Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
As Tracy Kidder’s immersive journalism matures — his latest book recounts his travels through genocidal East Africa — he becomes more visible. He featured significantly in his debut book, The Road to Yuba City (1974), which chronicled the murders of migrant farm workers in California. But he so regretted putting himself in the story that in 1981 he bought the rights back to prevent future republication, and he declines to list Yuba City on his books’ “Also by this author” pages. He began to disappear from the narrative in The Soul of a New Machine (1981), which won the 1982 Pulitzer for general non-fiction. By House (1985), he had perfected the art of invisibility. A passage describes the view from the ground, then quotes a builder on the need for everyone who goes up a ladder to carry a box of shingles, and then — with no acknowledgment that Kidder himself climbed and carried — moves to a scene on the roof.
He stayed hidden through the rest of what became a four-book-deep study of his community in Western Massachusetts: Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993), and Home Town (1999). But he allowed himself back in Mountains Beyond Mountains, the 2003 volume that garnered lots of publicity for the book’s subject, Dr. Paul Farmer, and Farmer’s effort to bring health care to rural Haiti. After a reflective Vietnam War memoir, My Detachment, in 2005, Kidder releases Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness, the second in what might become a series of intensely personal global social-issues investigations.
Strength’s prologue shows Kidder and Deo, the book’s main subject, driving through Burundi, returning to Deo’s home village more than a decade after his escape to America from the Hutu-Tutsi massacres of 1993 and 1994. The first section covers Deo’s youth, the civil war’s interruption of his studies to become a doctor, his flight through the wilderness, and how he rebuilt his life starting as a poor refugee in New York City.
Kidder’s gift is in the way he merges eagle-eye on-the-spot reporting with probing after-the-fact interviews, making us not just observers but privy to people’s innermost thoughts. In his previous books, we were left to imagine the exhausting work of assembling all these details. But in Strength’s second section, he gives a master class in interviewing, offering his own thoughts, as well. His devotion to his work and his compassion for those he writes about is most poignant when he confesses that he feared he was asking Deo questions that would “traumatize him all over again. On several occasions, I offered to stop my search for his story and let his memories die, if they would. Once or twice, I hoped he would accept my offer. But he always declined.”
We accompany Kidder and Deo as they travel to Burundi, retrace Deo’s route to safety, and also launch a Burundi branch of the medical initiative Kidder described in Mountains. We research with Kidder the baseless “distinctions” between “Hutus” and “Tutsis” that were so central to the mass slaughter. We, too, feel terror when he and Deo explore the now-vacant hospital where the massacre began for Deo, and from which Deo fled into the wild. “Up until now I hadn’t fully understood . . . that even his most lurid dreams weren’t weirder or more frightening than what inspired them. He didn’t wake up from his nightmares thankful they weren’t real.”
Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness | By Tracy Kidder | Random House | 277 pages | $26
Showing posts with label BostonPhoenix. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BostonPhoenix. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Jailed HIV-positive pregnant woman released - for now
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
Quinta Layin Tuleh, the HIV-positive pregnant woman a federal judge in Bangor, Maine, ordered jailed until her baby was delivered, has been released on bail while her appeal of her sentence makes its way through the courts.
Quinta Layin Tuleh, the HIV-positive pregnant woman a federal judge in Bangor, Maine, ordered jailed until her baby was delivered, has been released on bail while her appeal of her sentence makes its way through the courts.
In May, Judge John Woodcock Jr. ruled that he would jail Tuleh — who pleaded guilty to possessing false immigration documents — for the rest of her pregnancy because he believed that, if she were in prison, she would be more likely to get medical treatment that would reduce the risk of her fetus contracting HIV. He told her that if she were either not pregnant or not HIV-positive, he would have sentenced her to the 114 days she had already spent in jail and let her go free.
The decision was so unusual that both Tuleh and federal prosecutors appealed the sentence for being too harsh. Fifteen state and national organizations (mainly advocates for women's issues, HIV-patients' rights, and reproductive rights) and medical experts filed a joint document supporting both the appeal and Tuleh's request for bail, saying medical care would be better outside of the prison system, and that keeping her locked up simply for being pregnant and HIV-positive was a dangerous precedent other courts have studiously avoided.
Last week, Woodcock agreed, though he is powerless to alter the sentence — the appeal process removes that option from his jurisdiction. Tuleh and the prosecution have asked the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to immediately overturn the sentence and return the case to Woodcock, with the expectation that, this time, he will sentence her to time served and release her immediately.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
White-supremacist code printed nationwide
Published in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Phoenix, and the Providence Phoenix
Imagine you are a white supremacist who is getting on in years. You've spent your life writing, extolling the virtues of Nazism, and denouncing Jews and African-Americans. You even wrote a book (published only online) that claimed the Jewish holy book, the Torah, demands the slaughter of Christians, and used that spurious beginning to justify the slaughter of Jews instead. You know full well that it was part of Hitler's justification for the Holocaust.
As 2009 dawns, you are nearing 90 years old, and you have watched your fellow World War II veterans struggle and suffer their ways through slow, degenerative deaths. You have no desire to endure that. You see yourself as a warrior, even perhaps a holy warrior. So you hatch a plan that will bring you a warrior's death, and simultaneously make you a white-supremacist martyr. And you realize that your age gives the plot an incredible twist only those in the know will discover: it is the key to getting all the world's media to print "Heil Hitler" in your obituary. But time is short — your birthday is in July.
The Southern Poverty Law Center last week confirmed that it is investigating a theory similar to my own, which is described above, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, on June 10. In that incident, James von Brunn, a long-time white supremacist and neo-Nazi, allegedly shot and killed an African-American guard before being shot by other security staffers.
And while von Brunn survived to face federal criminal charges and may yet die slowly in federal prison, he did manage to get newspapers around the globe to print a white-supremacist code praising Adolf Hitler right next to his name. "James von Brunn, 88," was a phrase in almost every news story — indeed, it was a common piece of harmless information that would have been more noticeable if reporters had left it out. It is his age.
But white supremacists and those who monitor hate groups know it is also a numeric code meaning "Heil Hitler." The letter "H" is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and hatemongers around the world have long used "88" to mean "HH," or "Heil Hitler," honoring the leading historical icon of hate and intolerance, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Von Brunn himself knew and used this code often. Even before this year, he signed many of his Web postings "James von Brunn 88" — differing only by a comma from how newspapers and online news sites described him after he put his tragic plan into action.
Imagine you are a white supremacist who is getting on in years. You've spent your life writing, extolling the virtues of Nazism, and denouncing Jews and African-Americans. You even wrote a book (published only online) that claimed the Jewish holy book, the Torah, demands the slaughter of Christians, and used that spurious beginning to justify the slaughter of Jews instead. You know full well that it was part of Hitler's justification for the Holocaust.
As 2009 dawns, you are nearing 90 years old, and you have watched your fellow World War II veterans struggle and suffer their ways through slow, degenerative deaths. You have no desire to endure that. You see yourself as a warrior, even perhaps a holy warrior. So you hatch a plan that will bring you a warrior's death, and simultaneously make you a white-supremacist martyr. And you realize that your age gives the plot an incredible twist only those in the know will discover: it is the key to getting all the world's media to print "Heil Hitler" in your obituary. But time is short — your birthday is in July.
The Southern Poverty Law Center last week confirmed that it is investigating a theory similar to my own, which is described above, in the aftermath of the fatal shooting at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, on June 10. In that incident, James von Brunn, a long-time white supremacist and neo-Nazi, allegedly shot and killed an African-American guard before being shot by other security staffers.
And while von Brunn survived to face federal criminal charges and may yet die slowly in federal prison, he did manage to get newspapers around the globe to print a white-supremacist code praising Adolf Hitler right next to his name. "James von Brunn, 88," was a phrase in almost every news story — indeed, it was a common piece of harmless information that would have been more noticeable if reporters had left it out. It is his age.
But white supremacists and those who monitor hate groups know it is also a numeric code meaning "Heil Hitler." The letter "H" is the eighth letter of the alphabet, and hatemongers around the world have long used "88" to mean "HH," or "Heil Hitler," honoring the leading historical icon of hate and intolerance, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Von Brunn himself knew and used this code often. Even before this year, he signed many of his Web postings "James von Brunn 88" — differing only by a comma from how newspapers and online news sites described him after he put his tragic plan into action.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Fetal obligations: Federal judge: more rights for the unborn
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
Following the tragic shooting in Kansas last month, pro-choice advocates have been dealt another disheartening setback: a federal judge in Bangor has recognized a new right of fetuses — to be protected from diseases carried by their mothers — that could become a key element in the nation’s ongoing abortion debate.
In May, Judge John Woodcock Jr., the chief federal judge in Maine, ordered an HIV-positive pregnant woman from Cameroon, who pleaded guilty to possessing false immigration documents, to remain in federal prison until after her expected delivery date in order to protect the child’s welfare. The judge said he worried that if Quinta Layin Tuleh was released or in the custody of immigration officials — who are seeking to deport her — she would not have access to medication that can prevent HIV transmission from a mother to her fetus.
“My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying,” ruled Woodcock, a Bowdoin College and UMaine Law graduate who was appointed to the federal bench in 2003 by President George W. Bush. “I don’t think the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.”
Woodcock went on to say that he has an “obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.” Having admitted that he would have released Tuleh on time served if not for her medical conditions, he remanded her to federal prison for 238 more days.
This sets out an argument that, legal experts say, if taken to its logical conclusion, could be used by a court to protect a fetus from its mother. (At the moment, fetal rights are generally limited to protection from strangers acting without the consent of the mother — as when someone who assaults or murders a pregnant woman can be charged with two offenses: one for the attack on the mother, and one for the attack on the fetus.) It also contradicts a key element of current abortion rights: namely, that a mother is allowed to do what she wishes with a fetus, including abort it.
Maine activist groups are reeling, with some worrying that it could mark a dangerous precedent for so-called negligent mothers. “When are you allowed to lock up a pregnant woman?” asks Zachary Heiden, the legal director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union. Can a pregnant woman convicted of a crime be sentenced to jail solely to ensure she takes prenatal vitamins, or stays away from junk food?
Women’s issues and reproductive-rights organizations, as well as those dealing with immigration questions, HIV status, and prisoner treatment, have also huddled to craft responses.
“It’s crazy that we live in a country where you have to be in prison to get health care,” says Ben Chin, the Maine People’s Alliance’s federal-issues organizer, who believes that if our immigration laws were reformed to allow people who are here to legalize their status, this issue would not even have come up. “She was here to work, she was contributing to the economy,” he says. Jailing her and sending her out of the country does neither her nor the country any good.
Peter Rice, legal director of the Augusta-based Disability Rights Center, notes that HIV-positive status is a disability under federal law, and says Tuleh “was imprisoned for her disability,” which is against the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (That law, however, does not specifically apply to federal judges handing down criminal sentences.)
Another curious wrinkle to this case: federal prosecutors objected to the sentence, and have appealed it to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which is expected to hear arguments by August. “I’ve never heard of a prosecutor appealing” when the judge’s sentence is longer than the government requested, says Heiden. Both his organization and the Disability Rights Center are considering supporting the appeal.
Paula Silsby, the US Attorney for Maine, declined to comment, saying it was an ongoing case. Judge Woodcock did not return calls seeking comment.
Following the tragic shooting in Kansas last month, pro-choice advocates have been dealt another disheartening setback: a federal judge in Bangor has recognized a new right of fetuses — to be protected from diseases carried by their mothers — that could become a key element in the nation’s ongoing abortion debate.
In May, Judge John Woodcock Jr., the chief federal judge in Maine, ordered an HIV-positive pregnant woman from Cameroon, who pleaded guilty to possessing false immigration documents, to remain in federal prison until after her expected delivery date in order to protect the child’s welfare. The judge said he worried that if Quinta Layin Tuleh was released or in the custody of immigration officials — who are seeking to deport her — she would not have access to medication that can prevent HIV transmission from a mother to her fetus.
