« Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still beating ‘em »:

’… The first plane to hit the first Twin Tower
The last plane to hit the last Twin Tower
The only plane to ever hit the Pentagon
The birth of a vast national paranoia
The beginning of the Third World War
(the War Against the Third World)
The first trip abroad by an ignorant president
The last free-running river
The last gas and oil on earth
The last general strike
The last Fidelista the last Sandinista the last Zapatista
The last political prisoner
The last virgin and the last of the champagne
The last train to leave the station
The last and only great nation
The last Great Depression
The last will & testament
The last welfare check for rent
The end of the old New Deal
The new Committee on Unamerican Activities
…’

And so on.

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t perfect, but he was on to a good thing when he wrote that separation of church and state was a good and desirable thing.

Case in point is Colorado, an increasingly Fascist FunDumbMentalist state where « a judge and lawmakers are being threatened and harassed by nuts from the Springs »:

‘Colorado lawmakers who voted against impeaching a judge who made a gay-positive ruling in a child custody case are being swamped with demands from the conservative lobby group Focus on the Family to turn over all of their files, letters, documents, emails, phone records and notes. FOC, one of the most vocal opponents of gay issues, had sought the removal of Denver District Judge John Coughlin after he ruled last November that a woman could not subject her child to homophobic teachings at her church. … Judge Coughlin in awarding custody ordered [the woman] to prevent the child from receiving any homophobic religious teachings.’

That one really stirred up the FFs:

’”This is a judge who has put the word ‘homophobia’ into a court decision,” said Tom Minnery, Focus on the Family’s vice president for public policy. “That is very alarming to us. We want to know everything we can about this case and the reason why our elected officials did nothing to look into this matter.”’

But even the Fascist-leaning Colorado legislature refused to play ball:

‘When the impeachment measure reached the House Judiciary Committee a majority of members, including some conservative Republicans, found that Coughlin had done nothing to warrant impeachment. Even Gov. Bill Owens, who opposes same-sex marriage, advised against impeaching Coughlin. Now, FOC is using Freedom of Information Laws to see if lawmakers were “unduly influenced”. Some members of the committee call the action political blackmail and other accuse the FOC of harassment. One member, Rep. Anne McGihon (D-Denver) who refused to vote for impeachment, and who calls FOC’s actions harassment, said she would comply.’

Yup, she’ll comply. And FOC will continue to grow in power and influence in the state. Having lived there for a year, I can attest to its character and the curious paradox that, in spite of being so hyper-religious and praise-Jeebus, it’s one of the most unfriendly and aggressive and violent places I’ve ever visited (and that includes Oakland and Detroit). I’ve said many times that the Columbine HS massacre was no surprise.

And stuff like this just continues to bolster my impression. And to make me think that Thomas Jefferson knew what he was talking about.

The Torture Roundup for tonight:

« A pregnant Lynddie England gets hung out to dry ». She’s been turned into the face of American torture by the media and the military, her family is angry at the military, angry at Bush and in denial and she herself is back home and pregnant. The New York Times goes into exhaustive detail here about her personal life; detail which I haven’t seen on any of the male participants. Coming at the same time as Ann-thrax Coulter and other Fascist pundits’ blaming the torture and abuse of Iraqis on women in the military specifically and feminism generally, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

« A different view of Private England » and the place where she hailed from:

‘Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker’s daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call “a backwoods world”. She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero. At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong. “A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq,” Colleen Kesner said. “To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised. “Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there, they’re hunting Iraqis.” In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.’
—The Daily Telegraph

Which brings up a rather interesting and disturbing point; in George W. Bush’s Amurrican Empire, despite his protestations to contrary, it is not at all unAmerican to support torture and eye-for-an-eye. The entire rightwing Fascist chorus doesn’t think this is a big deal at all; their attitude was summed up thusly:

‘A colleague of Lynndie’s father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the whingeing. “We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis,” he said. “We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn’t kill ‘em, she didn’t cut ‘em up. She should have shot some of the suckers.”’

