Puffin’s Place

So Obama is going to toss a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Stillwell riots. Hmm. That’s about like intoning, “Some of my best friends are gay” while festooning the White House with rainbow tissue paper.

It’s easy. Creates no discord or risk. Puts one on the side of the angels without risk of having to wrestle with the devil.

And it is ludicrous. What gay man or woman today is comforted by knowing that the pres, or anyone else, has gay friends? Who gives a rat’s ass? So long as DADT is the ruling mantra of the armed services and the Defense of Marriage Act gets White House support, why would any of us breathe a sigh of relief that a 40-year old riot is being commemorated!

Not only are campaign pledges being ignored and, in some cases, betrayed, but Obama shows no sign of taking on the hard stuff: civil and legal rights. And the Roiling Brains in print and tv tell us to cool it and wait till some significant problems have been solved.

Memo: DADT and the DMA are pretty vital for the gay population. Try taking property rights away from straights and see how patient Jack and Jill will be.

Obama, if you haven’t time and energy and will to tackle the real issue, at least don’t wave symbolic tissue paper at us.

Once again I lament the lack of proportion among many of us. When asked to make a choice, it appears to me that we always choose the bling over the blood. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett are dead–no great reason for joy there. But also no great reason for wall to wall media coverage and the language exhibitionism around us as tv molls inquire of Fawcett’s stepson whether the family is hurt that Jackson’s death has pushed her demise off the front pages.

Both, I suppose, gave some of us varied moments of pleasure, but by what measure is either one a hero, a giant among humans, a source of significance? Aside from his largess to children, Jackson was a self-indulgent self-absorbed character who indulged in drugs and teenage music. Fawcett was an attractive woman who did some decent acting and had the good sense not to marry her bloated, spoiled lover. No heroes there, say I.

Meanwhile the blood of Neda and other nameless boys and girls and men and women lies about the world, small players in significant moments.

How come we seem unable to tell the difference?

These post-election days are not as fiery as those before the vote, but I find myself unable to resist the temptation to come back and launch more regular words into Grand Canyon.

Thinking today, for example, of how I feel about Barack Obama.

I am daily proud of his demeanor and restraint. I applaud him for not going cowboy over the Iran drama. I admire his coolness and his almost constant motion toward specific goals. I am proud of him when he is overseas. Our first couple is, to my mind, as good as it gets.

I am frustrated by Obama’s endorsement of the Defense of Marriage Actg; by his failure to move fast in closing Gitmo and sending all of its inhabitants back to their native countries; I wish his environmental people care more about the polar bear; I wish he has not left the LBGT population feeling used for energy and money and then abandoned by Obama’s apparent disinclination to take on the military over the absurd don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. (Which, come to think of it, might better be invoked with carious Republican pols.)

But in balance, I continue to be relieved and satisfied that Obama won the election. He is the best president we have had in decades. And even he cannot do everything at once. Or buck the self-serving intellectual laziness of the Congress.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
The Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture rallied on Capitol Hill in March 2008.

The Washington Region Religious Campaign Against Torture rallied on Capitol Hill in March 2008.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Today’s Washington Post includes the above dismal observation.

Who knows why. Seems to me way too many self-defined Christians and self-defined-other are eager to put aside values for the my-country-right-or-wrong syndrome.

If anyone can convince me that god really endorses cruelty, that’s fine. Another “force” to consign to the trash heap.

The New York Times international edition includes info on the released torture memos as well as links to additional relevant info, including originals at the ACLU site.

Check it out here.

The current flogging of the torture issue may very well drive this blogger to a scream: the loathsome and without scruples Dick Cheney says such treatment called forth city-saving intelligence. Others argue that other, legal means would have had equal success.

And both side fog endlessly about who bears the ultimate responsibility: those who carry out the torture, those who justified the torture in legal memos, or those at the top who manipulated the system to justify their lawbreaking?

Anyone remember Nuremburg where the Allies tried the defeated for war crimes. Remember the plea of the Nazi subordinate who tossed bodies into ovens, claiming “I was just following orders.” Remember how eager the Bush club was to punish the lower orders for Abu Ghraib while never indicating that the shame of the soldiers and General Karpinski were the direct result of Administration orders?

Ever hear of the real hero of the Iraq war, Alyssa Peterson who killed herself rather than participate in torture?

The issue at hand is not whether or not torture works. The issue is that it is illegal; it is barbaric; it is the last resort of a bullying and clumsy mind; and it is NOT what this country has historically been about.

Not its leaders. Not its servants to the law. Not its people.

We should try and judge each participant from the non-com diapering a prisoner or leaving a threatening bug to the desk jockey administering the program to the shyster carving the law for the appetites of savages to the president, vice president, secretary of defense, etc.

Or, if real justice is impossible, I hope the current Administration along with Congress, the Supremes, and the media unites in sending a huge wad of spit on all those we are too preoccupied to try.

I’ll be returning to this blog regularly very shortly, but did want to jump in for a couple of quick thoughts.

Reading Christpher Hitchens’ God is Not Great recently and want to share a delicious last line: “We have first to transcend our prehistory, and escape the gnarled hands which reach out to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty pleasures of subjection and abjection.”

Secondly, a thought directed at Obama backers now glued to media conspiracy hokum and muttering darkly about the President’s performance: He is doing precisely what he said he would do if elected, and we elected him. We knew he was inexperienced in the ways of Washington, and we elected him. We knew Congress to be largely ungovernable when it actually moves at all. We knew the country to be in a mess the proportions of which we could only guess.

Hoe about we let this chap we voted for, supported, and believed in have a chance. Who has the temerity to expect Obama in 50 days to undo the grotesqueries of the past eight years?

Speaking of which, Good on GWB for not taking pot shots at the President. Best to leave that to the media who sustains its 24/7 by hacking plots and intentional evil out of the drab tapestry of indifference, unintelligence, and the capacity to move straight ahead only in moments of feeling absurd.

Why is Obama sustaining Bush’s Constitution-breaking faith based government office?

The first amendment makes clear “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Although this Amendment does not refuse government the right to consider matters of religion, it makes clear that government is one thing and religion is another, quite separate thing.

Make no mistake: I support Obama. I appreciated his mention of non-believers in his inauguration speech. But why he believes that government has any role at all is “faith-based” matters is a dangerous mystery to me.

Americans are atheists, agnostics, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and myriad other religions. None of which are any business of the government.

President Obama, keep the religionists out of our government.