of Burgesses
? Delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention
? Author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights
? Delegate to the Constitutional Convention
? Delegate to the Virginia ratification convention
? George Mason University and three states' Mason Counties is named in his honor
? George Mason Memorial is in Washington, D.C.

Caesar Rodney
? French and Indian War veteran
? Delegate to the Stamp Act Congress
? Delaware militia major general
? Speaker of the Delaware Assembly
? Delegate to Continental Congress
? Signer of the Declaration of Independence
? President (governor) of Delaware

FORGOTTEN FOUNDING FATHERS TOURNAMENT BRACKET
Washington Bracket
1. George Mason
8. Caesar Rodney
*
4. John Witherspoon
5. Casimir Pulaski
*
3. Daniel Morgan
6. Frederick Muhlenberg
*
2. William Penn
7. William Blount

Jefferson Bracket
1. Nathanael Greene
8. Robert R. Livingston
*
4. William Paterson
5. Edmund Randolph
*
3. John Carroll
6. Henry Muhlenberg
*
2. Richard Henry Lee
7. John Trumbull

Madison Bracket
1. Roger Williams
8. David Rittenhouse
*
4. Isaac Shelby
5. Joseph Warren
*
3. Henry Knox
6. George Wythe
*
2. Roger Sherman
7. George Clinton

Franklin Bracket
1. John Jay
8. Pierre Charles L'Enfant
*
4. James Otis
5. John Dickinson
*
3. John Paul Jones
6. Abraham Baldwin
*
2. Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben
7. Samuel Nicholas

FFFs and match-ups are determined by my interpretation of who I believe were the 32 greatest FFFs. Personal politics, favoritism and reader response was NOT a factor in selection or seeding. As for the tournament itself: each match-up will be conducted every 24 hours with a synopsis written by yours truly and readers can determine using the poll function who the winner should be for that match-up; there is no #1 overall seed; FFFs will retain their seeds throughout; the winner of the Washington bracket will face the winner of the Jefferson bracket, and the winner of the Madison bracket will face the winner of the Franklin bracket. I am not voting nor will I pick sides in discussion. I wish I could somehow do a more rigid time duration period for each round but there's no guarantee I'll be on a computer or awake at that time so I'm gonna say polling lasts until I post the next match-up, or roughly 24 hours later. Readers may choose whichever FFF contestant they wish, but the point of the tournament is to select the greatest Forgotten Founding Father - the most influential, most important, most impactful, who contributed the most to the Revolution and/or seeds of American liberty. Have fun!

Everyone who gives a damn about the U.S Constitution is buzzing this week about Democratic legislators' craven capitulation on the Bush administration's new FISA law that has immunized invasions of our private communications by their "national security surveillance" spooks. Yes, that is what the law effectively does; see this. The Bushies yelped "terror, terror"; the Dems caved -- again. Pissing on the people seems to come too easily to elected Dems. The more folks look at the debacle, the more comes out about the tactical blunders (or possible perfidy) of the Democratic leadership, especially Majority Leader Harry Reid in the Senate and Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House.

As a long time Pelosi constituent, I'd like to explore the terrible possibility that this episode shows that my congresscritter has, in being elected Speaker, demonstrated the truth of the Peter Principle.

What's the Peter Principle? Propounded by Laurence J. Peter in his 1968 book, this tidbit of pop sociological and business wisdom says: "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."Or her incompetence. Simply put, I think Pelosi has worked very hard to rise very far in an insiders' system -- and truly mastered the art of such an ascent. Unfortunately, the very skills and instincts honed on the way to becoming the first ever woman to be Speaker of the House make her unable to lead effectively on contentious issues.
Where'd Pelosi come from, anyway?
Pelosi's official bio is strong on her family background. Pelosi hails from a strong family tradition of public service. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., served as Mayor of Baltimore for 12 years, after representing the city for five terms in Congress. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also served as Mayor of Baltimore.

