Commentary Index

The Iraq-War veterans are “insulted”. In March, CBS “exposed” Hillary Clinton for her “mis-statement” about her Bosnia 1996 trip: “I remember landing under sniper fire … Instead, we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles.”

As further proof that Presidential campaigns inevitably devolve down into minutae, mis-statements and trivia, Clinton was lambasted for what turned out to be obviously quite different that what she said she remembered from that time. Whether we think she lied, or “mis-spoke”, would seem to align closely with the political party we belong to.

The issue has been cussed and dis-cussed. It is still raging strong. A Presidential candidate should choose words carefully, expecially around the media, political enemies, and veterans. I’ve found that veterans tend to act like they “own” the ultimate truthes concerning war, military conflict or any combat issue, and they form a pretty effective grassroots political action group (PAC), as Sen. Kerry learned the hard way.

I have a slightly different take. I do hope Sen. Clinton learned from her mistake. I’m still willing to give her some benefit of the doubt. As an untutored civilian, I question whether Ms. Clinton had much of an idea at all what was really going on around her, and I have no doubt she feared for her safety. With no training in the event she actually came under fire, she ought to have feared for her life.

I’m a war veteran. Consider my own experience as a noncombat soldier in VietNam (Signal Corps):

• Our remote compound was protected only by a sentry, a wire fence and a lot of 5′ sandbag enbankments
• We worked every day within a few yards of 50,000 gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel storage
• In a year, we had several high security alerts, but no “strikes”
• bodies were flown into the local airfield about once a week, stacked like cord-wood on helicopter runner blades
• We safely completed a three-province, one week convoy, delivering rice and electronics, through known ”VC territory”
• the next convoy was wiped out to a man
• I was never shot at, and never won a medal

Was I scared at times? You bet. Was I a war veteran? The US Army says so. Did I ever run for cover with my head down? Nope. Do I call myself a war hero? Nope. Do I talk about those days any more? Only to others who were there. They understand.

When speaking before special interest groups, choose your words carefully. Chances are, unless you’re one of them, they understand the topic better than you do.

There it was, over conversation at the restaurant, right after “please pass the pepper”:

“I don’t think I could vote for Romney because he’s a Mormon, and he would have to do what the Mormon Church tells him to do.”

Following that were a litany of concerns about the LDS establishment’s stand on women, gays, blacks, and the very time and personal life of its Saints. There’s the tithing. And the missionary work. And the indisputable historical track record of what happens to members who stand up against the church and its beliefs, or even those who criticise, directly or indirectly, the teachings, traditions, and doctrinal stance of the church.

But, wait a minute, we’ve heard all this before. I remember this talk from over 40 years ago, when a young Roman Catholic named John F. Kennedy was running for the office of President of the United States. And my parents would have remembered that this echoed the reception given Governor Al Smith, when he ran as Democratic nominee for President, in 1928.

If we’re concerned about church influence over influential Mormon and Catholic nominees, what about Southern Baptist nominees? If you look at the track record, all three religions have horrible track records on freethinking idealism and civil liberties, particularly for minorities, and to varying extents, toward anyone outside their church. For gays and unspecified other minorities, Huckabee is a loose cannon.

For Summitlake.com to cite a Catholic news source is unusual, but take a look at the Catholic News Service’s article “Catholic presidential candidates abound, but faith’s effects unclear“. Our 2008 candidates cover a wide spectrum: Mormon, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, and United Church of Christ - to name a few. Not mentioned: Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, unsuccessful 2004 Presidential candidate, who is Jewish.

Who wants the unenviable position of arguing that some sects are safe from church meddling, where others are not?

More to the point: is it the candidate or the church who accepts responsibility for his or her views?

In our view, any person who uses the excuse “God told me to do it” or “Because my pastor told me so” is guilty of a monumental personal evasion: abdication of personal responsibility. The historical court at Nuremburg wasn’t impressed with this line of reasoning either, when Hitler’s highest deputies told the court, “I was only following orders.”

I don’t recall any charges that Governor Al Smith ran New York as a Catholic fiefdom, or that Mitt Romney governed maverick Massachusetts voters with the idea in mind of converting them all to Mormonism. Retrospectively, people tend to love or late the late President John F. Kennedy, but after the heady campaign days, I don’t recall either Catholic or non-Catholic Americans reminiscing, “but he was Catholic.”

If you believe the founding fathers had valid reasons for separation of church and state, you might vote against a candidate who vowed to amend the Constitution to enforce the views of their own particular sect. And, if you were gay, black or female (or simply affirmed that everyone’s rights deserves equal protection under the blindfolded eyes of Lady Liberty), you might vote against a candidate who vowed to marginalize or deprecate a minority group.

