Now there’s a choice!

The Green Party’s nominee for governor of New York should not be as exceptional as he clearly is in the midst of the current swamp of opportunistic, middle-of-the-whatever, do-as-the-Man-says, make-no-waves and make-no-difference rich boys or paid hacks of both the major parties. But he is.

Enter Stanley Aronowitz, 69, the Green Party’s nominee this year for governor of New York, who, when you listen to him call for higher taxes to increase money for schools, pay for campaign finance reform and establish state-subsidized health insurance, is the anti-candidate this time around. He has set out to anger the powerful and the rich who, he says, pull the strings of the “Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush regime,” stressing that the troika is listed in order of importance. And, like all of those who believe in a cause, he is willing to go down with the ship rather than compromise.
….
OUR democracy is in trouble,” he said. “The Democratic and Republican Parties have converged. Their economic policies are not different. They believe that anything that hurts business is not a viable position.”
….
“Dostoyevsky taught me about irony,” he said. “I have great trouble with this as a would-be politician. You cannot be a successful politician and be ironic. Our slogan — tax and spend — is meant to be ironic, but people don’t get it. They get upset.”

Take that, you Center-Rightists!

And kindly permit the real Left to go about the business of trying to save the Republic (and your own integrity, where it may still survive).

As a gay man, I find it laughable that anyone could vote for the Republican party, but “they’re not as bad as the GOP” is not a good enough reason for me to vote for the Democrats. They must earn my vote — they do not have a “right” to it. Given the ways the party has acquiesced as the Bush administration has shredded the Bill of Rights since 9/11, I will not vote for a Democratic candidate again unless I see a fundamental change in their behavior.

REMAINING U.S. CEOs MAKE A BREAK FOR IT

Yup, just satire, but even Einbildungenschadenfreude makes us happy for a moment.

El Paso, Texas (SatireWire.com) — Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.

gay macho mythology

Though too late for some, the myth of the homo macho man is, maybe, dying, and good riddance!

The world that queer radicals would create is one where no man needs to butch up to fly right. Masculinity would be something every male possesses, not a test every boy must take. Gay men would be free to follow their hearts without sacrificing prestige—and so would straights. After all, macho is a wound for everyone. It isn’t just about boys bonding and dads passing their cojones along to their sons. It’s also about boys brutalizing each other to establish a hierarchy based on fear of the feminine, and fathers injuring their sons for failing to make the grade. It’s about mothers repressing their daughters, and butch girls suffering through the female equivalent of the playground trauma: the prom from hell.
….
The unfinished business of gay liberation is to break these chains. Only then will we know what it really means to be gay.

Zion or empire?

From the words of a professor of history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writing in the Israeli press, we can still hold onto our hopes for the triumph of basic good sense among Israelis in the midst of terror.

If indeed there is no difference between the territories that were conquered by the end of the War of Independence and those that came into our hands in the Six-Day War, it is possible that Zionism really never was, as its opponents have always said, either national liberation movement or a movement to save Jews from physical and cultural extinction, but rather an imperialist movement that aims at constant expansion.

Tax religion before it taxes us all

The Supreme’s ruling yesterday on school vouchers obviously reflects the increasing integration of religion and public life in America. [The Pledge’s “under god” is symbolically very important to this impulse, and symbols are important—look at the fuss we make over the flag!]
The wall of separation between church and state is being dismantled. A NYTimes news article observes that “Recent [court] rulings have held that religion is entitled to equal treatment in public life.” In an otherwise estimable editorial on vouchers in the same edition, the paper observes that in parochial schools “…for a variety of reasons [the writers do not elaborate], tuition is far lower [than other private schools],” thereby eliminating even this court rulings’s premise that parents must have “genuine choice.”
What’s missing here? Just the observation that to get “equal treatment in public life” and incidently to give parents an equal “genuine choice” between schools competing for the voucher money collected from all taxpayers, religious institutions should lose their tax-exempt status, since this is the key to their attraction as a bargain alternative to all kinds of public programs we should be looking to instead.
If we excuse religion its tax obligation, we are already heavily subsidizing it before we hand over additional money in the form of the vouchers we offer it, at least partly, as a reward for the fiction of its good money management.
If we can no longer be protected from religion, religion can no longer be protected from taxes. The two principles must stand or fall together.
P.S. The Declaration of Independence mentions “god,” but that excellent text was essentially a letter of resignation, and was composed for the purpose of public relations. The deist misstep was corrected in the document which became the law of the land, the U.S. Constituion with its Bill of Rights.

one nation under David Koresh?

An excerpt from an interview with Michael Newdow, the man who brought the suit which resulted in a court ruling against the use of the phrase, “under god,” in the Pledge of Allegiance recited in schools.