Pelosi graduated from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. in 1962. Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, a native of San Francisco, have five children: Nancy Corinne, Christine, Jacqueline, Paul and Alexandra, and six grandchildren. But that doesn't tell much about how she climbed the ladder to her current status.

That story requires going back quite a long time. From 1964 to 1983, the Congressional seat Pelosi now occupies was held by Phil Burton. Burton was a kind of liberal we don't often see these days: a tough guy with principles. The National Park Service has put up a surprisingly good bio him as part of its site for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one of his legacies:Descriptions of Phil Burton reveal that he was a "good-doer" who had no patience for "do-gooders" who settled for glorious defeats. He loved to win, knew how to win, and expected to win.

Phil was a liberal in the truest sense of the word. He fought for workers' rights, the underprivileged, farmers and coal miners, the aged, and the "little guy." He knew how to forge coalitions of idealists and pragmatists, conservatives and liberals, amateurs and professionals. He was the consummate vote counter who always knew exactly where he stood and what it took to win.

Phil was the old-fashioned boss prowling the aisle, buttonholing colleagues in the cloakroom, hustling votes for his next worthy cause. On the home front, in San Francisco, Burton built a political force usually referred to  as "the machine." Up and down the ranks of officeholders, aspiring Democratic pols had to get right with Burton. And lots of the better people in San Francisco politics over the last forty years came out of that axis.

When Phil Burton died, in office, he had no trouble bequeathing his seat to his wife, Sala. The new Burton won two elections herself, but died two months into her second term. On her death bed, in 1987, she designated Nancy Pelosi as her successor.

San Francisco leftists by that time had come to feel that perhaps the Congressional seat wasn't merely the property of a Burton to give away. Maybe the voters should have a say. As well, new forces were maturing in the city -- in particular, gay folks were contesting for "liberal" leadership, often to the discomfort of the former Irish- and Italian-American elites. Harry Britt, a gay former Methodist minister and city Supervisor, became their standard bearer.

Pelosi was not well known to the Democratic electorate in the city. Her Democratic credentials were as a party fundraiser, a party insider -- not a resume that gives a person a wide public following. We didn't really know what she stood for.

The primary election triggered by Sala Burton's death was one hell of a campaign. I remember it as the time when a generation of political consultants who come out of 1970s radicalism, often with the United Farm Workers Union, jumped to the side where the money was -- Pelosi's side. Meanwhile, a younger generation of budding progressive consultants and pols cut their teeth working for Britt. It is hard at this distance in time to understand what a radical thing it was to have a openly gay man running for Congress -- one way to gauge it is to realize that two years later, in 1989, San Francisco defeated a domestic partnership referendum.

Pelosi barely squeaked through the primary, defeating Britt by a 36-32 percent margin. And ever since, she's had clear electoral sailing. The only question in our biennial elections is whether a token leftist opposition candidate will out poll the token Republican sacrifice.

So who has Pelosi been in office?
She has voted as a pretty darn good liberal. According to Wikipedia, she has "a lifetime rating of 3 from the right-leaning American Conservative Union." That's just fine with her constituents. She's mended any broken fences with the gay community and been a champion for women. She makes sure to stay friends with the Israel Lobby, despite voting against the Iraq war resolution -- but all major Washington Dems have those ties.

The most memorable public actions I remember my congressperson taking have been condemnations of China's human rights record. In 1991, she got into a fracas with Chinese police while trying to visit Tiananmen Square. Whether her activism on these issues has been a nod to hard-line anti-Communist Chinese-Americans in San Francisco, or signs of authentic commitment to human rights, these are the only occasions on which I remember her standing out from the generality of quietly liberal Dems. (Sara at Next Hurrah initiated a fascinating conversation about where Pelosi learned her values that might bear on this question.)

Closer to home, Pelosi has not always been a liberal force. She can be counted on to endorse status quo, business-friendly Dems against populist pols. She negotiated the conversion of the Presidio Army base into a "public-private partnership" that must pay its own way, instead its becoming a National Park -- this particularly rankles as the site is in the middle of Phil Burton's magnificent Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

But on balance, Pelosi hasn't been a terrible Congressperson. Unlike that other San Francisco product, the execrably authoritarian Diane Feinstein, there have been years when this leftist could vote for her.

