Bush Smells Like Old Money
In which Dubya and Dick snicker at corruption charges, and the war excuse weakens
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Of course we're at war. Just look at those horrible lines at the airport.
Just look at that man having his scruffy topsiders screened four times, that woman's lovely underwire bra setting off the metal detector, that huge pile of confiscated nail files. Don't we all feel safer now.
Of course we're at war. Just look at all those flags stuck in all those manicured lawns, the ominous United We Stand billboards, the all-new 2003 Ford Excursion now with room for 13 and a full 10mpg Highway/7mpg City, all the cheap plastic stars-and-stripes kitsch at the Hallmark store, Made in Malaysia.
And look at all the billions being unquestioningly appropriated for more military action and more "homeland security" and more mysterious attacks and more clandestine operations, random budget-busting expenditures you will never fully know about.
Simply because this is one of the most secretive and blatantly unreported wars in American history and if you think all the cover-up is merely in the name of security, I've got a fabulous time-share on a Saudi oil field to sell you, cheap.
And look, just look how the Bush administration has no intention of telling anyone anything about anything except ooh that evil evil Saddam we're gonna get him and oooh that evil evil bin Laden we're gonna get him too, maybe, doubtful but maybe, someday, but probably not, and never you mind all those eerie Bush/bin Laden family connections. Hush now.
Of course we're at war. Witness all the angry puffed-up deflections, every reproach of the president and every suspicious glance in the direction of his corporatized administration instantly retorted with a nice "how dare you don't you know we're at war" or maybe "the president has a great deal on his very compact little mind right now and he can't be bothered with the details of, you know, rampant favoritism and hypocrisy."
And meanwhile isn't that Bush appointee and former conniving, pro-accounting industry, anti-SEC lawyer, current SEC chairman Harvey Pitt investigating malfeasance at WorldCom? Cherish the irony.
You just know we're at war because clearly there is just no room for accusations of Bush's former corporate wrongdoings or economic bilking, or of Cheney's simply astonishing connection to the oleaginous Halliburton corporation, which signed a cool $73 mil worth of oil deals with Iraq while Dickie was still CEO just a handful of years ago. Whoops, shhh. War.
And who knew everyone's favorite inviolate meta-doyenne Martha Stewart would have so much in common with Geedubya? Cashing in on a cool $230K worth of ImClone stock just before the company tanks, Martha?
Not bad, but try nearly a cool $1 mil for Bush back in '90, cashing in on Harken Energy stock just prior to the company reporting a huge loss, and then accidentally whoops gosh "forgetting" to disclose the sale to the SEC for oh, eight months, give or take. Aw, shucks. "Clerical error," they say.
And it's becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone but the truest I-believe-everything-Ari-Fleischer-says jingoists who actually believes this "war" has become anything but a grand excuse, a marvelously leveragable plaything which the Bush cadre can point to as their very own personal holy shroud, some sort of sacrosanct shield to protect them from criticism and claims of blatant impropriety and selling the nation's soul for pennies on the barrel.
The more pleasant idea is that the war excuse is becoming thinner and thinner, the populace increasingly fatigued and wary of false terrorist warnings, fearmongering, lopsided Us-versus-Them posturing, the sucking dry of the budget in the name of accidentally bombing Afghan weddings.
Wary, in addition, of the idea that simply sending in troops and bombing caves and infuriating Middle Eastern countries even further will somehow solve the problem, stem the tide of terrorism, eradicate the numinous, germinating terrorist cells, make everyone look away as Bush Sr.'s sinister investment company the Carlyle Group rakes in millions from War on Terror defense contracts. Shhh.
Maybe it won't last much longer. Maybe the day will come very soon when the scales will tip in the other direction, the fearmongering and the falsely hyped patriotism will no longer outweigh the increasing piles of proof that we are being misled, that all is not what it seems.
Maybe we will realize that what was, very briefly, a necessary and urgent need to defend our pride and our national identity in the wake of brutish hatred and an unspeakably barbaric attack, has become a cheap political pawn, a bureaucratic commodity, the national soul bought and sold like so many artillery shells for the Carlyle Group's $11 billion Crusader tank.