“My obligation is to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant, and that public, it seems to me at this point, should likely include that child she’s carrying,” ruled Woodcock, a Bowdoin College and UMaine Law graduate who was appointed to the federal bench in 2003 by President George W. Bush. “I don’t think the transfer of HIV to an unborn child is a crime technically under the law, but it is as direct and as likely as an ongoing assault.”
Woodcock went on to say that he has an “obligation to do what I can to protect that person, when that person is born, from permanent and ongoing harm.” Having admitted that he would have released Tuleh on time served if not for her medical conditions, he remanded her to federal prison for 238 more days.
This sets out an argument that, legal experts say, if taken to its logical conclusion, could be used by a court to protect a fetus from its mother. (At the moment, fetal rights are generally limited to protection from strangers acting without the consent of the mother — as when someone who assaults or murders a pregnant woman can be charged with two offenses: one for the attack on the mother, and one for the attack on the fetus.) It also contradicts a key element of current abortion rights: namely, that a mother is allowed to do what she wishes with a fetus, including abort it.
Maine activist groups are reeling, with some worrying that it could mark a dangerous precedent for so-called negligent mothers. “When are you allowed to lock up a pregnant woman?” asks Zachary Heiden, the legal director of the Maine Civil Liberties Union. Can a pregnant woman convicted of a crime be sentenced to jail solely to ensure she takes prenatal vitamins, or stays away from junk food?
Women’s issues and reproductive-rights organizations, as well as those dealing with immigration questions, HIV status, and prisoner treatment, have also huddled to craft responses.
“It’s crazy that we live in a country where you have to be in prison to get health care,” says Ben Chin, the Maine People’s Alliance’s federal-issues organizer, who believes that if our immigration laws were reformed to allow people who are here to legalize their status, this issue would not even have come up. “She was here to work, she was contributing to the economy,” he says. Jailing her and sending her out of the country does neither her nor the country any good.
Peter Rice, legal director of the Augusta-based Disability Rights Center, notes that HIV-positive status is a disability under federal law, and says Tuleh “was imprisoned for her disability,” which is against the spirit of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (That law, however, does not specifically apply to federal judges handing down criminal sentences.)
Another curious wrinkle to this case: federal prosecutors objected to the sentence, and have appealed it to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, which is expected to hear arguments by August. “I’ve never heard of a prosecutor appealing” when the judge’s sentence is longer than the government requested, says Heiden. Both his organization and the Disability Rights Center are considering supporting the appeal.
Paula Silsby, the US Attorney for Maine, declined to comment, saying it was an ongoing case. Judge Woodcock did not return calls seeking comment.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Gulf War vet 'saved' by Phoenix article
Published at thePhoenix.com; a version was also published in the Portland, Boston, and Providence Phoenixes
Mike Fitzgerald spent 10 and a half years in the Marine Corps. He'll turn 43 tomorrow (March 13), and has been out of the corps since he was honorably discharged in 1997. A Gulf War veteran, he lived in Providence, Rhode Island, after he left the service, and worked as a housekeeper at a VA building there — not just as a job, but as a way of keeping himself "under their nose," he says, so they would know what he needed and be sure to help him.
Mike Fitzgerald spent 10 and a half years in the Marine Corps. He'll turn 43 tomorrow (March 13), and has been out of the corps since he was honorably discharged in 1997. A Gulf War veteran, he lived in Providence, Rhode Island, after he left the service, and worked as a housekeeper at a VA building there — not just as a job, but as a way of keeping himself "under their nose," he says, so they would know what he needed and be sure to help him.
In January 2008, he moved back to Maine, where he grew up, and began to fight against his country, for his life.
I found all this out earlier today. Yesterday, we published "Soldiers Committing Suicide," by Jason Notte, and just hours later, Mike left me a voicemail on my office phone, saying he's experiencing the same things that a man described in the story had. That man, Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, had struggled with federal Veterans Administration officials to get proper healthcare after his return from Iraq, and had killed himself in 2004.
In the morning, Mike and I spoke for about 15 minutes, in a conversation whose ramifications would take over most of my day, and would ultimately involve me crying quietly to myself in my office, and then writing this short piece.
Diagnosed with bipolar, he has been prescribed lithium and Effexor, but "they won't refill my medications until I take the last pill." And when he calls to order more, they mail it to him, which takes seven to 10 days. As a result, every few months he suffers withdrawal, and then has to go back on the meds.
He told me Thursday that he was in his ninth day of withdrawal, having run out of all of his meds a week and a half ago. "I'm angry," he says, not only for himself but also for fellow Marines like Lucey, who have ended up killing themselves. "These kids didn't get killed over there," he said. Lucey, Mike told me, got "to come home and have the VA kill him."
Mike also gets upset when he sees news coverage of celebrations for troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, because he knows what many of them will face. "In two months, they will be me," he says. "No wonder we're knocking ourselves off."
Mike thanked me over and over again for publishing the article; he told me he had written to local and national news organizations, including e-mailing Katie Couric at CBS News, trying to tell his story. He has contacted Senator Olympia Snowe's staff, and even brought a copy of the Phoenix article to her Biddeford office to show her staff.
After speaking with Mike, I got in touch with Jason, who had written the original story. Jason suggested I call Mike back and suggest a local counseling service for veterans, if I could find one that was not actually part of the VA, with which Mike was having such trouble.
Fortunately, our staff writer here in Portland, Deirdre Fulton, had done a story back in July 2007 about efforts in Maine to help returning veterans with mental-health problems. (See "Coming Home," July 11, 2007) When I asked her which she would suggest contacting first, she immediately told me that I should get in touch with the Community Counseling Center here in Portland. (207.874.1030).
I gave Mike their information, and he promised to call them. Jason Notte, who had written the article, also spoke to Mike for a while.
A little later on, Mike left me a short message saying that he has an appointment with a counselor scheduled for early next week. In the middle of the message, he choked up, and said that between the article and Jason's and my conversations with him, "You guys saved the life of a veteran."
Then I heard from a woman who works in an attorney's office in Bar Harbor. She said she had just talked to Mike, who is a client of the firm, and also thanked us for saving his life. She said her office has been keeping in close touch with him lately, because he was, she said, "close to the edge." She asked about the counseling service I had suggested to Mike, and I gave her that information and the link to Deirdre's story.
Jason and I will continue to check in with Mike, and we'll see how things go from here.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Judge dismisses RNC protest case
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
Portlander Paul McCarrier, an activist with the Black Bird Collective and the North East Anarchist Network, Bostonians Molly Adelstein and Kate Bonner-Jackson, Drew Wilson of Worcester, and three others were among roughly 20 people arrested September 1, 2008, at the intersection of 6th and Wall Streets in St. Paul, Minnesota during the Republican National Convention. Police alleged that they had participated in a roadblock four blocks away, and charged them with unlawful assembly, impeding traffic, disorderly conduct, and obstruction of a legal process.
Portlander Paul McCarrier, an activist with the Black Bird Collective and the North East Anarchist Network, Bostonians Molly Adelstein and Kate Bonner-Jackson, Drew Wilson of Worcester, and three others were among roughly 20 people arrested September 1, 2008, at the intersection of 6th and Wall Streets in St. Paul, Minnesota during the Republican National Convention. Police alleged that they had participated in a roadblock four blocks away, and charged them with unlawful assembly, impeding traffic, disorderly conduct, and obstruction of a legal process.
The defendants — who became known as the "Wall 7" — were in St. Paul during the RNC because, as Wilson puts it, "we think that our government should be held accountable for the crimes it has committed." They weren't released from jail until the last day of the convention.
Along with many of 800 others arrested (including journalists, a convention delegate, and a convention security guard), faced misdemeanor charges, 40 percent of which have since been dropped. More than 20 people — including the "RNC 8" activists who coordinated protests and protest support — face felony charges.
The Wall 7 were offered plea deals — the chance, says Bonner-Jackson, to "plead guilty to something you didn't do" — but, unlike many others, didn't take them. With legal advice and support from the National Lawyers Guild, Minnesota activists Community RNC Arrestee Support Structure (CRASS) the Seven, relative strangers, demanded a collective jury trial, which was scheduled for January 20, inauguration day.
But the case was doomed because the Wall 7 and other RNC protestors had demonstrated wearing masks, helmets, and padding for both protection and anonymity — the familiar "black bloc" protest tactic. As a result, witnesses couldn't identify who had done what in the streets of St. Paul, and the judge dismissed all the charges.
"Police had no basis for the vast majority of arrests made during the RNC," said defense attorney Jordan Kushner said in a press release after the trial ended. "The judge in this case decided there wasn't even enough evidence to require the defendants to put on any evidence and allow the case to go to a jury."
Bonner-Jackson (who works with Boston's Food Not Bombs group) is "kind of disappointed" their day in court didn't include the chance to explain what they were doing, but she's "not arguing" with the ruling.
"We did nothing wrong. We went there for good reasons. We did something right," says Worcester community activist Wilson.
The Wall 7's victory is significant in that it opens the courtroom doors for other protestors who've declined plea bargains. CRASS, meanwhile, is now organizing arrestees to sue authorities for wrongful arrest and use of excessive force.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Fretrosexuals: Reconnecting can be fraught with peril
Published in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Phoenix, and the Providence Phoenix
Some people really enjoy the potential of reconnecting with folks from the past, and I'm usually one of them. Through the wonder of the Internet, old friends and I have found each other. When I see such a request in my inbox on Facebook, I almost always immediately click "Confirm." Of course, those reunions haven't been sexual — just friendly. But the prospect of a reconnection with one person has left me conflicted.
Some people really enjoy the potential of reconnecting with folks from the past, and I'm usually one of them. Through the wonder of the Internet, old friends and I have found each other. When I see such a request in my inbox on Facebook, I almost always immediately click "Confirm." Of course, those reunions haven't been sexual — just friendly. But the prospect of a reconnection with one person has left me conflicted.
More than a decade ago, my relationship with "Anne" ended. Ours was the longest either of us had been in to date, and we had seriously contemplated our future together (marriage, kids, house, all that stuff). Ultimately, though, it finished badly.
While from time to time I have wondered about what ever happened to her, I've never tried to get in touch with her, and she has never contacted me. We have a few friends in common, from whom I have heard ultra-brief updates every few years — "Saw Anne the other weekend" or whatever — and maybe she's gotten the same about me. But that was the extent of our "contact," if you can even call it that.
Then last fall, thanks in part to those friends in common, Anne popped up in my "People You May Know" box on Facebook. Of course, I looked at her profile: she's married, living near Boston, and her photo shows her with a big grin amid a group of friends. All that's great: time has healed many of my wounds (though, I find, not all). I don't wish her ill. I might even have a drink with her if we run into each other somewhere, to catch up. But I'm not proud of how I behaved all those years ago, and I don't want to revisit those times.
Beyond that, I don't suffer from the illusion that we have much in common any longer. (Apart from our memories of what happened between us, which are probably more similar than either of us might ever admit.)
Too much time has passed, and what I did in the years since would have happened very differently, if at all, had we stayed together. While I've now settled down and gotten married, the person I am today owes more to the fact that things ended with Anne and I got on with my life than to the fact that we ever were together.
So if we did run into each other again, and caught up over lunch or a drink, I wouldn't expect us to stay in touch, much less to become friends. And I (and our respective spouses) sure would be nothing less than astonished if we wound up in bed together.
Given all that, Facebook is more of a get-in-touch-and-stay-in-touch kind of site. Privacy settings aside, anyone who is a "friend" can see my status and other information as I update it. Distant though it is, I'm not sure if that's a level of connection I want with Anne.
So I decided not to initiate contact. After about a week went by, I assumed she had seen me in her "PYMK" box and made the same decision. Not so. Another week later, I got a friend request from her: a short, friendly note ending with "It's been a looooong time . . . "
Waiting game
That was at the end of September. It has now also been "a looooong time" since her friend request, and I still haven't clicked "Confirm" — or "Ignore."