Ascent to the Speaker's chair
It now seems clear that during all those years when Pelosi was an acceptable, if mostly invisible, Washington fixture, what she was really doing was climbing the internal Democratic Party House hierarchy. She accumulated seniority. She kept on raising money, tons of it, for Dems in need. She worked her colleagues. However she did it, she reassured many of them that she wasn't some fire-breathing liberal they should fear.

And she rose up the ranks -- ranks of what during her tenure was mostly a minority caucus, so some of these positions probably had less cachet than they might have if Democrats had been the majority. She served on the Appropriations and Intelligence committees, the latter as the ranking minority member. In 2001, she became Minority Whip, defeating Rep. Steny Hoyer; in 2002, she rose to Majority Leader of the battered, somewhat cowed, minority Democratic caucus. In both positions she was "first" woman.

And so, after the Democrats took a majority in the House in 2006, Pelosi became Speaker. She supported Rep. John Murtha for Majority Whip -- but Murtha lost out to Rep. Steny Hoyer. Pelosi and Hoyer are the House Democratic leadership today.

Now that is clearly a tale of insider intrigue. Pelosi's rise wasn't a triumph of parliamentary proficiency (under the Republicans, no Democratic maneuvering was possible) or a mark of command on policy issues. Pelosi got to the top though some combination of cajoling, flattering, funding and soothing some 200 plus, mostly male, mostly egocentric, peers. And obviously, she learned and practiced the right mix of skills to do this very competently. It is no small accomplishment to become the first woman Speaker. She should be admired for it.

And the Peter Principle?
It doesn't seem to me that the skills Pelosi has honed so well have much to do with leading a fractious, fearful caucus against an aggressive, vicious, authoritarian political enemy. Bush isn't playing by insider rules -- he lies and cheats and bulldozes his way through enemies. Frankly, I doubt that Pelosi is personally at all cowed by him; she had five brothers and she has proved she can face down male bullshit.

But her caucus is cowed. When I was part of a delegation to her San Francisco office in May, her aide pretty much admitted that Pelosi was concerned that some of her own members would rebel if she didn't let a Bush-friendly Iraq funding bill come to the floor. As Speaker she could block it, but she wouldn't because her own members would turn on her. That is, Pelosi's status as Speaker is hostage to letting Bush get his way. And there we have the FISA collapse in a nutshell.

CORRECTION in the interest of historical accuracy: A friend writes: "I was present at the decision to anoint Sala. -- Phil had nothing to do with it. Like so many hard drinking hard smoking men he made no provision for his early death."

Ever since the age of Enlightenment and the wave of revolutions that swept Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, democracy has been the answer. When American and French revolutionaries overthrew their dictators and founded new government, they were ruled by the people. When Germany twice descended into fascism, the United States and other Allied powers went to war to bring the power back to the people. When we were faced with the red communist menace in Eastern Europe, we again relied on democracy as the right answer to tyranny. Today, the U.S. strives to sow the seeds of democracy throughout the world, from Kosovo and the Congo to our current misadventure in Iraq. However, installing democracy is often more complex and subtle then we make it out to be. What’s more, democracy doesn’t necessarily give us a friendly nation to deal with, leading me to question whether democracy really is the savior of the people that we think it is.

Not that I'm against it, but recent events bring up some interesting questions. Follow me for more...

Cross posted at The Seminal

Our faith in democracy seems to rest upon a number of startling assumptions. When we advocate democracy as a way of government in foreign lands, we seem to be saying that as soon as a country lets their masses rule, that country’s problems will fade away. Democracy is the cure for dictators. It is the cure for economic depression. It is the cure for civil war, poverty, repression, censorship, ethnic conflict, human rights abuses, and any other ill a nation may suffer. When we advocate for democracy, we promise to bring these new democratic states into the modern age. More importantly, we promise that with democracy comes a contented and productive populace, one that will propel a country successfully into the future. As Walt Whitman said:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges and schools — democracy in all public and private life….

