De Facto Power Shifts

by Dennis Green

[Fox News Now Special Report] Dateline Washington, D.C. Viewers may recall that in January, 2000, in a childish display of frat boy humor, Clinton staffers, on their way out of the White House, removed or disabled the “W” key on all the typewriters and computers they left behind. Some have speculated that in the early days of the Bush administration, in one of those “unintended consequences,” this prank caused a de facto shift in power to Vice President Dick Cheney, who began receiving all the more important memos.

[Show clip of Cheney cradling shotgun…]

Now, investigators from Fox News Now have discovered that Bush staffers, in a fair play turnabout, pulled off a similar coup by removing or disabling all of the “O” computer keys on their way out. They also re-programmed the “auto-correct” feature on the computers so that the personal pronoun capital “I” would always default to a “U” symbol. Jolly good fun.

[Show clip of George W. grinning broadly.]

But again, the unintended consequences of these merry pranksters’ mischief making are manifold. We believe the disabled “O” has led to a de facto power shift in the Obama White House — not to Vice President Joe Biden — but to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who appears to be calling all the shots.

And the disabled personal pronoun has created a curious rhetorical shift in Obama’s perspective. In his speeches, he says “we will negotiate with you, the Iranian people,” and that “we will empower each and every American with these protections…”

[Show clip of Obama speaking in Cairo.]

In fact, in his first 340 days in office, Obama has given 927 speeches and has not used the personal pronoun “I” even once. He has never said, for example, “I want this to happen or I will do that…”

This may account for the unusual diffidence or stand-offishness evident in the highest office in the land, the very opposite of that take charge, command presence, mission accomplished predecessor of his. It may, in fact, account for the slogans Democrats have just rolled out for the 2010 midterm elections:

“U Can Do It!”

And

“Status Quo U Can Believe In!”

Someday, perhaps, historians will ponder these little known facts uncovered by the dogged determination of your trustworthy correspondents and reporters at Fox News Now, and conclude, as we have, that even the smallest actions can have far-reaching consequences.

[Close on moderator, yours truly.]

©2009 Dennis Green

Jesus the Prophet

by Dennis Green

Jesus figures prominently in the Koran, is the subject of many verses, and he is one of the major Prophets acknowledged by Mohammed. In the Koran, he was born of a virgin, under a palm tree in Palestine, and was never crucified but was rescued from that fate by God, when he complained, “My God, My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” And then Yahweh/Allah relented, and spared his life.

In Islam, God is not a person, and it is in fact idolatry to try and describe him in human terms, such as “Father” or “Old Man with a Beard,” or anything not ineffable and numinous. And to posit a “Holy Trinity” or imagine Jesus as the Son of God and a deity of equal significance — that is heresy. They may be onto something.

Jesus is just one of many Prophets, from Abraham to Ishmael to Isaac to Moses, David, and the last Prophet is Mohammed. Many Christians are ignorant of other religions, as they are discouraged from taking an interest in any faith but their own, and probably no religion is more hidden to the average Christian than Islam.

But they are often, also, ignorant about their own religion. They don’t seem to understand, or appreciate, that at the very heart of their belief system, their theology, is human sacrifice. “Jesus Paid It All.” Indeed. His crucifixion is regarded as a propitiation, a satisfaction in abstentia, for the sins of us all, a Way for the anger of Yahweh to be appeased.

Likewise, when we are told that the communion wine represents His Blood, and the communion wafer represents His Flesh, (“Take, eat, drink, do this in remembrance of me!”), we are practicing a cannibalistic ritual as primitive and as ancient as any tribe on earth. Plain and simple.

But all these facts of cultural anthropology are glossed over in modern times. Whole congregations revere human sacrifice and practice a form of symbolic cannibalism without even giving it any thought. Religion is like that. Especially on Christmas day.

Prayer, ritual, sacrifice — these ancient traditions are alive with us today. But the Catholic Popes, and all those Spanish conquistadores and missionaries did their best to stamp out so-called “Pagan” religions because they couldn’t stand the competition. Mother Church is a lot like Microsoft.

Meanwhile, divination, Nature Worship, alternative medicine and healing, meditation, chanting, animal totems, human and animal sacrifice, the eating of the flesh, the drinking of the blood, all persist. The hunger for a spiritual life is eternal, and if the old religions become calcified and un-fulfilling, new ways will be found, or even older ways will be resurrected.

There is something so primal, so compelling about human sacrifice and propitiation that it has been practiced in Christendom for more than 20 centuries. Only in the Koran is Jesus regarded as so loved by God that, like Ishmael, by his father Abraham, he is spared.