But this dallying has only made matters worse. Every time someone sends me a friend request, I have to face Anne, lined up first in the "Friend Request" queue. And all the well-meaning friends I already have on Facebook deluge me with kajillions of pokes, thrown sheep, drinks, and other application requests — never knowing that every time they do, I have to face Anne then, too.
(Almost) every time I see Anne's request, the debate begins again. If I click "Confirm," then she'll be able to see photos, videos, notes from other friends, all kinds of stuff that I'm not sure I want to share with someone who's not, technically, a "friend."
On the other hand, if I ignore her request, then I'm putting up the Berlin Wall, severing completely a chunk of my past that, while hanging on only by the barest tendril, was still somehow a connection.
Then again, by virtue of the fact that I've taken this long to make any decision at all, Anne probably thinks I've long since clicked "Ignore," and has written me off. The terrible irony is that, as a result of Facebook, I've thought about her more — and more often — in these past few months than I had in the last decade.
One last wrinkle: if you're wondering whether my wife knows about all of this, the answer is yes. She actually brought up the bizarre topic of what do to about old loves in new media because she was wondering if an ex-boyfriend was ever going to show up online. To date, she hasn't had the pleasure.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Take Back Barack: It's time to reclaim the man we put in the White House
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix; reprinted in the Pittsburgh City Paper; co-written with Deirdre Fulton
Let's be honest: we didn't vote for the Barack Obama his campaign advertised. We didn't vote for an African-American man, nor for a US senator from Illinois, nor for a father, a husband, an activist, or a young politician.
We voted for the Barack Obama we fantasized — the progressive miracle worker. We voted for Change.
Millions of us stood up and shouted, handed out fliers, talked to our neighbors, donated hard-earned money, and drove people to the polls for Change. We screamed, hugged, kissed, and cried when we learned Change had come to America. We knew Change wouldn't come overnight, that it would take time, but we were excited that we had elected a man who was open to Change, who said he wanted to consider real people's needs while in the Oval Office. We eagerly awaited the first hints of Change, as the president-elect's transition developed.
And now, we have reason to worry that Change is not coming to America after all. For nearly two years we were encouraged to "Be the Change you want to see in America." It is now obvious that we have a ways to go toward Being that Change. And so does President-elect Barack Obama. And that, above all else, needs to Change.
It was not the Democratic base, nor the centrists, nor even the center-left, who put Obama where he is today. The progressive movement rose from near death and kept Obama alive in the primary, eventually proving stubborn enough to carry him to victory over the Establishment candidate. And then, in the general election, it was the progressives whose energy infected the nation, whose enthusiasm reminded longtime vote-the-ticket Dems that elections were about the future, and whose contributions, tiny as each individual one was, funded the revolution of Change that swept Obama into the Oval Office.
Now is the time to hold him accountable — even before he takes the oath of office — because once he's in there, he will be surrounded by the trappings of Power, the machinery of State, and the inertia of Bureaucracy. If we are to reach him, we must act quickly. Though he has shown us that he is not who we thought he was (for the record, we did know he wasn't the Messiah), he has also, fortunately, shown us the way to keeping him — and our country — on the right track.
What's gone wrongObama's fall from progressive grace goes beyond the campaign-season disappointment of his support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless-wiretapping law strongly opposed by liberal activists and civil libertarians.
Progressives have a variety of objections, largely relating to flip-flops (warrantless wiretapping), climbdowns (withdrawal from Iraq and taxing the ultra-rich), and betrayals (keeping Bushies like Robert Gates and Michael Hayden anywhere near the halls of power). Many also object to a return of Clintonites, who while certainly Democrats, were hardly progressives in many areas.
While a CNN poll shows that 80 percent of Americans approve of Obama's transition so far, some progressives are unconvinced. They objected loudly enough to warrant a Huffington Post talking-to from legendary Democratic strategist (and Obama advisor) Steve Hildebrand.
"This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren't progressive enough," he wrote. But Hildebrand accused naysayers of being impotent and shortsighted. "After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people — not just those on the left."
But that plea for patience and tolerance wears ever thinner as we watch the transition unfold. Perhaps Obama's most egregious mistake in the eyes of progressives is the president-elect's decision to surround himself with decidedly unprogressive national-security and foreign-policy advisors. In part, that list reads like a Clinton-era roster — which is troubling because, as United Nations correspondent Barbara Crossette wrote in The Nation last April, "The Clinton record . . . is anything but stellar in global or even US security terms. . . . In many ways the 1990s were a wasted decade in international relations."
Most notably, there's Hillary Clinton herself, our soon-to-be secretary of state, who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, who has been called "a hawk among hawks," who pointed approvingly at humanitarian interventionist actions like the one her husband initiated in Kosovo in 1999. Obama's team of advisors includes several other returnees from the Clinton administration, such as Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice (recently named US ambassador to the UN), Richard Holbrooke, Anthony Lake, and Madeleine Albright, all of whom have been neoliberal hawks to one degree or other.
While a return to Clinton-era foreign relations is a certainly a change from destructive Bush-era policies, it is not Change writ large. Not to mention the fact that another segment of Obama's national-security squad is rounded out by center-righties with firm Bush-era roots, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who will stay on as a holdover from the Bush administration, and national-security advisor-designate Jim Jones, a former advisor to John McCain.
What will these choices mean when it comes time to make big decisions about closing Guantanamo Bay prison, or about withdrawing from Iraq, or about increasing troops in Afghanistan?
"Obama's argument — that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so — is denied by recent history," writes Ted Rall in Maui Times Weekly. "The US government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them."
On the economy, as well, Obama has made some critical missteps. It's not just that Lawrence Summers, Obama's pick for head of the incoming White House National Economic Council, is a Clinton-era economist who oversaw the same policies that got us into the financial mess we're in today (or that his record on gender equality is iffy-at-best). Two of Obama's largest policy backpedals have been economic.
First, he adopted a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year — rather than taking the bold step of repealing those, he now says he'll just let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. Then, citing the sharp decrease in oil prices from this summer's record levels, he shelved his plan to tax oil-company windfall profits. Liberal blogger and columnist David Sirota had this to say: "[I]f oil prices are down and oil industry profits are truly down, what's the harm in passing a windfall profits tax? Even if you buy the right-wing nonsense about a windfall profits tax 'hurting the industry' or 'hurting the economy' when it is applied, if there really are no windfall profits to tax, then it won't be applied."
What's going right-ishIt is true that Obama is doing some stuff we thought he would do, although not always in as gung-ho a way as we might like.
Consider "Your Seat At the Table," a special section of the Obama transition team's Web site, change.gov. There, average-Joe Internet browsers can read policy recommendations from high-powered lobbying organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, various environmental groups, the National Education Association, and HIV/AIDS activists. This is obviously in keeping with the team's promise of transparency.
Other bright spots are Obama's weekly YouTube addresses, and the announcement of an Office of Urban Policy, which could have big implications for the economy, the environment, and urban education. He's focused his economic efforts on preventing foreclosures. And while some of his advisor picks are ideologically questionable, there are enough women on the list that some pundits have suggested, as AJ Rossmiller did in The New Republic, that Obama is "ushering in a feminist revolution in foreign policy and national security."
Aside from the fact that, as Christopher Hayes wrote in The Nation, "not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration," some of Obama's choices have been downright heartening. The selection of Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, for example, signals a sharp departure from the days of head-in-the-sand climate change non-leadership from the federal government. Chu, an experienced outsider — seemingly unbeholden to any interest, other than science — is an ideal pick, the type we hoped we'd see more of from the Obama-Biden administration.
And former senate majority leader Tom Daschle, though he is on the surface a classic boys-club Dem, has impressive healthcare credentials to back up his appointments as secretary of health and human services and director of the new White House Office of Health Care Reform. His book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis (Thomas Dunne Books) will come out next year, and will outline Daschle's major reform ideas, including the creation of a Federal Health Board that would make coverage decisions for federally-administered insurance programs. At the change.gov Web site, he's soliciting citizen input on how to fix our healthcare system (though there's one thing we can be sure of: it won't be single-payer). The fact that Daschle pushed to run both the federal agency and the executive-branch office suggests that there will be an aggressive attempt to address this issue early in the Obama administration — and that Daschle is eager to use his wheeling-and-dealing skills (honed in Congress) to make it happen.
But the most important achievement so far is that Obama has managed (mostly) to keep our nation's optimism afloat — despite Blagojevich, despite the auto-industry-bailout mess, despite the public's generally pessimistic outlook, Obama is still enjoying higher ratings and a longer honeymoon period than any recent predecessor. He's courting doubters while making sure that his base gives him the benefit of the doubt. That's Change.
Not there yetThe question becomes whether Obama will be a servant to his advisors, or whether he will learn from their experience, absorb their suggestions, and yet ultimately go his own, progressive, way.
As he rounds out his cabinet appointments, we'll assess his progress. (See how Obama's selections measure up, as they're made, at thePhoenix.com/TakeBackBarack.) With education, Obama was under pressure from conflicting pro-union and reform interests. One of his top transition-team education advisors was Linda Darling-Hammond, who had the support of teachers' unions, and is somewhat notorious for her stances against Teach for America and No Child Left Behind; but on Tuesday he chose Chicago public-school superintendent Arne Duncan — who is more reform-minded (generally favoring concepts such as merit-based teacher pay, charter schools, and high-stakes testing), but has questionable classroom bona-fides.
There's also the whole question of America's relationship with food, eating, and farming — and who Obama picks as his agriculture secretary will set the tone on these issues. While he's said he doesn't want the job, here's what sustainable-food guru Michael Pollan told PBS host Bill Moyers about the decision: "What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area — and that isn't clear yet that he does, at least in his first term — I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education."
Just last week, in a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof suggested Obama "name a reformer to a renamed position" — Secretary of Food and Agriculture, or just of Food, perhaps?
On so many other questions — How will Obama deal with terror-suspect detainees? Who will he appoint to federal courts? How will his administration address the possibly illegal maneuverings of its predecessors? — we will simply have to wait and see. Perhaps, in this case, patience is practical.
"Sure, there's a chance that Mr. Obama, derided this past year by the right as an empty slate who tried to mean all things to all people, has simply been leading the left on and is now morphing into a rudderless pragmatist who will break their hearts," Steve Kornacki writes in the New York Observer. "But pragmatism doesn't have to be rudderless. It's just as easy to portray Mr. Obama's early moves as a sign that he will be pragmatic about pursuing progressive goals."
But there's a fine line between pragmatism and losing sight of one's principles. If Obama turns out to be "more of the same," or more like "more of the same" than he is like Change, the progressives will go back in the closet they came out of to support Obama. A generation of young people might get their hopes dashed and become cynical opters-out of the political system, like the preceding generation.
Fortunately, Obama's campaign of Change has shown us the way to take back Barack. We need to mobilize, to communicate, to connect, even to fundraise — and we need to be sure we get his attention, the way we got the world's attention when we voted for Change.
STEP 1: DECIDE WHAT CHANGE YOU WILL MAKE.
Determine what difference you will begin making, what effort you will start making — beyond any community involvement you're already involved in — and get started. Make the phone calls, send the e-mails, start the conversations, around whatever it is you're going to take on: healthcare, education, hunger, poverty, or any number of other problems facing us.
STEP 2: TELL OBAMA HIMSELF. At the Obama transition team's Web site, there's a page to share "your vision," saying "where President-Elect Obama should lead this country." (It's at http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision.) Make sure Obama knows that your vision is for Change, and what you are doing. But don't stop there. Write letters asking for support, demanding Change, and send them to the Presidential Transition Team, Washington DC 20270 (no street address is needed; and the transition team helpfully informs that only letters in No. 10 envelopes — that's business-size — can be accepted; nothing smaller, no greeting-card envelopes, and no packages).
STEP 3: TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW. Post Change-seeking comments on blogs, forums, social networks, and even meatspace bulletin boards. Talk about what you are doing for Change — and how others can help — at bars, business functions, book-group meetings, and every other social event you attend. (Remember how much you did this before November 4? Just do the same thing again!)