If you attack the church, you consolidate the adherents. I don’t like Huckabee, but I’ve known lots of Baptists who are fine people personally, and responsible people politically and socially. Is Huckabee representative of them and their views? I don’t think so.

Fanning popular fear of others who are “different”, in church, lifestyle, dress or views, is nothing new. It’s the oldest political dirty trick in civilization. If you look at the historical record of civilizations that were decimated or destroyed, most often it’s this fear that was used to fuel and justify the destruction. If you look at the historical record of civilizations that thrived and prospered, most often it was those that tolerated or blessed the natural differences among our cultures.

There’s nothing new about our conclusion, which reaffirms America’s existing de-facto practice: we generally vote for the candidate and their stand on the issues, not what church they do (or don’t) belong to.

Enough, already.

(02-06) 13:37 PST WASHINGTON (AP) –

The White House on Wednesday defended the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, saying it is legal — not torture as critics argue — and has saved American lives. President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects if certain criteria are met, a spokesman said.

We think the White House is probably sincere in its position. And why not? Bush has nothing personally to fear from it. He’s obviously comfortable with the feeling of drowning, he doesn’t know anything, and the globe will be getting used to more water sports anyway.

You know how it goes. You’re looking for a 16mm socket wrench in the workshop, and you end up cleaning and reorganizing the whole basement.

Commentary is one of Summitlake’s oldest departments, with articles posted every year from 1998 to present. This spans not only html code “ports” through at least three or four web design applications, but several theme changes over the decade. The older departments (in particular) have suffered loss of that prized page-to-page “consistency” so valued by web developers and so welcomed by eye-weary readers and surfers.

Moreover, if you know a little about coding HTML, you’ll know that porting a page through several successive design applications can result in code that ain’t a pretty sight.

I found some old pages that badly wanted reformatting. The code was ugly and hard to work with; the visual layout was poor and in some cases broken. Hence my remark about the 16mm socket, and the decision to clean up the whole basement.

Similar to what has already been done for “Astronomy” and “Miscellany”, all the HTML articles are gradually being moved into WordPress (like this article you’re reading now). In most cases, this involves stripping the original text into raw “plain text”, in NotePad, and reformatting each page manually. So it does take a while.

WordPress More Searchable

WordPress articles can be searched with the WordPress “Search” box in every right-hand margin. They are archived and indexed by month/year. You can click the “Articles” page and see a breakout of all department contents broken out by category. And, we’ve added “tags” support, so you can search for all articles having to do with the keyword “holidays” — even though that’s not a Category.

Major articles that were compiled into “books” of multiple HTML pages (using Frames technology) will not be converted into WordPress, but WordPress will be responsible for taking over their indexing. You’ll find a listing for each major publishing project under “Pages”, for example “Kansas Board of Education” (1999).

When the conversion project is done, you’ll see that the blue “Index Commentary” button has gone away. This is what we used to use to compile automated listings of HTML pages in a directory. With WordPress, that dual functionality will no longer be needed.

We had a 5 day mail outage here at the apartment complex, a delay that is impossible to explain in the confines of a short, civilized blog entry. I am trying to catch up on my New Yorkers. In the August 20 issue, I found a book review about four novels by the late Sci-Fi eccentric Philip K. Dick, who is evidently making a comeback.

The book review is by the incredibly accomplished and insightful writer Adam Gopnik, who needs no introduction to New Yorker readers but is sadly not adequately known outside the world of the literati.

In his review, BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE, Gopnik delves into the Philip K. Dick brand of “craziness” Sci-Fi. According to Gopnik, Dick novels are surreal in theme to the point of craziness, and never fail to disappoint those who expect the hero and heroine to ride off into the sunset. In the Dick telling of the future of the universe, the madnesses of absurdly strange worlds are rendered into the normal and commonplace, much, for example, as it has been said that Los Angelenos learn to thrive on the bizarre and make it run day-to-day under the rules of the plebian and expected norm.

My exposure to Philip K. Dick in the 1980’s was mercifully brief. All I remember about the novel Blade Runner (now a movie) is that it imposed an art form upon the outlandish, purposefully stretched it beyond credibility, punished that ingredient in the human spirit which occasionally struggles to do the right thing, and drowned hope of future redemption with great tsunami-like waves of corruption, degradation, despair and failure.

For entertainment as in life, I am one of those ignoramuses who still hold out for the happy ending.

It does not escape Gopnik’s notice that there are political parallels to be drawn from all this. And I have already told you all I remember, or want to, about Blade Runner.