©2009 Dennis Green

America's War Chest

by Dennis Green

This year’s “Defense” appropriation — America’s very own war chest — will total some $626 billion, including some $4.2 billion in earmarks, 1,720 little chunks of fat. It is the largest appropriations measure passed by Congress this year, and is expected to be signed by President Obama without a whisper of dissent from the GOP. These tightwads, who have blamed Obama for every penny of the deficit, including Bush’s $800 billion TARP measure of ’08, never saw a dollar of defense spending they didn’t love.

The measure also includes some $128 billion for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, although some Republicans say that isn’t enough. Why is their sense of “fiscal responsibility” so selective?

Well, it begins with ideology. Most conservatives in America are congenital war hawks, no matter what the cause or the mission. They are unquestioning when it comes to invading other countries, and even in bombing targets in sovereign, allied countries, such as the use of Predator drones in Pakistan, regardless of the legality of such actions.

These normally law and order advocates also turn a blind eye to defense spending because of very practical reasons. Many of those billions of dollars go to defense contractors in their home districts, or to Big Money corporations such as Halliburton, who donate many hundreds of millions to their campaigns. And in all fairness, this is also the motivation for many “Neo-Liberals” or “Corporate Democrats” as well.

Rogue states and failed nations exist all over the globe, of course, and we don’t target all of them, but we do have U.S. troops in 220 nations worldwide. In some instances, such as Japan and Guam, our military bases are a source of much anti-American sentiment. The expense of such bases makes the potential costs of health care reform pale into insignificance.

“Insurgencies” opposing American forces are many, and are often nativist groups resisting our occupation or presence in their homeland. Americans’ sense of world geography and sovereignty is malleable, according to perceived threats, imagined hostilities to American interests, more often economic, rather than security interests in particular.

To the average citizen, even one who has followed and attempted to study U.S. Foreign Policy, we might just as well, as Whitman says, “write upon the doorpost ‘Whim!’” because there is nothing consistent or predictable about it, any more than there is a solid, bedrock principle in the GOP about deficit spending. “Friend or Foe, come or go, just cross my palm with silver.”

And ultimately, it’s all about power politics. No entity in America is as powerful as the Pentagon, its generals, its advisors and its contractors — such as Blackwater, no matter what its name. No president, no committee of Congress, no critic has the power to stand up to that Military/Industrial Complex.

Only the ragtag Vietcong could defeat them, and for the past eight years, the Taliban in Afghanistan. None of these insurgents had a West Point, or nuclear subs, or Navy SEALS, or the hundreds of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry available to the U.S. military, and yet their determination and cunning is often superior to our best training and supplies.

A huge war chest is no substitute for fighting to defend your homeland against a foreign invader, and though we might coat it with glorious and elaborate rhetoric, unfortunately, that is our role, as it was in North Korea, in Vietnam and it is who we are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Imagine how you would feel if foreigners invaded your hometown. You might fight back.

©2009 Dennis Green

Neo-Liberalism in the U.S.A.

by Dennis Green

Even before Bill Clinton was elected President of America, the Neo-Liberalism Movement in this country held sway over the Democratic Party. This is the movement away from Progressive, populist, Jacksonian Democracy ideals toward a Democratic Party in league with Wall Street. Sometimes called “Corporate Democrats,” they are faux liberals, not ideological conservatives like the “Blue Dogs,” but willing to side with “Big Money” rather than the interests of the common man.

Concentrated economic power is a much bigger threat to democracy in America today than either the Religious Right or “Islamo-Fascism” abroad. It has blocked meaningful health care reform with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying, as well as any substantial movement away from dependency on foreign oil. And most recently, it has stymied any economic reform whatsoever. Congress isn’t just dysfunctional, it’s on the make and on the take. The fix is always in.

Armchair politicians who complain about President Obama’s “socialism” and his “radical” ways don’t have the slightest understanding of this shift in American politics that began after the defeat of Walter Mondale for president. That’s when Democratic strategists decided that they couldn’t depend on liberals groups, think tanks, labor unions and vox populi to compete with the Republicans for campaign funds. This was a purely pragmatic decision, and had nothing to do with ideology.

Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, was Bill Clinton’s chief political advisor, and he learned from the failure of health care reform in 1994 that you couldn’t go into the process cross-wise with the big insurance and pharmaceutical companies. So he assured these economic powers, known as the “medical/industrial complex,” that their perks and privileges would not be threatened, (such as exemptions from anti-trust laws), but also that their subscriber/customer bases would be vastly expanded through federal subsidies to low income Americans.