[Interviewer]: I have some reaction here in the audience. I think Mike from Alabama wants to say something to you, Mr. Newdow.
Audience member: We are talking about the greatest flag to the greatest nation in the world, I can’t believe that Americans will allow something like this to go by without voicing their opinion. This is ludicrous to me. I just can’t believe that the courts would give him the time of day.
Newdow: I agree, it is the greatest nation and what has made it great is our Constitution. The framers were quite wise in recognizing what religion can do and how it can cause hatred and how it can cause death. You don’t have to go far in this world, outside of our nation, to see where that has happened. It is prevalent over the entire globe and the reason we don’t have it here is because we have an establishment clause … If Mike there from Alabama wouldn’t mind saying “we are one nation under Buddha” every day, or “one nation under David Koresh” or “one nation” under some religious icon that he doesn’t believe in … if he doesn’t understand the difference then we have a problem.

more on the nation’s godhead

Dahlia Lithwick, who covers the US Supreme Court for Slate, suggested on NPR this morning that she thinks the 9th Court’s decision is silly, yet she muses on Slate’s own web site, “I must wonder why … all the religious groups in the country are going apoplectic. My guess is that the words “under God” do promote monotheism, and of course the effect of that isn’t just ‘de minimus,’ as they say.” So, is it really silly for the Court to protect minorities and the Constitution?
A few additional notes on the subject which I predict [no stretch!] won’t die:
1.) Yes, “under God” [proposed by the Catholic Knights of Columbus and pushed by the jingoistic Hearst newspapers of the time] was adopted during the McCarthy era to contrast our society specifically with that of atheistic communism [which incidently did not require an oath from its citizens, of any age].
2.) The Pledge itself has a quite modern history. It was the brainchild in 1892 of a radical leftist, Francis Bellamy.

The original pledge began “I pledge allegiance to my flag,” but that was changed in the 1920s so immigrants would be clear on which flag they saluted [it’s now “the” flag]. A stiff, one-armed salute that accompanied the pledge was dropped during World War II because it was deemed Nazi-like.

[Egaads! I remember the one-armed salute myself, long after WWII, but I suppose Catholic schools were slow to adopt the less fascist form.]

3.) Any Pledge, in any form, is authoritarian, stupid and counter-productive for the encouragement of an informed and flourishing citizenry.
4.) Our Founding Fathers were not Christians, but rather Deists, if they professed any relationship to an imaginary supreme friend.
5.) As a motto, “In God We Trust” replaced the particulary federalist and un-Republican [with a big “R”], “E Pluribus Unum” [“from many, one”], on our coins only during the Civil War, on our paper currency in the fifties, and, I believe, only then in our courts, this at the same time we put god in the Pledge and in our schools.
6.) “So Help Me God” are the final words of, I believe all, of our oaths of governmental office, and of the oath required in our courts of law [unless you want to make the kind of scene I look forward to each time I am there, whether as part of a jury or as a defendent in a civil disobedience action].
7.) Apparently somewhere around 90 percent of Americans believe in a personal god and in heaven and hell. The U.S. is the most religious of all the industrialized nations. Our current executive, legislative and judicial governmental branches are all increasingly acting as if we were officially, rather than just functionally, ruled as a theocracy.
The argument for total neutrality on god:
I do not believe there is one god or goddesses or many gods or godesses.
You [forgive me, my good readers, allow me the rhetorical “you”] believe there is or are gods or goddesses.
I do not want my government, its courts, its schools or any of its institutions to tell me there are gods or goddesses, nor to suggest that I am in agreement with that belief. You do not want your government, its courts, its schools or any of its institutions to tell you there are no gods or goddesses, nor to suggest that that you am in agreement with that belief.
The Constitution protects both of us, regardless of the actual numbers we can enlist in our ranks of disbelievers or believers.
One hope for the future:
The current hullabaloo over the Califonia-based Court’s ruling is ironically sure proof against the only argument which the U.S. Supreme Court has used and could use going forward to retain “god” in our government’s institutions and practices, that the phrases are protected from the Establishment Clause because their religious significance has been lost through rote repetition.
Apparently “god” still does have a religious significance. Good news for the religious, and, maybe, good news for those who are not.

God struck down!

Finally, one for the handful of Americans who do not believe in invisible friends and who are not part of a cult!

A federal appeals court found the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional on Wednesday….
“A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical … to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’ a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,”‘ it said.

The words, “under God,” were first added in 1954 in the midst of our last big right-wing witch-hunting god-fearing jingoistic fake-war boom time, in a year dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. I should be amazed it’s still there, but I’m not, and I have no illusions the Supreme Court would agree with this Federal Appeals Court decision.

SUV’s good for us all

Is this for real? The Paper of Record actually published this letter, supposedly defending SUV’s, in today’s edition. [I’m putting it under “Happy,” because I can only find it ludicrous, definitely not serious enough for any other category.]

The fuel cost is borne entirely by me, and though this makes the United States more dependent on foreign oil, it is also the most powerful method of introducing capitalism and democracy into corrupt oil-producing nations.

Have you no shame, Mr. Mullen?