Without further adieu, I am going to quote Gopnik, who saw the Johnson-Nixon years here, and then reproduce a quote he extracted from Philip K. Dick, and then leave you to the mercies of your own imagination.

Do you see what I see behind our past forty years? Are we manufacturing foes like DVDs for the home entertainment center? Where are we headed, indeed?

Gopnik: “And the interesting corollary: it won’t matter; the world of speaking ghosts will work about as well as this one. A society of paranoids can work as well as Nixon’s America did, and, perhaps, in similar ways.”

“Of the normalized madhouse on the Alphane moon, a psychiatrist says:”

Leadership in this society here would naturally fall to the paranoids. . . . But you see, with paranoids establishing the ideology, the dominant emotional theme would be hate. Actually hate going in two directions; the leadership would hate everyone outside its enclave, and also would take for granted that everyone hated it in return. Therefore their entire so-called foreign policy would be to establish mechanisms by which this supposed hatred directed at them could be fought. And this would involve the entire society in an illusory struggle, a battle against foes that didn’t exist for a victory over nothing.

“Brer Rabbit keep on axin’ ‘im, en de Tar-Baby, she keep on sayin’ nothin’, twel present’y Brer Rabbit draw back wid his fis’, he did, en blip he tuck ‘er side er de head. Right dar’s whar he broke his merlasses jug. His fis’ stuck, en he can’t pull loose. De tar hilt ‘im. But Tar-Baby, she stay still, en Brer Fox, he lay low.” — from The Wonderful Tar Baby Story

There is a troublesome article in the July 30 New Yorker, The Apostate, by David Remnick. It is about a controversial Cassandra, a social critic and Zionist gadfly named Avraham Burg. Burg, a former Speaker in the Knesset, is author of a book “Defeating Hitler”, the central point of which seems to be that the mindset of the modern Israeli state has not changed much from the siege mentality in the early years of the Jewish State after World War II.

I would rather tackle the Tar Baby with my own two fists than present a list of my own recommendations for the future of Israel. I am not well read or experienced on the topic. In forty years, I have progressed from being thrilled by the tale told in Leon Uris’ “Exodus”, to realizing that something has gone seriously wrong in Israel, to grasping that we do not really seem to even have a serious handle on what is going on in Washington these days.

I highlighted key passages in the Remnick article, flagged the article page 32 with a fluorescent Post-It marker, and put the whole magazine unceremoniously in the recycle pile. This is Tar-Baby material, which is why I found the article troublesome. There is not even anybody at work with whom I would dare discuss it, these days.

I dragged it out of the recycle bag a week later. While you the reader might always follow the link and read the entire article on the New Yorker’s online pages, I the writer would just like to present a few of the highlighted passages and let you make up your own mind.

“[Burg] describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority.”

“BURG: I say that as of this moment Israel is a state of trauma in nearly every one of its dimensions … Would our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed in Israel the ability to trust the world? … Instead, we do not trust the world, they will abandon us, and here’s Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black umbrella and we will bomb them alone.”

Burg was also reported by Remnick to have said Israelis “are not at the stage to be sensitive enough to see what happens to others and in many ways are too indifferent to the suffering of others”.

In other words, Hamas bombs Israel with its Scud missiles. Israel wipes the offending township off the map. Americans characteristically would react the same way, and not without provocation. But this has been going on, in one form or another, for fifty years.

Even the casual observer of world affairs can see that such words and thoughts would be regarded as controversial in today’s Israel. One Knesset member said, Remnick reports, “that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetary, in Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders.”

This guy sounds about as popular in Israel as Salman Rushdie (”Satanic Verses” ) is in Iran. You’ll recall the notorious Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill author Rushdie for alleged blasphemy or unbelief.

I would like to conclude with a citation, reported by Remnick, attributed to columnist Sarah Honig of the Jerusalem Post.

“The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimatization.”

Note the clear implication that some ideas are too dangerous to be discussed, and, more particularly, the insinuation that free expression of ideas ought to be controlled before they spread, like wildfire.

If such thinking is popular, and it appears that, in some circles, it is, this is not the dialogue of a free state. It is the dialogue of panic, the agitative rhetoric of the same immediately pre-Nazi era that the modern state of Israel, we had supposed, was founded to be free of.

An ages-old theme resurfaced in the current Scientific American, namely, the “problem” of whether there should even be a dialog between people of science and people of faith. Put that way, right there you can see the lines being drawn in the sand: if you are on the other side of that line, experience has taught me that you are the enemy, and we cannot even talk, and the real “problem” is one of “containment”: how do we draw a circle in the sand and confine you to it?