STEP 4: JOIN THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT. Print out "Take Back Barack" logos, make them into bumper stickers, put icons on your Web site and social-networking pages, make signs and put them in your windows or on your front lawn. Host parties and neighborhood get-togethers to talk about your projects. If there are enough of you — and we're sure there are — get a group together to organize a March for Change in your community. Go to Obama supporters' "Change Is Coming" meetings in your community, or start one by visiting barackobama.com.
STEP 5: GET THE MEDIA'S ATTENTION. Call up your local alternative-weekly paper (and the local daily, if it still exists), and the local TV stations, and tell them what you're doing. Invite them to your events, and encourage them to cover the issues that are important to you.
STEP 6: USE TECHNOLOGY TO DO ALL OF THE ABOVE BETTER, FASTER, AND MORE EFFECTIVELY. Create a system by which people can text and e-mail in their hopes, dreams, plans, and actions from their phones and computers, and have that information forward automagically to Obama and his team. At the same time, post that information publicly elsewhere on the Internet, so we can all track the nationwide effort for Change and the increasing pressure on Obama — and gauge the response.
STEP 7: KEEP AT IT. As much as positive energy can come from all this, there's an important negative lesson: we can never let up. Change does not happen and just stay that way. We need to work for Change each and every day of our lives, and enlist more people in the cause at every turn.
Let's be honest: we didn't vote for the Barack Obama his campaign advertised. We didn't vote for an African-American man, nor for a US senator from Illinois, nor for a father, a husband, an activist, or a young politician.
We voted for the Barack Obama we fantasized — the progressive miracle worker. We voted for Change.
Millions of us stood up and shouted, handed out fliers, talked to our neighbors, donated hard-earned money, and drove people to the polls for Change. We screamed, hugged, kissed, and cried when we learned Change had come to America. We knew Change wouldn't come overnight, that it would take time, but we were excited that we had elected a man who was open to Change, who said he wanted to consider real people's needs while in the Oval Office. We eagerly awaited the first hints of Change, as the president-elect's transition developed.
And now, we have reason to worry that Change is not coming to America after all. For nearly two years we were encouraged to "Be the Change you want to see in America." It is now obvious that we have a ways to go toward Being that Change. And so does President-elect Barack Obama. And that, above all else, needs to Change.
It was not the Democratic base, nor the centrists, nor even the center-left, who put Obama where he is today. The progressive movement rose from near death and kept Obama alive in the primary, eventually proving stubborn enough to carry him to victory over the Establishment candidate. And then, in the general election, it was the progressives whose energy infected the nation, whose enthusiasm reminded longtime vote-the-ticket Dems that elections were about the future, and whose contributions, tiny as each individual one was, funded the revolution of Change that swept Obama into the Oval Office.
Now is the time to hold him accountable — even before he takes the oath of office — because once he's in there, he will be surrounded by the trappings of Power, the machinery of State, and the inertia of Bureaucracy. If we are to reach him, we must act quickly. Though he has shown us that he is not who we thought he was (for the record, we did know he wasn't the Messiah), he has also, fortunately, shown us the way to keeping him — and our country — on the right track.
What's gone wrongObama's fall from progressive grace goes beyond the campaign-season disappointment of his support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the warrantless-wiretapping law strongly opposed by liberal activists and civil libertarians.
Progressives have a variety of objections, largely relating to flip-flops (warrantless wiretapping), climbdowns (withdrawal from Iraq and taxing the ultra-rich), and betrayals (keeping Bushies like Robert Gates and Michael Hayden anywhere near the halls of power). Many also object to a return of Clintonites, who while certainly Democrats, were hardly progressives in many areas.
While a CNN poll shows that 80 percent of Americans approve of Obama's transition so far, some progressives are unconvinced. They objected loudly enough to warrant a Huffington Post talking-to from legendary Democratic strategist (and Obama advisor) Steve Hildebrand.
"This is not a time for the left wing of our Party to draw conclusions about the Cabinet and White House appointments that President-Elect Obama is making. Some believe the appointments generally aren't progressive enough," he wrote. But Hildebrand accused naysayers of being impotent and shortsighted. "After all, he was elected to be the president of all the people — not just those on the left."
But that plea for patience and tolerance wears ever thinner as we watch the transition unfold. Perhaps Obama's most egregious mistake in the eyes of progressives is the president-elect's decision to surround himself with decidedly unprogressive national-security and foreign-policy advisors. In part, that list reads like a Clinton-era roster — which is troubling because, as United Nations correspondent Barbara Crossette wrote in The Nation last April, "The Clinton record . . . is anything but stellar in global or even US security terms. . . . In many ways the 1990s were a wasted decade in international relations."
Most notably, there's Hillary Clinton herself, our soon-to-be secretary of state, who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, who has been called "a hawk among hawks," who pointed approvingly at humanitarian interventionist actions like the one her husband initiated in Kosovo in 1999. Obama's team of advisors includes several other returnees from the Clinton administration, such as Michele Flournoy, Susan Rice (recently named US ambassador to the UN), Richard Holbrooke, Anthony Lake, and Madeleine Albright, all of whom have been neoliberal hawks to one degree or other.
While a return to Clinton-era foreign relations is a certainly a change from destructive Bush-era policies, it is not Change writ large. Not to mention the fact that another segment of Obama's national-security squad is rounded out by center-righties with firm Bush-era roots, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who will stay on as a holdover from the Bush administration, and national-security advisor-designate Jim Jones, a former advisor to John McCain.
What will these choices mean when it comes time to make big decisions about closing Guantanamo Bay prison, or about withdrawing from Iraq, or about increasing troops in Afghanistan?
"Obama's argument — that his center-conservative cabinet will carry out radical change if he orders them to do so — is denied by recent history," writes Ted Rall in Maui Times Weekly. "The US government, as micromanager Jimmy Carter learned, is too big for the president to manage on his own. And, as George W. Bush learned after 2000, the people you hire are more likely to change you than you are to change them."
On the economy, as well, Obama has made some critical missteps. It's not just that Lawrence Summers, Obama's pick for head of the incoming White House National Economic Council, is a Clinton-era economist who oversaw the same policies that got us into the financial mess we're in today (or that his record on gender equality is iffy-at-best). Two of Obama's largest policy backpedals have been economic.
First, he adopted a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year — rather than taking the bold step of repealing those, he now says he'll just let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010. Then, citing the sharp decrease in oil prices from this summer's record levels, he shelved his plan to tax oil-company windfall profits. Liberal blogger and columnist David Sirota had this to say: "[I]f oil prices are down and oil industry profits are truly down, what's the harm in passing a windfall profits tax? Even if you buy the right-wing nonsense about a windfall profits tax 'hurting the industry' or 'hurting the economy' when it is applied, if there really are no windfall profits to tax, then it won't be applied."
What's going right-ishIt is true that Obama is doing some stuff we thought he would do, although not always in as gung-ho a way as we might like.
Consider "Your Seat At the Table," a special section of the Obama transition team's Web site, change.gov. There, average-Joe Internet browsers can read policy recommendations from high-powered lobbying organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, various environmental groups, the National Education Association, and HIV/AIDS activists. This is obviously in keeping with the team's promise of transparency.
Other bright spots are Obama's weekly YouTube addresses, and the announcement of an Office of Urban Policy, which could have big implications for the economy, the environment, and urban education. He's focused his economic efforts on preventing foreclosures. And while some of his advisor picks are ideologically questionable, there are enough women on the list that some pundits have suggested, as AJ Rossmiller did in The New Republic, that Obama is "ushering in a feminist revolution in foreign policy and national security."
Aside from the fact that, as Christopher Hayes wrote in The Nation, "not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration," some of Obama's choices have been downright heartening. The selection of Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu to head the Department of Energy, for example, signals a sharp departure from the days of head-in-the-sand climate change non-leadership from the federal government. Chu, an experienced outsider — seemingly unbeholden to any interest, other than science — is an ideal pick, the type we hoped we'd see more of from the Obama-Biden administration.
And former senate majority leader Tom Daschle, though he is on the surface a classic boys-club Dem, has impressive healthcare credentials to back up his appointments as secretary of health and human services and director of the new White House Office of Health Care Reform. His book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis (Thomas Dunne Books) will come out next year, and will outline Daschle's major reform ideas, including the creation of a Federal Health Board that would make coverage decisions for federally-administered insurance programs. At the change.gov Web site, he's soliciting citizen input on how to fix our healthcare system (though there's one thing we can be sure of: it won't be single-payer). The fact that Daschle pushed to run both the federal agency and the executive-branch office suggests that there will be an aggressive attempt to address this issue early in the Obama administration — and that Daschle is eager to use his wheeling-and-dealing skills (honed in Congress) to make it happen.
But the most important achievement so far is that Obama has managed (mostly) to keep our nation's optimism afloat — despite Blagojevich, despite the auto-industry-bailout mess, despite the public's generally pessimistic outlook, Obama is still enjoying higher ratings and a longer honeymoon period than any recent predecessor. He's courting doubters while making sure that his base gives him the benefit of the doubt. That's Change.
Not there yetThe question becomes whether Obama will be a servant to his advisors, or whether he will learn from their experience, absorb their suggestions, and yet ultimately go his own, progressive, way.
As he rounds out his cabinet appointments, we'll assess his progress. (See how Obama's selections measure up, as they're made, at thePhoenix.com/TakeBackBarack.) With education, Obama was under pressure from conflicting pro-union and reform interests. One of his top transition-team education advisors was Linda Darling-Hammond, who had the support of teachers' unions, and is somewhat notorious for her stances against Teach for America and No Child Left Behind; but on Tuesday he chose Chicago public-school superintendent Arne Duncan — who is more reform-minded (generally favoring concepts such as merit-based teacher pay, charter schools, and high-stakes testing), but has questionable classroom bona-fides.
There's also the whole question of America's relationship with food, eating, and farming — and who Obama picks as his agriculture secretary will set the tone on these issues. While he's said he doesn't want the job, here's what sustainable-food guru Michael Pollan told PBS host Bill Moyers about the decision: "What Obama needs to do, if he indeed wants to make change in this area — and that isn't clear yet that he does, at least in his first term — I think we need a food policy czar in the White House because the challenge is not just what we do with agriculture, it's connecting the dots between agriculture and public health, between agriculture and energy and climate change, agriculture and education."
Just last week, in a New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof suggested Obama "name a reformer to a renamed position" — Secretary of Food and Agriculture, or just of Food, perhaps?
On so many other questions — How will Obama deal with terror-suspect detainees? Who will he appoint to federal courts? How will his administration address the possibly illegal maneuverings of its predecessors? — we will simply have to wait and see. Perhaps, in this case, patience is practical.
"Sure, there's a chance that Mr. Obama, derided this past year by the right as an empty slate who tried to mean all things to all people, has simply been leading the left on and is now morphing into a rudderless pragmatist who will break their hearts," Steve Kornacki writes in the New York Observer. "But pragmatism doesn't have to be rudderless. It's just as easy to portray Mr. Obama's early moves as a sign that he will be pragmatic about pursuing progressive goals."
But there's a fine line between pragmatism and losing sight of one's principles. If Obama turns out to be "more of the same," or more like "more of the same" than he is like Change, the progressives will go back in the closet they came out of to support Obama. A generation of young people might get their hopes dashed and become cynical opters-out of the political system, like the preceding generation.
The way forward
How can we take back Barack?Fortunately, Obama's campaign of Change has shown us the way to take back Barack. We need to mobilize, to communicate, to connect, even to fundraise — and we need to be sure we get his attention, the way we got the world's attention when we voted for Change.
STEP 1: DECIDE WHAT CHANGE YOU WILL MAKE.
Determine what difference you will begin making, what effort you will start making — beyond any community involvement you're already involved in — and get started. Make the phone calls, send the e-mails, start the conversations, around whatever it is you're going to take on: healthcare, education, hunger, poverty, or any number of other problems facing us.
