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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The Recovered Saga Of Alberto Gonzalez 

...I'm not going to get into the passage of Jerry Falwell. As a Christian, I did not accept a great deal of his particular theology and could never come to grips with his racism, sexism, statements that suggested hatred, and strange powerful grasping at Old Covenant Levitical law at the expense of the New Covenant that Jesus and the Apostles espoused. He has played a role in creating a legion of follow-on true believers (Monica Goodling, anyone?) who will continue to try to insert a particular theological belief system into the secular governance of our land, so his particular departure is mostly an historical note. Besides, there are much bigger fish to fry today...

For example, there was another performance today that was itself more an historical note than some sort of fresh "ripped from the headlines" meat, but it offered a crystal-clear demonstration of the lengths to which Bushco has been willing to go to subvert even the most whacked out interpretation of the Constitution. That performance, of course, was the testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Former Deputy Attorney General James Comey. He described an episode, most grippingly described in an NPR All Things Considered piece this evening, involving wild lights-flashing Code 3 races across D.C. to beat Abu Al and Andy Card to John Ashcroft's hospital bed during a dispute about the legality of the NSA wiretapping program...

For those who haven't been paying attention over the last few years, this ugly little tale could come as a shocker, but anyone who has been paying attention to Abu Al since the Bush junta came to town clearly understands that this is just another piece of the same fetid pie. The current Attorney General of the United States is - at best - an enabler and more likely could be considered the greatest danger to any common understanding of American democracy since...well, Hell, since what? I mean, at some point, those of us of a certain age who have clear personal memories of the Nixon years have to begin scratching our heads and reaching for the history books in a desperate and vain hope for some comparison. That sordid collection of brain-damaged geeks made some serious runs at all the hard work those old dead white guys cranked out in the late 18th century, but it's getting hard to finger anyone from that cheerful time who can hold a candle to the vicious little band of twisted vermin that are currently chewing on the straps holding our bold little 230-year-old experiment together. Alberto Gonzalez has been that lump behind the curtain at almost every turn in this six-years-long assault on our country. From enabling the disturbing specter of "the unitary executive" through this strange story that Comey told today to the faithful "good German" support of a concerted effort to turn the Justice Department of the United States of America into a wholy-owned subsidiary of the Republican National Committee, complete with what appears to be bald-faced lying under oath about that whole US Attorney-firing gig, Abu Al stretchs one's imagination in an effort to find a corollary in living history...

Ed Meese was dangerous, but hapless. The closest one can come may be Robert Bork, willing to step in during the Saturday Night Massacre to take the helm in those storm-tossed seas and fire the Watergate Special prosecutor when nobody else would. But even then, the Congress and the press were so locked onto the blood trail that his loyalty to an undeserving president is as good a mappoint as any for someone trying to backtrack to the point where it all went to hell for Tricky Dick. Karma being what it is, Bork was paid for that debt in full at his later Supreme Court nomination hearing, but there doesn't seem to be any similar sort of "payment in full" date for George Bush's close lackey/enabler/consort/"friend". Even though Gee Dub's tour in the White House has featured the sorts of outrages that would have sent Nixon to exile in Corsica, he remains as a living, breathing reminder of the disdain with which the dirty little gang of fixers and losers surrounding him like some dumb brute herd of water buffalo view any of the concepts that my teenagers are taught every day in Government, Civics, and US History classes...

The saga of Card and Gonzalez trying to browbeat a sick man in the George Washington Hospital intensive care ward into bowing to somebody's will over illegal electronic spying is, on the one hand, an interesting bit of history. On the other hand, it explains so much about the Alberto Gonzalez that we see today that his continued tenure as Attorney General says all you need to know about the Republican party...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:50 PM 0 comments

Monday, May 14, 2007

Wherein "The War" Reveals My Failings As A Wannabe Progressive 

...I will obviously never make it all the way to home plate as a true-blue progressive. There is some failure of upbringing, some blockage in the endocrine system, that draws me up just short of being able to make that final breakthrough to some place that I apparently should be but won't ever successfully get to. The recent fight over the documentary about World War II that Ken Burns created for broadcast on PBS is the perfect roadmap to the terminus of my failing...

I will freely admit that I have problems with all of this. Ken Burns wasn't producing a definitive narrative about "The American Experience" in WWII. He was telling a story; his intent was to explore a variety of experiences from a time that has a specific resonance to people of my age group, whose parents experienced the direct impacts of the war, but that has been swallowed up in the fog of ancient history to the young people of today for whom Vietnam has the same historical connection as the Second World War did for me. He didn't select American Hispanics to talk about. He also didn't pick twenty-something Central Idaho soldiers who - like my father - were a month away from discharge from the Army in December, 1941, but got "stop-lossed" for five more years of service. He also didn't choose young riflemen from the Fifth Marine's like my wife's uncle from northeastern Washington State, and he didn't talk about how people like that uncle died on the black sand beaches of Iwo Jima...

I will submit that there is such a thing as artistic license that allows people to make whatever kind of documentary film they would like to make. I would also submit that the story of Japanese Americans enlisting in the US military is at least as compelling as the story of Hispanic Americans, if not more so - for reasons that shouldn't need to be explained. I will also argue way past bedtime that any documentary rendering of the contribution of Native Americans is at least as compelling as the story of Hispanic Americans, and no such rendition is found in this documentary. I will further argue till the sun rises that the application of pressure by Members of Congress of Hispanic heritage that Burns's personal artistic piece should contain "the story" of the Hispanic contribution is little better than the very sort of message pressure that progressives have been complaining about when it has been applied to NPR and PBS by Republicans over the period of time that they were in control of the whole federal government...

The fundamental fact is that the contribution of Hispanics to the war effort isn't any sort of secret. Stereotypical "small wiry Puerto Rican guy" movie roles aside, the problem probably isn't so much that there hasn't been any acknowledgement of Hispanic contribution to the war effort than there is a general slipping away of any group recollection of the contributions of any particular ethnic group or race to the war effort. It wasn't the place of Ken Burns to have to tell this story because...well, because he didn't choose to. While it can be argued - with some merit, I suppose - that his corporate sponsors and PBS were legitimately subject to pressure because of this failing, the bottom line that cannot be successfully escaped is that "The War" was not intended as a full telling about the entire American experience in WWII. Burns's intent was to reconnect people to the larger story of the war, especially those people who don't watch stories on the History Channel or various other outlets or read the books or have any link to the history...

That artistic vision has been consumed by a different agenda, however, and if Native Americans, the descendents of first-generation German Americans, Scandinavians from the northern tier states, and the various progeny of Pacific Islander Americans develop a fuller understanding of what is going on here, Ken Burns will be either facing the prospect of overseeing the production of a documentary that runs into weeks rather than hours or simply carting all those wheelbarrows full of video out into the parking lot and setting them on fire. Documentaries are, by their very nature and - fundamentally - aside from the sources of funding and support, the expression of a particular vision of a particular person. In this instance, that process has been hijacked, and in the view of this failed, inadequate quasi-liberal neo-curmudgeon, that is simply wrong...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

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