That’s a pretty succinct summation. And of course, torture and prisoner abuse is not only not unAmerican, it’s long been very much the American Way all over the world and in the heart of the Empire itself, in places like Parchman and Angola and San Quentin and McAlester and Huntsville, etc. While the Boy Emperor was the provincial governor of the Republic of Texas, the prison system spent most of his time in office under judicial consent decrees, a situation replicated in 39 other state prison systems. A judge wrote about the Texas system:

‘Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions.’

The judge imposed the decree after learning that Texas prison guards were allowing inmate gangs to buy and sell other inmates as sex slaves.

It’s simply a fact that this kind of thing is a very American as The New York Times article (from which the quote above comes) noted:

‘Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates. In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation. At Virginia’s Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.’

In fact, America’s penal system can be directly connected to Abu Ghraib:

‘The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country’s criminal justice system. Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company’s operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.’

He claims to have left Iraq after Abu Ghraib was reopened and has washed his hands of more recent events. But it really doesn’t matter. Instead of exporting freedom, liberty, democracy and our traditions of civil rights, Constitutional due process of law, respect for justice and so on, we’ve exported our arrogance, our violence and our prison system.

But that’s okay. The Cabal is circling the wagons. Fascist pundits are on the case, and « now a soldier has been trotted out to say ‘it ain’t that bigga deal »:

‘Arevalo said he was angered by the reports of prisoner abuse because he felt that soldiers at his compound were doing a good job. Arevalo said he even made a point of being friendly and talking to the prisoners, including one Iranian prisoner who used to tell soldiers off in English and Arabic. “We prided ourselves on keeping prisoners in control, and after that came out, I was somewhat disappointed,” he said. “It’s not the whole army’s fault. It’s two people who were bored or something. Just a few bad apples.”’

Yeah, he’s one of the good Germans, er, I mean Americans. Maybe some Iraqis will send him some rose petals …

Publicly, the NeoCons want us to think everything is a-okay and hunky-dory. Privately, « as the Washington Post reports », military officials are unhappy with the Dr. Strangerummy/Wolf-of-Dimwitz lunacy:

‘Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say that the United States faces the prospect of casualties for years without achieving its goal of establishing a free and democratic Iraq. Their major worry is that the United States is prevailing militarily but failing to win the support of the Iraqi people. That view is far from universal, but it is spreading, and being voiced publicly for the first time. Army Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who spent much of the year in western Iraq, said he believes that at the tactical level at which fighting occurs, the U.S. military is still winning. But when asked whether he believes the United States is losing, he said, “I think strategically, we are.”

Army Col. Paul Hughes, who last year was the first director of strategic planning for the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad, said he agrees with that view and noted that a pattern of winning battles while losing a war characterized the U.S. failure in Vietnam. “Unless we ensure that we have coherency in our policy, we will lose strategically,” he said in an interview Friday. “I lost my brother in Vietnam,” added Hughes, a veteran Army strategist who is involved in formulating Iraq policy. “I promised myself, when I came on active duty, that I would do everything in my power to prevent that [sort of strategic loss] from happening again. Here I am, 30 years later, thinking we will win every fight and lose the war, because we don’t understand the war we’re in.”’
—The Washington Post

Wolfie, of course, disagrees with all this and has his head planted firmly in his arse:

‘Wolfowitz, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, said that he does not think the United States is losing in Iraq, and said no senior officer has expressed that thought to him, either. “I am sure that there are some out there” who think that, he said in an interview yesterday afternoon. “There’s no question that we’re facing some difficulties,” Wolfowitz said. “I don’t mean to sound Pollyannaish—we all know that we’re facing a tough problem.” But, he said, “I think the course we’ve set is the right one, which is moving as rapidly as possible to Iraqi self-government and Iraqi self-defense.”’

But the Army has Wolfie’s number:

‘A senior general at the Pentagon said he believes the United States is already on the road to defeat. “It is doubtful we can go on much longer like this,” he said. “The American people may not stand for it—and they should not.” Asked who was to blame, this general pointed directly at Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz. “I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion,” he said. “Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] refused to listen or adhere to military advice.”’

Of course they didn’t. ‘Cause the Cabal is always right, the Cabal is always omniscient, praise the Cabal.