STEP 2: TELL OBAMA HIMSELF. At the Obama transition team's Web site, there's a page to share "your vision," saying "where President-Elect Obama should lead this country." (It's at http://change.gov/page/s/yourvision.) Make sure Obama knows that your vision is for Change, and what you are doing. But don't stop there. Write letters asking for support, demanding Change, and send them to the Presidential Transition Team, Washington DC 20270 (no street address is needed; and the transition team helpfully informs that only letters in No. 10 envelopes — that's business-size — can be accepted; nothing smaller, no greeting-card envelopes, and no packages).
STEP 3: TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW. Post Change-seeking comments on blogs, forums, social networks, and even meatspace bulletin boards. Talk about what you are doing for Change — and how others can help — at bars, business functions, book-group meetings, and every other social event you attend. (Remember how much you did this before November 4? Just do the same thing again!)
STEP 4: JOIN THE COLLECTIVE EFFORT. Print out "Take Back Barack" logos, make them into bumper stickers, put icons on your Web site and social-networking pages, make signs and put them in your windows or on your front lawn. Host parties and neighborhood get-togethers to talk about your projects. If there are enough of you — and we're sure there are — get a group together to organize a March for Change in your community. Go to Obama supporters' "Change Is Coming" meetings in your community, or start one by visiting barackobama.com.
STEP 5: GET THE MEDIA'S ATTENTION. Call up your local alternative-weekly paper (and the local daily, if it still exists), and the local TV stations, and tell them what you're doing. Invite them to your events, and encourage them to cover the issues that are important to you.
STEP 6: USE TECHNOLOGY TO DO ALL OF THE ABOVE BETTER, FASTER, AND MORE EFFECTIVELY. Create a system by which people can text and e-mail in their hopes, dreams, plans, and actions from their phones and computers, and have that information forward automagically to Obama and his team. At the same time, post that information publicly elsewhere on the Internet, so we can all track the nationwide effort for Change and the increasing pressure on Obama — and gauge the response.
STEP 7: KEEP AT IT. As much as positive energy can come from all this, there's an important negative lesson: we can never let up. Change does not happen and just stay that way. We need to work for Change each and every day of our lives, and enlist more people in the cause at every turn.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
A night in Guantánamo: Staying in a replica cell, with no waterboarding included
Published in the Portland Phoenix (with an excerpt in the Boston Phoenix); reprinted in the Orlando Weekly
First thing in the morning, a man stopped at my door, leaned in, looked me square in the eye, called me “a piece of shit,” and spat on my floor. I tried not to take it personally.
I was in a prison cell and wearing a day-glo-orange inmate’s jumpsuit, sitting on a thin mat, where I had sat and slept intermittently — and uncomfortably — through the preceding seven hours.
Amnesty International brought the cell to Portland’s Monument Square and arranged several days of events about the offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last week to draw attention to the 270 or so inmates still held there, and to highlight the support of some of Maine’s congressional delegation for suspending the legal rights of inmates there, most of whom have never been charged with any crime.
I’d volunteered to spend the night in the replica cell (which is modeled on the ones at Gitmo, which are very like the standard isolation units used in US “supermax” prisons) because we’ve all heard stories about unlivable conditions at Gitmo but can’t come close to imagining what it must be like to live for as long as seven years in a small box with little contact with the outside world, and even less hope of release. I hoped my few hours of simulated incarceration — even without the alleged abuse visited on Gitmo “detainees” by US service personnel — would help me appreciate the nightmare those prisoners endure.
When I first entered the cell, I sized things up. I could take three normal-size steps from side to side, four from the door to the bed; a “lap” around it involved 12 reasonably normal-sized steps. With my arms outstretched to the sides, I could touch the walls; reaching up, I could touch the ceiling with my stocking feet flat on the floor. Lying on the raised platform that served as my bed, my head touched one wall and my feet pressed against the other. The walls and ceiling were white; the toilet/sink fixture by the door was stainless steel; the floor was gray. There was one small window — easily covered by my forearm — by the bed and another in the door.
I was already in the jumpsuit, so I sat on the thin sleeping mat, got out my iPod, put in the earbuds, selected the “Gitmo” playlist, and turned the volume up. (The guards play a wide selection of American music — though mostly dark heavy stuff like Drowning Pool and Marilyn Manson — at high volume, at all hours, as a form of psychological torture for the prisoners.)
I read from the Koran, opening it at random and finding the 36th sûrah (chapter), entitled “Yâ Sîn,” or “O Man.” According to the annotation in my copy, that chapter is often recited by Muslims at times of adversity, to sustain their faith. At one point in the text, a group of believers approaches a city of non-believers to try to convert them: “(The people of the city) said: we augur ill of you. If ye desist not, we shall surely stone you, and grievous torture will befall you at our hands.” But, Allah explains through the prophet Mohammed, whatever suffering his followers must endure will be relieved if they stick to their faith, while those who did the torturing will be condemned to burn in hell. After a few readings, I found my hope rising and my discomfort decreasing, even though I am not a Muslim.
I also read — for the first of three times that night — a book of poems written by Guantánamo inmates, seeking a sense of what they feel and think. Despite great discomfort, hardship, and fear, some inmates are able to transcend themselves and their situation and find hope, and dreams, and a sort of freedom.
It’s really far worse
My night was only a tiny taste of what the detainees held at Guantánamo experience. The most obvious difference, of course, was that I spent just over seven hours in a replica of a cell sitting in downtown Portland. Many of the inmates have spent more like seven years in real cells in a remote base in Cuba. By comparison, my imprisonment was soft time.
A Portland police officer sat in his patrol car outside, mostly to protect the cell itself and its accompanying gear (a generator, electronic equipment, parts of a disassembled information booth), but I took comfort in his presence, knowing that if any harm befell me, aid would be nearby. The Gitmo detainees have their own uniformed, armed guards, but they are as likely to be their tormentors as their rescuers.
It was mostly dark in my cell, though a few streetlights shined in. Some detainees’ lawyers claim their clients are suffering permanent psychological damage because the lights in their cells have been kept on 24 hours a day for years.
I was warm and not hungry, equipped with a sleeping bag and fortified with a good meal at home before going into the cell; the inmates get blankets if they’re lucky and regularly complain about both the quantity and the quality of food served at Gitmo.
I could control the volume on my iPod (and I confess to skipping a couple songs); the detainees can neither control the volume nor prevent a guard from playing one song over and over for hours on end, as happened on at least one occasion with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” from their 1991 eponymous album.
But the biggest difference, the one that really made it possible for me (a somewhat sane person who functions fairly well in this weird world) to handle my time inside, was this: I knew when I would eventually leave. The men held in Guantánamo don’t. Even those who have been declared not dangerous, not worth holding, whose arrests and incarceration are acknowledged mistakes, are held for months before being finally released. One man, Maher Rafat al-Quwari, has been cleared for release since February 2007, but as a Palestinian with no passport or other national paperwork, he has nowhere to go, so he stays in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.
Without a futureI thought about what it would take to close the prison. Calls for just that have come from such high Bush administration officials as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and even the president himself, as well as both major-party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. And yet it remains open, stalled at best by the practical difficulties of moving terrorism suspects into other prisons, or, at worst, held up by people who may not mean what they say.
Maine’s DC delegation is split on the issue: Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic representative Mike Michaud voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. [Please see clarification, below.] It recreated a kangaroo-court show-trial system for “trying” detainees in front of military judges (after a nearly identical arrangement created by the Pentagon was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2006), and granted the US government the power to indefinitely imprison anyone — even US citizens — without charging them with a crime, and without ever bringing them before an independent civilian judge. Democratic representative Tom Allen opposed it; Republican senator Olympia Snowe didn’t vote, but later voted to overturn some of its harsher provisions.
And then there was that passerby who spit into my cell. I wondered if his attitude, amplified by the isolation of being stationed at a remote military base, and inflated by being allowed to carry large automatic weapons, might turn him into a rage-filled guard who just might do some of the things prisoners have described.
I wanted to judge him, to accuse him of insensitivity, of sympathizing with those who abuse and torture inmates. But I know as little about that man as we Americans do about the people held at Guantánamo Bay. I don’t know his name, and can tell you only the very basic outline of what he did. Without talking to him, without finding out why he did it, or where inside him that feeling came from, I cannot honestly “convict” him of anything more serious than common rudeness.
He walks free, though, so I’m less worried about him. The men in Guantánamo do not. Whatever they may be suspected of, why they were arrested, has never been made public, nor have the results of any subsequent investigations. Little wonder, then, that they have not been convicted of anything either. Justice has been slow in coming, and for some, may never arrive — at least four of them have committed suicide since the camp opened, and at least 40 of them have attempted it, often repeatedly.
Five others, among the most high-profile ones, appear to be seeking death another way. The morning I left the cell, they went in front of a military judge, in a proceeding that was widely criticized by lawyers and other observers for its departure from common legal standards (such as preventing co-defendants from talking to each other). After they were told what charges were being laid against them for their alleged involvement in the attacks of September 11, 2001, some of them said they wanted to be “martyred,” apparently asking for the death penalty. But like their fellow inmates, they wait.
I did, too. As people walked by throughout the night, some looked in, a few asked me what I was doing; others didn’t seem to notice the cell was even there, much less occupied. It was impossible to know what they thought.
I thought of the young men, some as young as 14, kidnapped from the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and sold to US troops as alleged terrorists for thousands of dollars in reward money, who now sit, as I did, in small cells awaiting the next dawn. And when I became cold, tired, and cramped, I reminded myself that they are enduring worse and suffering more. Their fortitude was a thin, cold comfort, but it gave me strength.
Visions from inside
Inmates’ smuggled words show pain, frustration
I discovered during my time in the cell that it is possible to look for so long at one spot — on the floor, the wall, the ceiling — that the spot actually disappears from view. With enough uninterrupted time — or enough detachment from the brutality of the “real world” — it must be possible to make everything you can see just disappear.
What appears in its place? We know some answers, courtesy of the men held at Guantánamo. They have, with the help of their lawyers, published fragments of poetry shedding light on their thoughts, dreams, and visions.
Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, published last year by the University of Iowa Press, includes 22 poems that made it past the US military’s censors. The one that struck me most deeply, in the middle of the night as I read the poems aloud to myself, was “O Prison Darkness,” by an author identified only by his first name, Abdulaziz. It ends with these lines.
Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable,
They will shatter.
Those who persist will attain their goal;
Those who keep knocking shall gain entry.
O crisis, intensify!
The morning is about to break forth.
Playlist
These were some of the songs I listened to while in the cell. My selections were based on reporting by Spin, Mother Jones, the BBC, the New York Times, Time, Transcultural Music Review, and FBI documents, all of which listed songs or bands played by soldiers at Guantánamo, usually at very high volumes, as a way to break down detainees’ psychological defenses.
“Soldier Like Me (Return of the Soulja),” 2Pac & Eminem, Loyal to the Game, 2004
“Don’t Get Mad, Get Even,” Aerosmith, Pump, 1989
“Dirrty,” Christina Aguilera featuring Redman, Stripped, 2002
“One Eight Seven,” Dr. Dre, Chronicles — Death Row Classics, 2006
“Step Up,” Drowning Pool, Desensitized, 2004
“Bodies,” Drowning Pool, Sinner, 2001
“If I Had,” Eminem, The Slim Shady LP, 1999
“Take a Look Around,” Limp Bizkit, Greatest Hits, 2005
“This Is the New S**t,” Marilyn Manson, Lest We Forget — The Best of Marilyn Manson, 2004
“The Burn,” Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season, 2000
“For Crying Out Loud,” Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell, 1977
“Whiplash (Live),” Metallica, Kill ‘Em All, 2008
“Meow Mix” radio commercial
“Killing in the Name,” Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine, 1992
“Naked in the Rain,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 2006
“Sometimes,” Britney Spears, . . . Baby One More Time, 1999
“How Mountain Girls Can Love,” Stanley Brothers, 16 Greatest Hits, 2004
“Walking Man,” James Taylor, Greatest Hits, 1974
“The Star Spangled Banner,” United We Stand, Songs for America, 2001
Clarification: The original version of this story did not fully explain the positions Maine Democratic US Representative Mike Michaud took on the Military Commissions Act of 2006. He voted in favor of the bill as it was introduced in the US House of Representatives, but in a subsequent vote changed his mind and opposed it.
