So the Pope and the Bush had a talk on the “fundamental moral values”? That’s the best joke I’ve heard all year. In the pseudo-state’s lush gardens, no less. A troll in the garden. I fell on the floor laughing at the thought. Bush greated Ratzy with "Your eminence, you’re looking good." The laughs keep coming.

Political economies

It’s fascinating how much attention is given to Vice Presidential candidates before an election. Afterwards, or course, they largely disappear -- unless they’re puppet-masters like Dick “Fuck Democracy” Cheney.

Barack Obama, fresh from pledging his fealty to toeing the disastrous Israeli-right line – guaranteeing continued colonialism, land theft, balkanization, and, not surprisingly, Palestinian reaction to these continued efforts to obliterate them as a people – is now hunting for a Veep. Needless to say, it must not be Hilary Clinton.

It’s yet another numbing irony of our politics that Clinton enjoys greater (white) working class support than Obama, since her DLC-wing of the Party has done so much to destroy the last vestiges of the (white) working class (cf. NAFTA) in the name of the neoliberal order. As Jesse Jackson showed, the white populist revolt, usually ignored by the Democrats, is a rich source of votes when not abandoned to the “god, guns, and gays” (and race) confidence game of the Right. This is why I think someone like Jim Webb or John Edwards should be Obama’s Veep; a populist firebrand who can shore up this flank, and then spend the next four years pushing hard for the long hard struggles ahead (global warming, health care, the war).

More than 3/4ths of adult American don’t have 4-year college degrees. What’s the matter with Kansas? What’s the matter with Manhattan, more likely: a liberal upper middle class and some enlightened rich folk don’t make much of a majority. But it’s this thin spectrum of the ruling class which funds the Democrats, making it a bourgeois party par excellence, beholden to the money. The Democrats, of course, are held up by African American voters, who aren’t much participants in the bourgeois pie. Meanwhile, the Republicans, equally bourgeois, are held up by poor whites, who also don’t get much more than ideological crumbs.

Harper's

“Everybody” reads the New Yorker, but for my money, Harper’s is where you should be if you want to break out of conventional wisdom. The latest issue is particularly rich: Mark Slouka wonders why Americans have become so subservient to “boss culture” authority, bootlicking and celebrity-worshipping, kissing up as we get kicked from above; Jonathan Rowe explains why a terminally ill man going through a divorce is the best thing for the Gross Domestic Product, that bogus and destructive way of measuring the economy (in the May issue, Kevin Phillips gave the history of the numbers racket, in which both Republican and Democratic regimes have fixed official statistics to mislead the rest of us); Garret Keizer examines the Episcopal Church’s battle over homosexual bishops, while Rome (the planet, the poor, etc.) burns. I’m half way through that last article, so I don’t know what else is to come, but I know it beats the shit out of the star-fucking that the Fleet Street hack Tina Brown debased the New Yorker with. Yes, I know she's gone, but the magazine remains largely what she made it: light, celebrity-oriented, fashionable, and soothing of its readership. There certainly are things worth reading it in, but they are few and far between.

Quaking

The response to the Chinese earthquake makes for an interesting comparison with cyclone-devastated Burmese. Authoritarian states are supposed to be good at this sort of thing, making the trains run on time and being in control, but as we saw with the Bush non-response to New Orleans’ destruction, there’s a direct connection between democracy/citizenship and responsibility, including the state’s caring for the people it represents. China’s doing a relatively good job, even loosening their grip on their pravadamedia, but they realize they have little choice; the magnitude of the disaster, which reveals the ruling military-based kleptocracy in a most unfavorable light, means they really have to deliver to tamp down any dissatisfaction among the people. China in recent years has been bursting with little rebellions, mostly from the brutalized peasantry, who see all the talk of happy-happy shop-shop from their masters and spit in disgust. Nationalism is an excellent crutch, but it only goes so far. Their masters fear them terribly and know they can’t let them down here

Meanwhile, the murderous myrmidons of Myanmar are only too happy to see the Karen people of the Irrawaddy delta killed off. Naomi Klein calls it “laissez-faire ethnic cleansing.” As clients of China, who are hungry for Burman’s hydrocarbons, the generals don’t fear their own people. The big panda is on their side. And so is, shamefully, India, a democracy that should know better.

But it takes more than democracy, doesn’t it? The Italians, back under capo di capo Berlusconi, are whipping up for some internal ethnic cleansing of their own. Last week there was a petit (bloodless) pogrom against a Roma encampment in Napoli (a bitter pun) and a roundup of undesirables. And many Italians, suffering under near universal Camorra-ization, another version of the kleptocracy, are only too happy to find a scapegoat in migrant workers.

people have the power

Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: Twenty-five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea is a brief, intense, and invigorating book I’d recommend to all. In a culture that glorifies violence -- indeed, our entertainment system is largely predicated on violence (particularly against women) – and fetishizes militarism (about half the federal budget pays for past, present, and future wars), it’s good to be reminded of the Anabaptists, Quakers, and other non-conformists, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, AJ Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, Bayard Rustin and CORE, King, SANE and the anti-nuclear movement, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Solidarity, the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union and it’s “bloc” (hideous appellation!), People Power in the Philippines, the defeat of the PRI in Mexico, the examples do pile up even though those invested in power do not want us to think about them.

civil fairness

California’s Supreme Court’s decision on “gay marriage” is a no-brainer. It’s an issue of civil rights and fairness, plain and simple. The haters and fear-mongers confuse civil unions with religious ones, which are completely different. Personally, I think the state has no place in regulating adult sexuality, nor in defining who gets the economic benefits, which is very much what marriage is about in civil society, but as long as it does, then there must be equity.

Now the Right, led by such liars and hypocrites as Vito Fossella, Larry Craig, and a cascade of whore-mongering preachers, is going to use this legal decision to gin up fundamentalist votes in November. They are already gathering signatures for a state-wide referendum to overturn the CA Court’s decision.

The American taliban must be fought. Unenlightened heterosexuals are pretty clueless how fundamentalism is ultimately very much a threat to us, as well, for their agenda includes banning all birth control and making women nothing more than incubators.

Sinking feeling

Thomas Powers is none too optimistic on the continuing wars, regardless of who our next President is:

"At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment somewhere between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going."

Powers also reminds us how Afganistan has been the ruin of Empires: the British, twice, the Russians, and now the US.