The article quotes senior military officials as saying we’re going to be in Iraq for at least five years (for the rest of the Boy Emperor’s ‘term’ wink wink?) and we will be taking casualities throughout that period. Interesting.

Downtown was (if possible) more packed today than usual. Must have been the nice weather and lots of out-of-towners. We saw a couple of movies at the State (“Latter Days” and “Good Bye Lenin!”—the latter for the second time), poked around at Kaleidoscope (a great, albeit cramped, store just down State from the theater, packed with used books, pulp paperbacks, old magazines, old toys and games, and all kinds of other cool stuff—like every great find you’ve ever seen at a garage sale crammed into one spot) and had dinner at Full Moon, which has taken over the business of Don Carlos, formerly a block south on Main. (Apparently closed—that’s the second Mexican restuarant to shut its doors since we moved here.) A nice evening out.

I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon thing to want to eat out at a restaurant and (if you’re a non-smoker, or if tobacco smoke makes you physically nauseated or you’re allergic to smoke) ask to be seated in an appropriate section. The restaurant we ate at last night made a pretense of seating us in non-smoking and then the server proceeded to get huffy and pissy when we complained that smoke from the smoking section was wafting over and interfering with our meal. She then proceeded to deep-six us and ring up our order only after we’d sat waiting for her to return with our check for fifteen minutes and we’d gotten up and walked up to the cash register. Along with that, she gave us this treacly, sing-songy little sarcastic number about how “oh, sorry,” she’d conveniently “forgotten” our check. Yeah, a really memorable dining experience, for all the wrong reasons. I’d love to have seen what Larry David would’ve done in a situation like that.

On another subject: yes, this blog is full of rants, kvetches, complaints, gripes, invectives, and questions. The point is, we do have that tendency, as do many blogs, partly because ranting is somehow definitionally part of what it is to be a blog (check out other blogs if you don’t believe me). Yet we also have many moments of wonderment, moments of reflection, moments of joy, and moments of beagleness.

So if you are reading us regularly (or even if you just stumbled upon us), and you’re okay with the fact that we sometimes gripe a little more than maybe we should, we’d like to say that we greatly appreciate your patience, your calm, and your support. Thank you.

Here’s a familiar one.

A newspaper (in this case, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) interviews a handful of undergrads (in this case, at the University of Minnesota) about their research practices. One student says that she goes to the library and uses it as a kind of away-from-home study hall, but uses it for nothing else. She complains that the library website is hard to navigate and that the library charges fines if a book is a day late.

Other common undergrad library use perceptions: The library system is too big and too daunting. Students want one answer and they want it now (“gimme gimme gimme”). Students like studying at Borders or Barnes and Noble; they can browse, find items quickly without having to memorize LC or Dewey Decimal numbers, take books off shelves and put them back when they’re done, don’t have to check anything out, and all of the books have new covers and attractive dust jackets. (All of the books in the library have had their jackets removed and are therefore “old” to the students.) They can bring food and beverages into the chain bookstore and not get yelled at or told to leave.

And of course, the big one: Everything you want to find out, you can find out on the Internet.

The one librarian interviewed for this article had exactly the right approach: “The question we are asking is what kind of library does the millennial generation need, not what do we want to give them.” She adds: “Faculty members are so annoyed by the low-quality research students do. I don’t want to let that happen. So what do we do to entice them here and make it welcoming and easy to use the library?”

But who knows how many libraries actually have the resources and the determination to put that mode of thinking into hard practice? Almost any of the remarks undergrads make in this article could be made about the University of Michigan’s library system (or, I imagine, most university library systems). The UM library system intimidated me when I first started using it, and I love libraries and everything about libraries, including the rows upon rows of LC-numbered books without dust jackets. It must have taken me at least a month or two of regular use before I shook the feeling that I wasn’t really supposed to know how to negotiate the library. And I forced myself to use the library for some reason almost every day. How, I wonder, would a freshman on a tight class deadline who’s not used the library extensively before feel upon encountering the vast UM morass?

It’s a tough question, and there are no easy answers, but the implications of finding a set of implementable answers are crucial to the survival of the library as we know it.

[Link courtesy LISNews.]