First thing in the morning, a man stopped at my door, leaned in, looked me square in the eye, called me “a piece of shit,” and spat on my floor. I tried not to take it personally.
I was in a prison cell and wearing a day-glo-orange inmate’s jumpsuit, sitting on a thin mat, where I had sat and slept intermittently — and uncomfortably — through the preceding seven hours.
Amnesty International brought the cell to Portland’s Monument Square and arranged several days of events about the offshore prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, last week to draw attention to the 270 or so inmates still held there, and to highlight the support of some of Maine’s congressional delegation for suspending the legal rights of inmates there, most of whom have never been charged with any crime.
I’d volunteered to spend the night in the replica cell (which is modeled on the ones at Gitmo, which are very like the standard isolation units used in US “supermax” prisons) because we’ve all heard stories about unlivable conditions at Gitmo but can’t come close to imagining what it must be like to live for as long as seven years in a small box with little contact with the outside world, and even less hope of release. I hoped my few hours of simulated incarceration — even without the alleged abuse visited on Gitmo “detainees” by US service personnel — would help me appreciate the nightmare those prisoners endure.
When I first entered the cell, I sized things up. I could take three normal-size steps from side to side, four from the door to the bed; a “lap” around it involved 12 reasonably normal-sized steps. With my arms outstretched to the sides, I could touch the walls; reaching up, I could touch the ceiling with my stocking feet flat on the floor. Lying on the raised platform that served as my bed, my head touched one wall and my feet pressed against the other. The walls and ceiling were white; the toilet/sink fixture by the door was stainless steel; the floor was gray. There was one small window — easily covered by my forearm — by the bed and another in the door.
I was already in the jumpsuit, so I sat on the thin sleeping mat, got out my iPod, put in the earbuds, selected the “Gitmo” playlist, and turned the volume up. (The guards play a wide selection of American music — though mostly dark heavy stuff like Drowning Pool and Marilyn Manson — at high volume, at all hours, as a form of psychological torture for the prisoners.)
I read from the Koran, opening it at random and finding the 36th sûrah (chapter), entitled “Yâ Sîn,” or “O Man.” According to the annotation in my copy, that chapter is often recited by Muslims at times of adversity, to sustain their faith. At one point in the text, a group of believers approaches a city of non-believers to try to convert them: “(The people of the city) said: we augur ill of you. If ye desist not, we shall surely stone you, and grievous torture will befall you at our hands.” But, Allah explains through the prophet Mohammed, whatever suffering his followers must endure will be relieved if they stick to their faith, while those who did the torturing will be condemned to burn in hell. After a few readings, I found my hope rising and my discomfort decreasing, even though I am not a Muslim.
I also read — for the first of three times that night — a book of poems written by Guantánamo inmates, seeking a sense of what they feel and think. Despite great discomfort, hardship, and fear, some inmates are able to transcend themselves and their situation and find hope, and dreams, and a sort of freedom.
It’s really far worse
My night was only a tiny taste of what the detainees held at Guantánamo experience. The most obvious difference, of course, was that I spent just over seven hours in a replica of a cell sitting in downtown Portland. Many of the inmates have spent more like seven years in real cells in a remote base in Cuba. By comparison, my imprisonment was soft time.
A Portland police officer sat in his patrol car outside, mostly to protect the cell itself and its accompanying gear (a generator, electronic equipment, parts of a disassembled information booth), but I took comfort in his presence, knowing that if any harm befell me, aid would be nearby. The Gitmo detainees have their own uniformed, armed guards, but they are as likely to be their tormentors as their rescuers.
It was mostly dark in my cell, though a few streetlights shined in. Some detainees’ lawyers claim their clients are suffering permanent psychological damage because the lights in their cells have been kept on 24 hours a day for years.
I was warm and not hungry, equipped with a sleeping bag and fortified with a good meal at home before going into the cell; the inmates get blankets if they’re lucky and regularly complain about both the quantity and the quality of food served at Gitmo.
I could control the volume on my iPod (and I confess to skipping a couple songs); the detainees can neither control the volume nor prevent a guard from playing one song over and over for hours on end, as happened on at least one occasion with Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” from their 1991 eponymous album.
But the biggest difference, the one that really made it possible for me (a somewhat sane person who functions fairly well in this weird world) to handle my time inside, was this: I knew when I would eventually leave. The men held in Guantánamo don’t. Even those who have been declared not dangerous, not worth holding, whose arrests and incarceration are acknowledged mistakes, are held for months before being finally released. One man, Maher Rafat al-Quwari, has been cleared for release since February 2007, but as a Palestinian with no passport or other national paperwork, he has nowhere to go, so he stays in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.
Without a futureI thought about what it would take to close the prison. Calls for just that have come from such high Bush administration officials as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and even the president himself, as well as both major-party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. And yet it remains open, stalled at best by the practical difficulties of moving terrorism suspects into other prisons, or, at worst, held up by people who may not mean what they say.
Maine’s DC delegation is split on the issue: Republican Senator Susan Collins and Democratic representative Mike Michaud voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. [Please see clarification, below.] It recreated a kangaroo-court show-trial system for “trying” detainees in front of military judges (after a nearly identical arrangement created by the Pentagon was struck down by the US Supreme Court in 2006), and granted the US government the power to indefinitely imprison anyone — even US citizens — without charging them with a crime, and without ever bringing them before an independent civilian judge. Democratic representative Tom Allen opposed it; Republican senator Olympia Snowe didn’t vote, but later voted to overturn some of its harsher provisions.
And then there was that passerby who spit into my cell. I wondered if his attitude, amplified by the isolation of being stationed at a remote military base, and inflated by being allowed to carry large automatic weapons, might turn him into a rage-filled guard who just might do some of the things prisoners have described.
I wanted to judge him, to accuse him of insensitivity, of sympathizing with those who abuse and torture inmates. But I know as little about that man as we Americans do about the people held at Guantánamo Bay. I don’t know his name, and can tell you only the very basic outline of what he did. Without talking to him, without finding out why he did it, or where inside him that feeling came from, I cannot honestly “convict” him of anything more serious than common rudeness.
He walks free, though, so I’m less worried about him. The men in Guantánamo do not. Whatever they may be suspected of, why they were arrested, has never been made public, nor have the results of any subsequent investigations. Little wonder, then, that they have not been convicted of anything either. Justice has been slow in coming, and for some, may never arrive — at least four of them have committed suicide since the camp opened, and at least 40 of them have attempted it, often repeatedly.
Five others, among the most high-profile ones, appear to be seeking death another way. The morning I left the cell, they went in front of a military judge, in a proceeding that was widely criticized by lawyers and other observers for its departure from common legal standards (such as preventing co-defendants from talking to each other). After they were told what charges were being laid against them for their alleged involvement in the attacks of September 11, 2001, some of them said they wanted to be “martyred,” apparently asking for the death penalty. But like their fellow inmates, they wait.
I did, too. As people walked by throughout the night, some looked in, a few asked me what I was doing; others didn’t seem to notice the cell was even there, much less occupied. It was impossible to know what they thought.
I thought of the young men, some as young as 14, kidnapped from the streets of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, and sold to US troops as alleged terrorists for thousands of dollars in reward money, who now sit, as I did, in small cells awaiting the next dawn. And when I became cold, tired, and cramped, I reminded myself that they are enduring worse and suffering more. Their fortitude was a thin, cold comfort, but it gave me strength.
Visions from inside
Inmates’ smuggled words show pain, frustration
I discovered during my time in the cell that it is possible to look for so long at one spot — on the floor, the wall, the ceiling — that the spot actually disappears from view. With enough uninterrupted time — or enough detachment from the brutality of the “real world” — it must be possible to make everything you can see just disappear.
What appears in its place? We know some answers, courtesy of the men held at Guantánamo. They have, with the help of their lawyers, published fragments of poetry shedding light on their thoughts, dreams, and visions.
Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, published last year by the University of Iowa Press, includes 22 poems that made it past the US military’s censors. The one that struck me most deeply, in the middle of the night as I read the poems aloud to myself, was “O Prison Darkness,” by an author identified only by his first name, Abdulaziz. It ends with these lines.
Even though the bands tighten and seem unbreakable,
They will shatter.
Those who persist will attain their goal;
Those who keep knocking shall gain entry.
O crisis, intensify!
The morning is about to break forth.
Playlist
These were some of the songs I listened to while in the cell. My selections were based on reporting by Spin, Mother Jones, the BBC, the New York Times, Time, Transcultural Music Review, and FBI documents, all of which listed songs or bands played by soldiers at Guantánamo, usually at very high volumes, as a way to break down detainees’ psychological defenses.
“Soldier Like Me (Return of the Soulja),” 2Pac & Eminem, Loyal to the Game, 2004
“Don’t Get Mad, Get Even,” Aerosmith, Pump, 1989
“Dirrty,” Christina Aguilera featuring Redman, Stripped, 2002
“One Eight Seven,” Dr. Dre, Chronicles — Death Row Classics, 2006
“Step Up,” Drowning Pool, Desensitized, 2004
“Bodies,” Drowning Pool, Sinner, 2001
“If I Had,” Eminem, The Slim Shady LP, 1999
“Take a Look Around,” Limp Bizkit, Greatest Hits, 2005
“This Is the New S**t,” Marilyn Manson, Lest We Forget — The Best of Marilyn Manson, 2004
“The Burn,” Matchbox Twenty, Mad Season, 2000
“For Crying Out Loud,” Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell, 1977
“Whiplash (Live),” Metallica, Kill ‘Em All, 2008
“Meow Mix” radio commercial
“Killing in the Name,” Rage Against the Machine, Rage Against the Machine, 1992
“Naked in the Rain,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik, 2006
“Sometimes,” Britney Spears, . . . Baby One More Time, 1999
“How Mountain Girls Can Love,” Stanley Brothers, 16 Greatest Hits, 2004
“Walking Man,” James Taylor, Greatest Hits, 1974
“The Star Spangled Banner,” United We Stand, Songs for America, 2001
Clarification: The original version of this story did not fully explain the positions Maine Democratic US Representative Mike Michaud took on the Military Commissions Act of 2006. He voted in favor of the bill as it was introduced in the US House of Representatives, but in a subsequent vote changed his mind and opposed it.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Beat the clock: Does anybody really know what time it is?
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
“The Earth is a terrible timekeeper,” says Geoff Chester, the spokesman for this country’s official clock-master, the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.
The first problem is the Earth, but the second problem is us. We cheat to make the movement of the Sun and Moon match up with the calendars on our office walls, and, at a more rarefied level, we cheat so that physicists and astronomers can synchronize their scientific watches.
The Earth doesn’t rotate exactly 365 times during a full revolution around the Sun. (It rotates 365.2422 times, on average, if you must know.) To make up for that, since the time of Julius Caesar (45 BC), we have added a LEAP DAY to the calendar every four years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII made a slight modification, saying a leap day would not be added in years that are evenly divisible by 100, unless the year was also evenly divisible by 400 (which is why 2000 was a LEAP YEAR; 1900 was not, and 2100 won’t be, either).
That’s still not good enough, though, so we need more cheating.
The Earth doesn’t cooperate with physicists’ super-specific definition of “one second” (derivation of which is so complicated we’ll just mention the outermost electron in a cesium-133 atom and skip the parts about microwave radiation, vacuums, and magnetic fields). That definitely doesn’t change, but the Earth’s rotation is generally slowing (because of resistance from ocean tides and the movement of molten rock at the planet’s center). From time to time, to keep things matching, we need to add a LEAP SECOND. The last one happened on December 31, 2005; the next may happen on December 31, 2009, but maybe not, Chester says, depending on how much the Earth’s spin actually slows between now and then.