The trade-offs? No banning of patients with “pre-existing” conditions, no dropping of the very sick, some indefinite limit on lifetime expenditures — but the additional profits for Big Pharm and Big Insurance far outweigh these concessions. And there will be no “public option” let alone a “single-payer” plan, the only measures which would make reform of insurance and drugs really meaningful.

The line between “pragmatic” and “cynical” can be thin indeed, just as the line between my days as a “realist” and those as a “pessimist” are often blurred. Yet I think that being a ruthless pragmatist means that I have to accept most things as they are, the things I cannot change. And give me the wisdom to know the difference.

Real health care reform means bringing the hospitals, doctors and nurses to heel, eliminating “fee for service” reimbursement and payment plans, as well as all unnecessary tests and procedures shown statistically to make no improvement in outcomes. But that is a long way off.

In the meantime, the neo-liberal, corporate Democrats are just as corrupt as their Republican counterparts, and as corrupt as regimes we prop up in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s human nature, and that’s the way it is, goin’ out West young man!

©2009 Dennis Green

The Grinch is GOP!

by Dennis Green

Well, we’re getting some kind of health care reform, which many Americans may like very much. It limits how much insurance companies can spend on “overhead” such as marketing and high salaries; it prevents people being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions; and it adds about 25 million Americans to the system. No thanks to the Republicans.

They bleat that President Obama’s approval rating has dropped below 50%, but it’s still far more than double theirs, which holds at 17%. And they have gambled on a very risky strategy: that Obama’s policies would fail to pass at all, or if they do that they will disappoint a majority of the voters in the upcoming midterms of 2010. Fat chance.

Meanwhile, not a viable candidate on the right in sight. Huckabee’s pardon of a vicious, unredeemed murderous thug cancels out his chances. And Sarah’s “misapprehensions,” (i.e., outright lies), pile up around her like a deep snowdrift. Death panels indeed. They’re meeting in the airline hanger of her bus tour even now.

The head of the GOP says that Democrats have just “Flipped the finger to the American public” by passing this bill. And such rhetoric reveals a mindset that may be, unfortunately, typical of his party. They mistake their own chronic chthonic view of life as the spirit of the American people.

And yes, Big Money controls the U.S. Congress, but every single Republican is bought and paid for, and only a majority of Democrats, perhaps 200 in the House and 40 in the Senate. There are still a few “Non-Corporate Democrats” left, and they voted for this bill rather than leaving 47 million Americans out in the cold.

So now the waiting, and the observing, and the carping begin. But if, nine months from now, a majority of Americans like what they see, the GOP will be forever a minority party, out of office and out of the running. The reasons for this are many.

They have lost the support of genuine fiscal conservatives by driving up the deficit during the last administration. They have lost the support of libertarians by catering to the religious right, which wants MORE government interference in our private lives and decision-making, not less. From abortion rights to gay rights to the civil rights of legal immigrants, the religious right wants Americans to be less free, not more free, of Big Brother, or is that Father McCoughlin?

And now they have chosen the strategy of Obstructionism to try and create gridlock in the Congress and block any progress by a president whose election makes them positively apoplectic. But they forget that such a strategy used by Democrats against President Ronald Reagan failed miserably and made him an American icon, prompting Spiro Agnew to call them “the nattering nabobs of negativity.”

Being a nattering nabob of negativity is just as silly, as burlesque, as it sounds. For Republicans, it’s like dressing up in black face and putting on a minstrel show to present an alternative to voters who have elected a black president. They need to remember the fate of the Grinch, and I don’t mean Newt.

©2009 Dennis Green

The Mad House

by Dennis Green

I’d been studiously avoiding the hit TV show, “Mad Men,” for all the right reasons. I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, worked in advertising for almost 30 years, and was partner and creative director in my own boutique ad agency for 20. The very notion of this replication made me cringe.

And then I caught a few scenes from the show late one night on Oprah, clips she showed when she had two of the stars as her featured guests. And sure enough, it was god-awful.

The most obvious hallmark of its in-authenticity, for me, are its fabled use of drinking and smoking, which permeate the show, and these characters’ work lives. As someone who started smoking cigarettes at the age of 10, in 1950, in the fifth grade — and shook hands with John Barleycorn a few years later — I know my way around a shot glass and a pack of smokes, I’ll tell ya.

(And I quit smoking cigarettes 20 years ago, but that’s another story…)

So what’s the problem? Well, in those “Mad Men” scenes, I saw that everyone — from the actors to the writers to the directors and the producers of the show — is just so damned self-conscious about the drinking and the smoking that they become stylized, little archaic rituals from a bygone era, and they’re not that, and never will be. People still smoke and drink, and in some countries do so at the office.