Of course that day will come. Of course you hope the populace cannot and will not be lied to for very long, the karmic tide cannot help but begin to change, and maybe we will finally realize the need for a different, long-term tack to defend our nation, change our oil-desperate foreign policy, commit fewer corporate atrocities and political puppeteering in foreign lands that tend to spawn all that hate in the first place.
Yes, that will be the day. Unless that's the day Bush declares war on Iraq. Whoops, shhh.
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Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, just like a special magic bunny of love. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed daily email column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/
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One Nation, Under...Er...Vishnu
In the most religiously diverse country in the world, why should "God" get the only plug?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
To hell with the separation of church and state. Forget the Pledge of Allegiance and "under God" and all this bipartisan puling about prayer in schools. Maybe we've had it wrong all along.
Let's try this instead: Maybe there should be no such separation at the school level. Maybe God and Vishnu and Kali and Astarte and Dionysus and Allah and Zarathushtra and Lao-Tzu have not only a vital place in the educational system, but also a fervent need to be heard and felt and imbibed, just like cafeteria Coke and meatloaf and badly written textbooks and nonexistent sex-ed and the capitals of all 50 states.
Maybe barring religious practice from our national places of learning is just about as ignorant and small-minded and spiritually degenerative as, say, bombing another country over oil or land or power or ego. Let's just say.
Ah, but maybe you agree with Dubya that America is Christian country and its "rights were derived from God." Maybe you think the current, adorably hypocritical separation of church and state, with its sanctimonious mentions of a patriarchal Christian God everywhere, is the righteous path, the common wisdom, the properly loving sentiment expressed by many a fervent patriot as we drop our bombs and thump our Bibles and let God sort 'em out.
You would be wrong.
Because America is also the most religiously diverse country in the world. America is teeming with saris and yarmulkes and monk's robes and funky prayer beads and glorious ornate temples of every shape and size. There are more Muslims in the U.S. now, for example, than there are Jews or Episcopalians. America, spiritually speaking, is not what most people think it is.
A quick look inside any apartment building in any major city outside of, say, Vermont or maybe Montana reveals a veritable kaleidoscope of faith and divinity: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew, Atheist, Wiccan, Pagan, Sikh, Atheist and Buddhist, living side by side and borrowing cups of sugar or sticks of Nag Champa from each other, stealing each other's newspaper and bootlegging each other's cable TV. It's a beautiful thing, really.
But nowhere is religious funk and spiritual diversity more prevalent and visible than in the classroom, which since the mid-'60s has seen an explosion of immigrant cultures and beliefs, a dazzling and unprecedented intermixing of faiths and backgrounds and languages and deities and kids with names that give your tongue a workout.
And hence it would seem to require negligible rationale or subtlety of mind to see that "under God" is really rather inane and exclusionary and insulting to a vast and increasing chunk of the soon-to-be-voting populace.
Alas, Conservatives still believe little Johnny should be kneeling in school and praising Jesus (and no one else) for the glory that is his math quiz every day, whereas Liberals believe he should keep that sort of thing in the church or risk warping his little mind.
Meanwhile little Daniel and Sunjat and Tenzin and Amir and Uma Das Gupta and Moonstarr and Ling Tso sit idly by, rolling their eyes and sighing sadly and wondering why there's so much intolerance and misunderstanding in the Land of the Free.
So maybe there should be prayer in schools. A lot of prayer. Say a half hour a day, every religion allowed its rituals and practices, quirks and screams and chants and head-bobbings and blood sacrifices to the great Lord Zorkon.
Immediately followed by a class on religious appreciation and diversity, with each kid talking about his/her beliefs and traditions and occasionally uptight dogmas and beautiful similarities and why the hell they have to wear that funny thing on their head and can't eat bananas on Tuesdays.
Maybe every major religion gets one week during the school year where the kid and the kid's family and their rabbi or priest or guru or teacher come in and share stories and teach everyone their traditions, and everyone eats that culture's food and recites that faith's prayers and everyone learns to tie a turban and decorate a robe and dances and laughs and learns.
It's what famed author and Harvard professor Diana Eck, in her book "New Religious America: How a 'Christian Country' Has Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation," termed "religious pluralism" -- more than mere tolerance and acceptance of other's religious beliefs, an active and dynamic engagement in the public sphere, classrooms and workplaces and fetish dungeons, an ongoing dialogue, a spiritual exchange.