We could avoid leap seconds altogether if we were like the physicists who want time to run based solely on the atomic clocks. But that would force some other adjustment at some point. Some propeller-heads have proposed passing the buck to future generations via a scheme requiring someone to add an entire LEAPHOUR to some year a little more than 1000 years from now. Not likely. So we’re probably stuck with leap seconds. Adjust your watches accordingly.
Could be worse: some people are burdened with much, much more. Accountants and other people who need a fixed number of exactly-seven-day weeks per year use an occasional LEAP WEEK, giving some years 52 weeks and some 53. That makes them happy, but is too confusing to the rest of us and generally of very little import.
And then there are the people who use a LEAP MONTH. “The Moon does not go around the Earth exactly 12 times in a solar year,” says Chester. It’s about 11 days behind, which is why events on a lunar schedule (such as Easter in the Christian calendar, and nearly every holiday in the Jewish calendar) are “movable feasts” — i.e. their dates move around a bit from one year to the next. The Hebrew calendar uses a leap month every two or three years to keep itself relatively close to the solar calendar.
Perhaps you’re ready to give up. (I know I am.) If so, try out the Islamic calendar, which is a purely lunar calendar, and ignores the solar calendar completely, not using leap days, weeks, months, or years. Happy February 29!Friday, January 11, 2008
Defending the universally loathed: TV: Shopping channels
Published in the Portland Phoenix, the Boston Phoenix, and the Providence Phoenix; part of a multi-part story
TV: Shopping channels
As detestable as they are, someone loves those shopping channels on TV. They bring in more than $10 billion a year to the washed-up non-celebrities pitching second-rate knives, dresses, jewelry, and cleaning supplies.
There is, however, a very compelling reason you, too, should love the shopping channels, and thank your lucky stars they exist: your cable bill would be higher than it is now — by as much as a few bucks a month, depending on where you live — if the “basic cable” package did not include shopping channels.
In many markets, cable companies are required by federal regulations to carry shopping channels. As a result, the cable companies don’t pay to transmit shopping channels (just as they don’t pay to carry other local broadcast stations or community-access channels). But unlike those other channels, shopping networks kick back a percentage of their sales revenues. So the more knives sold, the less likely your cable bill is to rise.
(Sure, nothing is stopping your cable company from racking the rates, except competition from satellite TV and Internet video, but if the feds require cable companies to sell channels individually, you’ll pay more for the same channels, and losing that shopping-network revenue is part of why.)
So every now and again, when you’re feeling bored, check out a shopping channel, and make sure you have a knife for every occasion. If you’re missing one for, say, cutting out your own appendix, go ahead and buy it. It’s just $9.99, you can pay in 15 easy installments of just 67 cents each, and you’ll keep your future cable bills down, too.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Live Earth 2007: Where to go, who to see, what to know — even if you don't have a ticket
Published as an online exclusive (with excerpts in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix)
So you’re headed to a Live Earth gig somewhere, whether outside New York City or in a remote outpost in Antarctica. Maybe you’re staying home to watch the various simulcasts online. But Live Earth is more than just a concert — or at least it’s supposed to be. Organizers are calling it “a concert for a climate in crisis,” and what better way to honor Al Gore’s dream of world climate awareness than by thinking green thoughts and seeing a few unsettling sights, to soak in a bit more the waning days of our nice, comfy climate?
BRAZIL
WHERE: Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro
CHINA
WHERE: Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai
UNITED KINGDOM
WHERE: Wembley Stadium, Wembley, London
UNITED STATES
WHERE: Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey
So you’re headed to a Live Earth gig somewhere, whether outside New York City or in a remote outpost in Antarctica. Maybe you’re staying home to watch the various simulcasts online. But Live Earth is more than just a concert — or at least it’s supposed to be. Organizers are calling it “a concert for a climate in crisis,” and what better way to honor Al Gore’s dream of world climate awareness than by thinking green thoughts and seeing a few unsettling sights, to soak in a bit more the waning days of our nice, comfy climate?
Herewith, a brief list of the Live Earth concerts (the one in Istanbul, Turkey, was canceled because the government and potential sponsors are distracted by upcoming elections), what musicians you’ll hear, a (relatively) nearby place to each concert where you can actually see the effects of global warming, and — for the homebodies preferring to use their exercycle-powered computers to experience the human decline — links to Webcams where you can see the real effects of human innovation on our big blue marble.
ANTARCTICA
WHERE: Rothera Station, Adelaide Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula
WHO: Nunatak (an utterly unpublicized and mostly ad-hoc group of scientists and support staff at the British station)
WHAT TO SEE: Open water just south of Cape Longing on the Antarctic Peninsula, where the Larsen A and B ice shelves used to be (before their sudden collapses in 1995 and 2002, respectively). Researchers in February reported that they had found several new species that had been living under the ice shelves for thousands of years, as well as species that moved in after the collapses, abruptly changing the seabed environment.
WEBCAM: Check out life at Rothera Station
And at the other extreme, a North Pole Webcam
AUSTRALIA
WHERE: Aussie Stadium, Moore Park, Sydney, New South Wales
WHO: Blue King Brown, Crowded House, Eskimo Joe, Ghostwriters, Jack Johnson, John Butler Trio, Missy Higgins, Paul Kelly, Sneaky Sound System, Toni Collette and the Finish, Wolfmother
WHAT TO SEE: The Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve, north of Nyngan, New South Wales, which are drier than they should be because irrigation systems upriver from the marshes are taking more water than they are allowed to, as farmers do everything they can to minimize the effects of a years-long drought that has turned many Australians’ attention to global warming.
WEBCAM: This vineyard is not that close to Macquarie Marshes, but is well irrigated, and feeling the effects of droughtBRAZIL
WHERE: Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro
WHO: Lenny Kravitz, Pharrell Williams, Macy Gray, Xuxa, O Rappa, Marcelo D2, Jorge Ben Jor, Jota Quest, Vanessa Da Matta, MV Bill
WHAT TO SEE: The Amazon Rain Forest, which is actually drying out. As the forest area drops, so does the amount of rainfall. The effect is increased by rain-preventing smoke from the slash-and-burn practices of poor farmers destroying the wilderness to make fertile farmland.
WEBCAM: Keep an eye on very localized deforestation in a residential garden in Olinda, BrazilCHINA
WHERE: Oriental Pearl Tower, Shanghai
WHO: Sarah Brightman, Eason Chan, Winnie Hsin, Evonne Hsu, Huang Xiao Ming, Anthony Wong, Joey Yung, 12 Girls Band, Soler
WHAT TO SEE: Linfen, Shanxi province, a city the World Bank says has the worst air quality on Earth, as a result of vast amounts of factories, mines, and homes that all burn coal. China is opening an average of two coal-fired electricity-generating plants each week. The country’s carbon-dioxide emissions surpassed the US level for the first time in 2006, though Chinese officials note that per capita, China’s emissions are one-fourth of America’s, and half of Britain’s.
WEBCAM: Shanghai’s air isn’t that clean, either. See what the folks attending the concert are breathing.
GERMANY
WHERE: Arena at Hamburg, Hamburg
WHO: Chris Cornell, Jan Delay, Juli, Katie Melua, Lotto King Karl, Maná, Michael Mittermeier, Sasha, Silbermond, Reamonn, Roger Cicero, Snoop Dogg, Mando Diao, Enrique Iglesias, Shakira
WHAT TO SEE: The Vernagtferner glacier, in the Otztal Alps, near Innsbruck, Austria. This glacier is one of the fastest-retreating in the world, having lost one-third of its area and more than half its mass in the past 100 years.
WEBCAM: This view of a ski lift at a mountain resort in Bayerisch Eisenstein, Bayern province, will tell you how much snow is falling and how fast it’s melting — both key elements of glacier-mass changes. (Yeah, it’s summer now. Keep checking back.)
JAPAN
WHERE: Makuhari Messe, Tokyo, Kanto region, Honshu island
WHO: Linkin Park, Rihanna, Ai Otsuka, Cocco, Genki Rockets, Kumi Koda, Rip Slyme, Rize, Ayaka, UA, Abingdon Boys School, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Rihanna, Bonnie Pink, AI, Michael Nyman
WHAT TO SEE: Well, there’s always the Kyoto International Conference Hall in Sakyo ward, Kyoto, where the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions was negotiated back in December 1997. (Nearly a decade later, and the US Senate hasn’t ratified it.) But also head to the Tohoku region, north of Tokyo, to the rice paddies, which are seeing increased production of the country’s staple food as a result of warmer temperatures. At the same time, wheat production throughout the country is falling.
WEBCAM: Pay attention to the streets of Tokyo — if a massive rice-fed monster isn’t trampling through them, maybe there’s hope.
SOUTH AFRICA
WHERE: The Cradle of Humankind, Maropeng, Gauteng Province (near Johannesburg)
WHO: UB40, Joss Stone, Angelique Kidjo, Baaba Maal, Danny K, the Parlotones, Soweto Gospel Choir, Vusi Mahlasela, Zola
WHAT TO SEE: The Karoo National Park, a desert ecosystem designated as a “biodiversity hot spot,” with as many as 2000 plant species found nowhere else on Earth. The area is being monitored for its reaction to climbing temperatures, and scientists have already found that some young plants aren’t doing well, because they can’t store enough water to survive the heat.
WEBCAM: Watch for signs of plants in distress in the forest and mountain view.UNITED KINGDOM
WHERE: Wembley Stadium, Wembley, London
WHO: Beastie Boys, Black Eyed Peas, Bloc Party, Corinne Bailey Rae, Damien Rice, David Gray, Duran Duran, Foo Fighters, Genesis, James Blunt, John Legend, Keane, Madonna, Paolo Nutini, Razorlight, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Snow Patrol, Metallica, Kasabian, Terra Naomi, Spinal Tap, Pussycat Dolls
WHAT TO SEE: The London Underground subway system, which in 2006 was partially disabled because of skyrocketing electricity demand from people around the city trying to beat the heat. (Also check out the M25 motorway encircling London; a segment between Junctions 26 and 27 melted in the summer heat in 2003.)
WEBCAM: If London’s roads are melting, be among the first to see them on the BBC’s “jam cams” monitoring traffic around the city.UNITED STATES
WHERE: Giants Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey
WHO: AFI, Akon, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi, Dave Matthews Band, Fall Out Boy, John Mayer, Kayne West, Kelly Clarkson, KT Tunstall, Ludacris, Melissa Etheridge, the Police, Roger Waters, Smashing Pumpkins, Keith Urban, Taking Back Sunday
WHAT TO SEE: Almost any stretch of the legendary Jersey Shore, where storms (of both increasing frequency and severity) continue to do serious damage to beaches, shorefront areas, and homes. As ocean levels rise, areas near the shore will be inundated, according to a recent report by Environment New Jersey, an activist group.
WEBCAM: Look for rising waters in the beach view.
On the Web
Live Earth: liveearth.msn.com
Sources
Antarctica: http://www.awi.de/en/news/press_releases/detail/item/einzigartiges_oekosystem_unter_dem_ehemaligen_larsen_schelfeis/
Australia: http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Irrigators-want-probe-into-water-theft/2007/06/26/1182623882590.html; http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052407R.shtml
Brazil: http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov; http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/AmazonFire/
China: http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,2111124,00.html
Germany: http://www.unep.org/geo/geo_ice
Japan: http://www.epcc.pref.osaka.jp/apec/eng/earth/global_warming/dounaru.html
South Africa: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0804_030804_karoo.html
Turkey: http://www.eonline.com/news/article/index.jsp?uuid=5b7285ea-7f09-4b9a-a4bd-10cae6a51ea7
UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/08/07/nhot07.xml
US: http://www.environmentnewjersey.org/reports/global-warming/global-warming-reports/an-unfamiliar-state-local-impacts-of-global-warming-in-new-jersey
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
State: One Santa okay; another no way
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
Maine regulators have refused to approve an English beer’s label featuring Santa Claus holding a beer, saying it makes the product attractive to children. But they didn’t balk at approving the label for Gritty’s Christmas Ale, which shows a man dressed up as Santa Claus, also holding a beer.