And back in the day, cocktails and a ciggies hanging off your lip were something we did unconsciously, something we took for granted, the way kids use their cell phones today.

But on that show, people are constantly flicking their ashes and blowing great clouds of smoke, like little girls playing “Grown Up” and serving tea. Likewise, they make a great show of the jiggers and the highball glasses, as if Prohibition is still in effect, instead of casually knocking back a few with lunch.

Consequently, I fear the show is designed to resemble a kind of archeological dig — “Oh, let’s work in a funny 1960 hairdo! How about an IBM Selectric TYPEWRITER! What a hoot! A museum piece..!”

Most of the actors on the show weren’t even born yet in 1960, so they can be forgiven, but somebody responsible for the look and feel of the series has to be a grownup of a certain age, no?

For let me tell you, 1960 was only 50 years ago, half a century, half a lifetime if we’re lucky, not a different era, not a time gone by. John Kennedy, whose peccadilloes far exceeded Tiger’s, was running for president, and the Beatles were playing those sessions in Hamburg. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were just revving up the bus, and Timothy Leary was turning on Harvard lab assistants to the joys of LSD.

We were on the cusp of a Cultural Revolution, but James Dean, Jack Kerouac and Brando had been at it for years.

And when James Dean smoked a cigarette, he didn’t flick the ashes off, but just let them fall where they may. So Mad Men, get hip, and stop being such a caricature of your times. Otherwise, you may be honored in the Old Fossils Hall of Fame.

©2009 Dennis Green

All About Eve

by Dennis Green

The tale of Adam and Eve is apophrical. A woman tempts a man into error, which leads to their mutual downfall. They are expelled from Paradise in nakedness and shame, and their two sons, who, so far as we can tell, mate with their mother, get into a brawl and one kills the other. The curse is then borne by Cain’s offspring, who are destroyed by the Great Flood, while the sons of Abel are spared. Whew!

Talk about your Hebraic Tragedy! The ancient Greeks never came up with anything more telling. But what does it mean?

We are told that Eve is tempted by the serpent to partake of the fruit of “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil,” duality perhaps??? And then she persuades Adam, with her fateful charms, to partake too. They have been granted complete freedom in the Garden of Eden, with this one prohibition, so when they break it, they feel immediate guilt, and hide their nakedness under fig leaves. God sees their newfound modesty, and knows what it means.

There has been much speculation over the years about the meaning of all this. Nakedness and sexuality, the duality of good and bad that doesn’t exist in a state of Innocence. But perhaps we have a situation in current events which may shed some further light on this ancient Mythos.

A young man succeeds in his chosen field beyond all expectations. He wins ten out of twelve consecutive contests. He is named spokesman for all sorts of products and services, from Nike to Chiclets gum. Soon, he is the first professional golfer to be worth a billion dollars.

And then he meets a woman determined to join with him in matrimony. But first, she must sign a pre-nuptial decree that limits her takeaway should they ever divorce. She signs it gladly, and coaxes, cajoles, caresses him into the marriage bed. All is bliss and they are set to live happily ever after.

And there is only one taboo: Marital Infidelity. The Tree of the Knowledge of Other Women, in the Biblical Sense. If that ensues, all bets are off. They are, as a couple, happy in public, happy to be photographed, happy to be together alone at last at the end of a long day or tournament.

And then, the blessed event, children! All that was missing to complete the portrait of perfect domestic bliss. And then…who knows..? But something went seriously sideways between them, our dark Adam and his blonde bombshell Eve. It may be that, as for many women post-partum, her libido simply up and died. It may be that he witnessed the birthing, and couldn’t quite look at…her…the same way ever again. Whatever it was, I suspect it produced some degree of frustration.

Cover thy nakedness! As Yeats writes, “Saint Joseph thought the world would melt/but liked the way his finger smelt…” And this: “Eros has pitched her tent/beside the place of excrement…” This from the poet who died after surgery to implant monkey glands to revive his sexuality!

So now the Mrs. Woods is saying that she is going to file for divorce, but that she’s going to wait until “everything has come out, because then I’ll have more leverage…” Now Tiger knows what Paul McCartney felt like. And also, perhaps, Adam the Heir to Eden. Or even me. Why is it that the adults always look so much worse than the kids?

Eve is not merely the archetypal First Woman, but also the First Wife. (I’d say “First Mate,” but that sounds too much like Starbuck…) And as First Wife, she sends a chill down the spine of any man who has one. If this were a nursery story, it would be a Grimm one indeed, enough so to warn little boys against those evil, scheming little Eves.

©2009 Dennis Green