In practice, however, democracy can be a complex endeavor. When Americans say they want to help other countries form democracies, we are thinking of starting a system similar to our own. However, democracy comes in many flavors and colors, not all of which Americans might approve of. Today, 70% of African countries are technically democracies. However, when Robert Mugabe reported a 48% voter turnout rate, with 73% of the votes going to his party, as he did in 2005, few people actually believed that Zimbabwe is ruled by its people. Iraq has had elections and has a parliament, yet democracy hasn’t solved any of its problems thus far. All of these countries are democracies, and yet they all exhibit varying degrees of tyranny, from official censorship and human rights abuses in (technically democratic) China to overtly rigged elections throughout Africa. What’s more, with democracy Africa is still poor, Iraq is still not secure, and the Chinese still cannot protest in the streets.

Why do we continue to hold up democracy as the savior of the world when it fails to work so often in practice? What has the West done wrong when promoting democracy throughout the world? One of the pitfalls the U.S. seems to run into when preaching democracy to the world congregation is equating voting with a true democratic system. A democracy requires more than simple polling. A secure country is necessary to ensure the populace is not intimidated to vote a certain way. A trustworthy election force, free of corruption, is needed to make sure ballots are properly cast and counted. A robust judiciary is necessary to resolve disputes. However, there are two elements that are absolutely essential to a democracy’s success, and these two elements are the most often overlooked.

First, a robust and free press is needed to help spread unbiased information. The press provides third-party information on candidates and parties, helping the people make up their mind without resorting to official propaganda. It helps police election officials, ensuring that any corruption or violence is widely reported and condemned throughout a country. During periods between elections, the press is the often the most powerful watchdog ensuring good governance, rooting out and exposing corruption, helping the citizenry understand what their government is doing, and providing a voice for those without clout in a society. Without a large, independent, and modern press, voting is a sham. As seen in Iraq and other “democracies” around the world, without convenient access to unbiased information the voting public is easily influenced, either by official propaganda or by local strong men. Elections in a country without journalism often break down along ethnic or sectarian lines and benefit those with connections.

Second, and much more elusive, a strong sense of nationalism is needed to ensure a democracy functions as such. People and leaders need to care more for the country than their own interests. For example, when President Bush steps aside in 2009 to make way for a newly elected president, the United States will not cease to exist. Our system is built on a strong nationalist foundation, and our leaders are but temporary representatives of that nation. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a Cuba without Castro or a South Africa without Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. When a country’s identity gets tied to one ruler or one party, peaceful transfers of power become hard to facilitate. A democracy depends on the electoral losers and those that voted for them to step aside peacefully when a new regime is elected. Unlike a free press, a sense of nationalism is much more nebulous and much harder to foster in the average person. I get the sense that Iraqis think of themselves first as Sunni or Shiite, and then as members of the Iraqi country. Until this hierarchy is reversed, it will be hard to conceive of a peaceful and unified Iraq.

Even if we do everything right in fostering democracy, even if a country has a free press, a sense of nationalism, a judiciary, security, and everything else that makes democracy possible, democratic states may still not be friendly states. The rise of Hamas in Palestine is a perfect example. Hamas is a terrorist group, plain and simple. Yet, they managed to win the popular vote in Palestine in an election that no one thought was rigged. Fatah, the previous ruling party, lacked clear leaders and was widely seen among the populace as corrupt and inefficient. Hamas, on the other hand, led massive public assistance campaigns, handing out food and clothing to the poor, helping residents build homes, and employing thousands, thus winning wide support among the largely poverty stricken Palestinians. While Western powers expressed surprise when Hamas won 44% of the popular vote and 56% of the seats in Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006, they really shouldn’t have. Now in power, Hamas is free to continue to spread their hatred of Israel along with their public assistance, a potent combination.