In the July feature article “Should Science Speak to Faith?” , Scientific American contributors Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss debate “about the best ways to oppose religiously motivated threats to scientific practice or instruction.” Both are scientists, both work in their spare time to keep Creationism out of the classroom, and they don’t always necessarily agree on methodology.

This isn’t really about religion, or science, or even philosophy. It’s a tactical debate. With all due credit to the scientists, I think they and their host publication overlooked an obvious fact. It’s really a political issue.

Put that way, why would scientists be more qualified to critique the politics of the American classroom than, say, photography or speed-boat racing? For that matter, why would prominent TV evangelists be qualified to tell Americans what scientific content is appropriate for our children?

Here at Summitlake.com, there’s no question that there’s a battle for the minds of American children, no question that Creationism belongs in Sunday School and not high school Biology, and no question that we get our fair share of seriously disturbed hate mail because we say: the evidence is in. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, early hominids go back over a million years, and homo sapiens emerged a hundred thousands years ago (give or take), spreading to Europe around 40,000 years ago.

We get even more mail for saying that there is no place for teaching Creationism as a serious theory of science, side-by-side with the accumulated evidence of thousands of years of research and testing, just as if Evolution is only just another unsubstantiable opinion.

And we get no thanks for suggesting that, if you were going to teach Creationism, you would teach it as part of a survey of world religions, many of which have their own theories of creation, being sure to include the views (as we’ve written before) of Tibetan Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and my personal favorite, Navajo.

But what is taught in American public schools is a political decision, and if you don’t like it, you can teach your kids yourself, or put them in a private school that subscribes to your personal views. And there are many valid reasons for doing so, but there are no valid reasons for trying to require the children of other parents to absorb your views too.

Instead of wasting time debating “Science vs. Religion”, perhaps we need to stop, step back, and take a fresh look.

Over the ages the world has honored many scientists - including Einstein - with deep, strongly held religious convictions. They didn’t see a conflict with their science. There are also many religious leaders, including the Vatican’s own astronomers, who don’t see a firm grasp of the Big Bang as in any way conflicting with their religion.

This is the mature, grown-up outlook. The desire to coerce the physcial manifestations of the entire universe into conformance with one’s personal views is the hallmark of an entirely different and unwholesome mindset.

The June National Geographic carried an article on botanist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus (b. 1707, Sweden). Linnaeus is credited with the modern system of taxonomy, by which we classify and name all our plants, and even with the name homo sapiens for our species. Was he an “evolutionist?”

“On the contrary, he heartily embraced the prevailing creationist view of biological origins, which stipuated that studying nature reveals evidence for the creative powers and mysterious orderliness of God. He wasn’t such a pious man, though, that he sought nothing but godliness in the material world … He believed that humankind should discover, name, count, understand, and appreciate every kind of creature on Earth.”

There you go.

Lighten up, scientists and creationists.

Our personal Gods are not going to “go away” because somebody else’s is different. The flip side: the personal theologies of certain American geographic regions don’t get to tell the rest of the world what to think, how to act, and how to educate their kids - and you have only to look as far as Baghdad to see why.

Part of the beauty of a personal faith is that it’s personal. And we should honor that. If some religious leaders have lost sight of that, we don’t have to accept that as a valid reason why we should subsidize and patronize everyone else’s personal gospels in order to enjoy and savor our own.

I don’t see a conflict between Science and Religion, per se. What I see are global political conflicts between political demagogues acting in the name of the religions they claim to represent, but don’t.

I won’t live the required future centuries to see it, but it would be nice for humankind to get to a simpler and more benevolent day where others’ religious beliefs were honored as sacred as our own - even when we didn’t personally subscribe to them.

If Americans can pause to rue the institutionalized destruction of “different” native American beliefs, values and culture, then surely we owe ourselves, as modern-day Americans, the same courtesy.

Howdy Pardner, still think we’re doing the right thing?

Congratulations on purchasing The War. Your credit card has been charged for $2 trillion dollars (US) as you authorized. Sorry, no returns or refunds on perishables.

Definition: “Insanity” - repetition of the same actions over and over again, while expecting something new to come of it.

Let’s stop for a minute. If you ever made a mistake in your life, would you throw out all the tools you had to find and fix the problem?

As a nation we’re looking at Iraq in terms of whether it makes us look good or it makes us look bad.

Like a cheap drunk in the final stages of divorce, we only agree to that which seems to justify our position, and we deny anything that suggests we could have done it at all differently. The net result is that even our best friends find it impossible to discuss it with us. “Loyal” friends (both of them) praise our integrity for staying the course, which in this case consists of beating our wife. Enemies and cheap treasonous vipers (everybody else) stubbornly refuse to see beyond alleged wife-beating issues to our many finer qualities and - egad my good man! - overlooked states of rightness.