In October, the state agency that approves beer-bottle labels (yes, we have one; it’s the Liquor Licensing and Compliance division of the Department of Public Safety) wrote to Shelton Brothers, importer of Santa’s Butt (a winter porter), saying the beer’s label (which shows a rear view of a fat-assed Santa sitting on a type of barrel that’s called a “butt”), and two other beer-bottle labels featuring bare-breasted women, are “undignified or improper.”
Last week, Shelton Brothers filed suit in federal court, saying the state’s ban and the rule it is based on violate the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression.
New York and Connecticut have recently expressed similar concerns over artwork on bottles imported by Shelton Brothers, a Massachusetts-based beer importer (headquartered, of all places, in Belchertown), but anti-censorship lawsuits in those states led to the bans being reversed.
In remarks to the press before he began declining to comment on the case, Maine State Police Lieutenant Patrick Fleming, who heads the state’s liquor-licensing agency, elaborated, saying the depiction of Santa might appeal to children.
That doesn’t wash with Gritty’s owner Richard Pfeffer. “Children aren’t really in the beer aisle all that much, unless they’re accompanied by adults,” he says. The Gritty’s Christmas Ale label has met with no problems from regulators, and was re-approved in April.
Shelton Brothers imports nearly 150 beers from around the world, and has run into trouble with a few of them, mostly relating to holiday designs brewed by the Ridgeway Brewery in England, whose brewer — a friend of the Sheltons — collaborates with them on beer and label ideas.
Maine officials have also declined to say whether this ruling means long-approved labels on other beers might also now be determined to appeal to children. (In addition to the Gritty’s Christmas Ale with Santa, several breweries have beers whose labels include drawings of dogs, for example.) Approval by the state does not force a store to display or sell a particular beer; stores can choose for themselves.
Daniel Shelton, one of the brothers who owns the import company, says even if Maine reverses its decision — which state liquor-licensing supervisor Jeff Austin said had not happened as of Tuesday — the lawsuit will continue, to get a court to strike down the state’s rule, which Shelton says is “way too vague.”
In addition to Santa’s Butt porter, Maine regulators have banned sales of Les Sans Culottes (a French blonde ale), whose label features a detail from the 1830 Eugene Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People. The symbolic figure of Liberty is a bare-breasted woman carrying a French flag and a rifle and bayonet. The painting hangs in the Louvre.
A third label to be rejected by the state, Rosé de Gambrinus (a raspberry-flavored Belgian lambic), features a painting specially commissioned by the brewery depicting Gambrinus, an unofficial patron of beers and brewing and legendary king of Flanders, with a naked woman on his lap (symbolizing beer, according to the lawsuit).
The state has yet to file a reply in court.
Maine regulators have refused to approve an English beer’s label featuring Santa Claus holding a beer, saying it makes the product attractive to children. But they didn’t balk at approving the label for Gritty’s Christmas Ale, which shows a man dressed up as Santa Claus, also holding a beer.
In October, the state agency that approves beer-bottle labels (yes, we have one; it’s the Liquor Licensing and Compliance division of the Department of Public Safety) wrote to Shelton Brothers, importer of Santa’s Butt (a winter porter), saying the beer’s label (which shows a rear view of a fat-assed Santa sitting on a type of barrel that’s called a “butt”), and two other beer-bottle labels featuring bare-breasted women, are “undignified or improper.”
Last week, Shelton Brothers filed suit in federal court, saying the state’s ban and the rule it is based on violate the First Amendment’s protection of artistic expression.
New York and Connecticut have recently expressed similar concerns over artwork on bottles imported by Shelton Brothers, a Massachusetts-based beer importer (headquartered, of all places, in Belchertown), but anti-censorship lawsuits in those states led to the bans being reversed.
In remarks to the press before he began declining to comment on the case, Maine State Police Lieutenant Patrick Fleming, who heads the state’s liquor-licensing agency, elaborated, saying the depiction of Santa might appeal to children.
That doesn’t wash with Gritty’s owner Richard Pfeffer. “Children aren’t really in the beer aisle all that much, unless they’re accompanied by adults,” he says. The Gritty’s Christmas Ale label has met with no problems from regulators, and was re-approved in April.
Shelton Brothers imports nearly 150 beers from around the world, and has run into trouble with a few of them, mostly relating to holiday designs brewed by the Ridgeway Brewery in England, whose brewer — a friend of the Sheltons — collaborates with them on beer and label ideas.
Maine officials have also declined to say whether this ruling means long-approved labels on other beers might also now be determined to appeal to children. (In addition to the Gritty’s Christmas Ale with Santa, several breweries have beers whose labels include drawings of dogs, for example.) Approval by the state does not force a store to display or sell a particular beer; stores can choose for themselves.
Daniel Shelton, one of the brothers who owns the import company, says even if Maine reverses its decision — which state liquor-licensing supervisor Jeff Austin said had not happened as of Tuesday — the lawsuit will continue, to get a court to strike down the state’s rule, which Shelton says is “way too vague.”
In addition to Santa’s Butt porter, Maine regulators have banned sales of Les Sans Culottes (a French blonde ale), whose label features a detail from the 1830 Eugene Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People. The symbolic figure of Liberty is a bare-breasted woman carrying a French flag and a rifle and bayonet. The painting hangs in the Louvre.
A third label to be rejected by the state, Rosé de Gambrinus (a raspberry-flavored Belgian lambic), features a painting specially commissioned by the brewery depicting Gambrinus, an unofficial patron of beers and brewing and legendary king of Flanders, with a naked woman on his lap (symbolizing beer, according to the lawsuit).
The state has yet to file a reply in court.
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Our real founding father? A lawyer’s story of John Cooke
Published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
It’s just plain too bad John Cooke is not around anymore. The 17th-century English lawyer who turned the divine right of kings to rule unquestioned into a crime punishable by death would be welcome here in our waning democracy.
It’s just plain too bad John Cooke is not around anymore. The 17th-century English lawyer who turned the divine right of kings to rule unquestioned into a crime punishable by death would be welcome here in our waning democracy.
Geoffrey Robertson, a British human-rights attorney, has drawn from an array of primary sources for his reinterpretation of the life of a man not quite lost to history. Much can be made of its relevance to current events, in which we seek to prosecute malevolent presidents and dictators under the law rather than assassinate them in their beds. We owe this dignity — and many of the protections in the US Constitution, as well as the right to an attorney, and even public registries of land ownership — to Cooke.
He has till now been remembered by a single word: “regicide.” He did, after all, invent a new crime, tyranny, and then accuse Charles I of having committed it. The king’s refusal to recognize the court and the court’s failure to assume innocence rather than guilt (which would have been another innovation) condemned Charles to the ax in 1649.
Robertson is the first biographer of Cooke, whose legal-reform efforts predate and rival those of the American Founding Fathers. (Some are so far-reaching that they remain unfulfilled, such as having lawyers spend 10 percent of their time helping the indigent.) For the better understanding of the real roots of American democracy alone — and where we have gone astray since — this book is more than worth the read.
But Robertson goes farther, delving into tiny, gruesome details and bringing a lawyer’s mind to the task of reviewing their significance. Although many historians have marveled at the efforts to which the Parliamentarians went to create a legalistic air about the trial of Charles I, none has so minutely described the machinations by which the Puritans massaged the law, the Bible, and their own consciences in the effort to do right, in the right way. Robertson sheds new light on how devotion to the law and to the word of God gave the Puritans’ life daily meaning, and he chides historians for not discovering what he did.
Although religion was the starting point of 17th-century religious reformers in England, morality became their watchword, and ruthless logic their method. But the English Puritans (a separate group from the Brownists, a tiny sect who later became what we know as the Pilgrims) got in their own way while trying to improve the godliness of their government. In the middle of the Civil War, some Puritan thinkers realized that what they really wanted was to restore the king to the throne. But they also realized that he would never accept the constitutional-monarchy constraints Parliament was seeking to impose.
What to do? Finding someone to sneak in and stab the king or poison his food was not acceptable. Instead, they found a lawyer to put the king on trial. That lawyer was Cooke, whose sense of logic and justice was so powerful that even when on the scaffold himself in 1660, about to be hanged, drawn, and quartered at the hands of the Restoration, he comforted other condemned men and encouraged his family to rejoice that he was going to meet his beloved God.
The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold | By Geoffrey Robertson | Pantheon Books | 448 pages | $30
Thursday, May 11, 2006
George vs. George: Compare and contrast
published in the Portland Phoenix and the Boston Phoenix
President George W. Bush is the third man named George to hold the head office of our republic, after his father and George Washington. That makes him, effectively, President George III. The last time our country was ruled by a George III, the American colonists undertook a years-long bloody struggle to overthrow him. Let’s compare and contrast today’s George with the one we got rid of in 1782.
President George W. Bush is the third man named George to hold the head office of our republic, after his father and George Washington. That makes him, effectively, President George III. The last time our country was ruled by a George III, the American colonists undertook a years-long bloody struggle to overthrow him. Let’s compare and contrast today’s George with the one we got rid of in 1782.
| |
He ran up the national debt far beyond the country’s ability to pay, spending millions on occupation of faraway lands (the American colonies in particular), on entangling wars (against France and Spain), and in government subsidies to major corporations (especially the East India Company). | H e ran up the national debt far beyond the country’s ability to pay, spending billions on occupation of faraway lands (Iraq and Afghanistan in particular), on entangling wars (against Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban), and in government tax breaks and overpayments for services to major corporations (especially Enron and Halliburton). |
He turned over administration of a vast Asian country to a private company. (India was overseen almost exclusively by the corporate officers of the East India Company.) | He turned over logistics support and some administration of a vast military operation to private companies. (Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown & Root are the major operators of US military bases and outposts around the globe.) |
| He was roundly criticized by political opponents for attempting to expand the authority of the monarchy well beyond its traditional role. | He was roundly criticized by political opponents — and members of his own party — for attempting to expand the authority of the presidency well beyond its constitutional role. |
| He donated thousands of books to the public, to start a national library. | He instituted (then failed to fully fund) an expensive, overarching, nationwide education-reform plan, which has yet to show any positive results. |
| He was a serious student of science, including having his own astronomical observatory. | He often rejected scientific arguments in favor of religious or ideological beliefs, even as he increased funding to the National Science Foundation. |
He was very interested in agriculture, and was called “Farmer George” for the time he spent on his royal estates. | H e did a lot of brush clearing on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, during his “vacations” and “working holidays” there. |
| He took a strong interest in government-policy debates, and had a sometimes-heavy hand in their outcomes. | His orders and those of his deputies were often invoked to “edit” scientific reports issued by government agencies, to remove information that would support ideologies other than those held by the White House. |
He was blamed for things, like the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend duties of 1767, that Parliament supported, undertook, and enforced, even though they were not always his ideas. | He was blamed for things, like the US refusal to join the Kyoto Protocol, that Congress supported and undertook on its own. |
| He paid for the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts. | His budgets, even after cutbacks in Congress, have increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. |
| He did not learn to read until age 11. | He bragged about being a C student while at Yale University. |
He imprisoned political opponents andfree-speech advocates. | His administration imprisoned American citizens without trial and investigated journalists for discovering inconvenient truths about his government. |
| His administration redefined the laws of treason to better control political opponents. | H is administration redefined the laws of national security, freedom of information, and terrorism, and then used them to spy on and manipulate political opponents. |
He was eventually deemed mentally unfit to rule, by reason of insanity. | Nothing official yet. |
Sources UK Government History; BBC; Spartacus Encyclopedia of British History; Associated Press reports; US federal records.
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