The people had spoken in Palestine, and yet the West was not happy. We refused to accept the consequences of Palestine’s freely elected democracy, one that we had approved of for years. The minute the Palestinian people expressed their frustration with the status quo using their vote, we became angry. When Hamas pulled off a coup in Gaza, we happily threw our support behind Fatah in the West Bank even though Fatah had been defeated in the elections. Democracy hasn’t been the answer for the Palestinians, as they are still prisoners in their own proto-country, and democracy wasn’t the answer for the West either, as we ended up with an elected regime that we couldn’t work with.

The world is full of functioning democracies that are somewhat hostile towards the America. Nations like Venezuela, Iran, and Pakistan all elect their leaders and are relatively corruption free and secure. They have a free press (to various extents) and exhibit a strong sense of nationalism. However, each of these countries is hostile to our interests in one way or another. If we offer democracy as the tool that will save humanity (which is our implicit argument), then we must be willing to face the consequences of the people’s choice. Democracy does not necessarily breed successful or friendly nations, as the examples of Palestine and Venezuela demonstrate. Are we willing to live with the choices people in those countries made?

So far, the answer has been no, which seems disingenuous to me. If democracy is the answer, then we must be willing to reap what we sow. If it is not, then why are we advocating democratic change in the first place? If we intervene in another nation’s affairs, shouldn’t we be concerned simply with security and economic development? Why get into the messy business of changing a nation’s form of governance, especially if democracy is hard to instill and isn’t nearly as effective at bringing change as we think it is. Plus, why install democracy if we are unwilling to live with adverse consequences? Before we continue our policy of nation building throughout the world, exporting democracy and claiming it is worth the blood and sweat necessary to set it up, we should think long and hard about the answers to these questions.

In light of my apparent uselessness, I approached my late friend Abraham Lincoln and have asked him if he might use his considerable respect, leverage and mastery of the English language to write a letter to Congress on my behalf. 

Due to his... inability to use a keyboard, and slight confusion as to the workings of the internets, I have offered to take this letter down as dictation, and he has allowed me the option of slipping in a few words of my own: the agreement being that I attribute his own words via use of blockquotes.

Sincerely, feduphoosier

Gentlemen and Ladies of the Congress:

It is with great regret that dictate this letter to you, in this time of national upheaval and constitutional crisis.  I cannot watch your current actions without extending my deepest concern and indeed, a dire warning. 

You must protect the Constitution; this is not optional.  You must protect the rule of law; you have sworn to do so with your oaths of office, before the citizens and before God.

Your unconscionable sacking of the Constitution, and the unalienable rights of each American citizen to protect their own privacy, their papers and their possessions from unreasonable searches:  these protections are guaranteed by the fourth amendment of the Constitution, which you have sworn to uphold.  Your rushed passage of the recent FISA bill was a grievous blow to the rule of law and justice in this land.
You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. 

What I shall say upon this head, I design exclusively for the law-loving and law-abiding part of the House. To those who claim omnipotence for the Legislature, and who in the plenitude of their assumed powers, are disposed to disregard the Constitution, law, good faith, moral right, and every thing else, I have not a word to say.I frequently make mistakes myself, in the many things I am compelled to do hastily.Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.

Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
I have borne a laborious, and, in some respects to myself, a painful part in the contest [the war between the States.] Through all, I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the Constitution.I freely acknowledge myself the servant of the people, according to the bond of service -- the United States Constitution; and that, as such, I am responsible to them.I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath. Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army.

These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle.

Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors.At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgement of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny.

I know the American People are much attached to their Government;---I know they would suffer much for its sake;---I know they would endure evils long and patiently, before they would ever think of exchanging it for another. Yet, notwithstanding all this, if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the Government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.Has it [popular sovereignty] not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.Let us then turn this government back into the channel in which the framers of the Constitution originally placed it.Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.

As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor;---let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father, and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty.

Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap---let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges;---let it be written in Primers, spelling books, and in Almanacs;---let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice.

And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.

The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Yours truly,