Let’s shift the focus back to what’s happening, not what others think about it. We need to start looking at Iraq in terms of what it’s doing to the people there. We stopped worrying about what’s best for the Iraqi people after the first or second week of the war.

Ordinary people who just want to stay out of harm’s way and provide for their families are getting murdered, mostly by partisan extremists among their fellow countrymen. These folks don’t really care whether we think we’re doing the right thing or not. They just want us to stop doing it.

In the Zippy cartoon above, Toad is saying, “Um .. yee hah … we’re here to … to foster DEMOCRACY, and … uh … train th’ Sunnis, I mean, th’ Shiites …”

Come on, quick, which is it? You have five seconds. Fact is, many of our friends and neighbors couldn’t be pressed to do a better job than Toad, even if they were riding in the popular TV quiz show Cash Cab. Yet they want to keep on doing it, whatever it is. How long before we all admit we don’t know what the hell we’re doing over there?

We should be working with our existing allies, and forging new alliances in the MidEast, to figure out who’s going to help shepherd Iraq back on a path to stability when we get out.

It’s time for America to dry out, George. The world doesn’t want to hear any more excuses. It used to look to us for results. Now it just wants them.

I read a fascinating story about the Beijing-Lhasa Tibet Railway, a monumental engineering feat by any accounting.

The article by correspondent Pankaj Mishra, The Train to Tibet, appears in the April 16 New Yorker. (The text of the article is not available online).

As an armchair railway buff, I was struck by the engineering difficulty of constructing track on the fast-melting permafrost (global warming), the systems to deliver oxygen-rich air to passengers at 16,400 feet, and the political side of the railway that we do not hear so much about. The railway serves as a delivery system for trainloads of Han Chinese, who already dominate the Tibetans, now a minority, living in their own capital of Lhasa. Many also view the railway as a British-style colonial device for plundering rich mineral resources and diverting them to Beijing.

The intense Red Guard style propaganda and blue laws, so out of date and unfashionable in Beijing, are enforced in Lhasa. You can be arrested for owning a photograph of the exiled Dalai Lama, the article reports. My reaction: when young people now carry Lenovo laptop PC’s, how can officialdom stop you from smuggling all the downloaded images you want from Google?

I’m not religious in any way that most of you out there could detect. Nevertheless, I have always admired the unflappable Dalai Lama as a powerful symbol of passive resistance and peace. We’re certainly aware of China’s immature and ineffectual efforts to regulate and control internet access as a means of censorship, but you can’t be arrested for owing a jpg image of the Dalai Lama if they can’t find it. At Google Images, I looked at results 1-20 of about 292,000 finds for “Dalai Lama”.

Although I respect Tibetan Buddhism, it would never have occurred to me to download and post a picture of the Dalai Lama unless I’d read that it was banned in his native country. I invite everyone, whether living in Lhasa or Livermore (CA), to locate and download their own image of the Dalai Lama. You can own your own copy, no matter what the officials have to say about it.

I’m getting emails about the “Fair Tax Act” that’s making the internet circuit.

The FairTax Act (HR 25, S 1025) is nonpartisan legislation. It abolishes all federal personal and corporate income taxes, gift, estate, capital gains, alternative minimum, Social Security, Medicare, and self-employment taxes and replaces them with one simple, visible, federal retail sales tax administered primarily by existing state sales tax authorities.

I’ve been in favor of a national sales tax for, my gosh, over 40 years now. This alone practically guarantees we’ll never get it.

In the 1970’s, Howard Jarvis (of California Prop 109 fame) took his “we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more” tax relief bandwagon to Sweden, one of the most highly taxed and nationalized countries on earth.

The Swedes have socialized medicine, nationalized cradle to grave health insurance, subsidized housing and every other benefit that gives conservatives nightmares in most of the rest of the world. Last I heard, they also had one of the highest literacy and longevity rates in the world, and one of the highest standards of living.

The Swedes weren’t interested in Jarvis or his tax relief ideas. Jarvis found he wasn’t really even welcome there. He wondered why. He returned to the United States with the explanation that Swedes just liked the idea of everybody having their hands in everybody else’s pockets too much to give it up.

As you might suspect, each Swede secretly believed they were dipping into others’ income more than others were dipping into theirs.

And it’s the same here. You have until the day after tomorrow to file your Form 1040. I would just go ahead and file. Don’t hold your breath.