It's messy and complicated and imperfect; we are trained to be suspicious, we resist change, we fear the unknown and erect walls and barriers of all kinds to keep foreigners and strange people out. Anxiety is our cultural modus operandi, and many spiritually uptight believers -- Christians in particular -- are loath to allow their kids to be "tainted" by exposure to other beliefs.
But this is the only way it will ever work. People of all religions must intermix and communicate and share ideas and find common ground, and there is no one better to take us there than children, as yet untainted by their parent's prejudices, their government's ideologies.
Lack of such integration and communication means cultural stasis, social breakdown, prejudice, ignorance, hatred, violence, zealotry, terrorism, war, increased and inexplicable proliferation of the Bush clan. Not necessarily in that order.
It means situations like the Middle East, full of checkpoints and barriers and razor wire and children being trained in hate, without ever learning the viewpoint of the other side.
It means we continue like we are right now, segregating ourselves and living in relative ignorance of who lives down the hall, looking over our shoulder suspiciously at the guy in the silk gown or the woman in the head wrap, wondering what crazy thing they're always chanting about.
So yes. Dump the inane "under God" provision of the Pledge. And maybe replace it with "One nation, under whatever noble and/or beautiful belief system you want, or maybe nothing at all, or maybe a little of this and that, just don't be a freak about it, because this is America and we're nothing if not about religious freedom, even though that may be difficult to believe right now, but just bear with us, indivisible...."
Sure it's a little verbose. But it sure beats the religious status quo.
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Thoughts for the author? Email him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly email column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/
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Seething Bilious Hate, Down 3%
Where is all the good news? Why is the media so obsessed with horror and misery? Herein, some possible salve
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
This morning on Highway 12 during dreary rush-hour traffic no one was really enjoying in the slightest, a large black gas-guzzling SUV slowed down slightly to allow not one but two small cars to merge into the lane ahead of it without the driver feeling the slightest need to blare his horn or swerve angrily or pull out any major weaponry.
And in fact said driver even smiled and shrugged and hummed and wasn't really bothered in the slightest and arrived to work exactly 1.3 seconds later than he would have, otherwise.
Sidebar: Drivers in the other vehicles suffered slightly less stress and heart-clenching tension, and in fact one felt sufficiently diminished amounts of jadedness and resignation about life that she finally said, what the hell, I'm going for it.
And she took a deep breath and took some initiative and posted that nerve.com personal ad and signed up for that art class and decided to eat more organic foods and forsake Oprah and read more actual books, as opposed to hollow coming-of-age family melodramas featuring alcoholism and betrayal and bitterly dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships.
Meanwhile in Israel, several hundred if not a thousand Israeli and Palestinian families living in relatively close proximity to one another, and each deeply proud of their respective nation's history and foundations and traditions, did not actively seethe in a roiling cauldron of hatred or religious bile, nor did they let the horrible atrocities some of their people are perpetrating on each other cause them to froth with self-righteousness and mad desire for war.
They did not go about their day cowering in a pit of lost hope, fearing for their lives and wishing their neighbors extreme painful death and eternal damnation, despite all the painful evidence and political urgency currently screeching at them that they must do so immediately.
It was a decided and almost prosaic lack of burning simmering timeworn malignant sentiment that lasted at least an entire day, if not the week, and perhaps longer, God and Allah willing.
We hereby interrupt to report that the above non-events were reported nowhere, because if you are not really incredibly violently angry about something, you are not news.
Also this week a very large multinational corporation held its quarterly board meeting and the CEOs and CFOs and all the other abbreviations scanned the financial report and realized they and the company as a whole were in fact exceedingly wealthy and prosperous and powerful.
And in a blasphemous anticapitalist step, the company decided to rake in slightly lower profits for the coming year so it might improve its community standing and treat its employees better and quit lining the pockets of corrupt senators, who by the way a newly released study reveals are just people too.
The corporation, headed largely by Republicans but also some Democrats and an Independent and a handful of women and even one Latino guy, also moved to slightly reduce its executive bonus packages in favor of granting raises to almost all employees and improving the pollution-filtration systems in its overseas manufacturing plants and by anonymously donating a huge slab of cash to the local school system to buy textbooks and art supplies and to hire a dance teacher, and it did so not just for tax deduction purposes or the good PR.
In other unreported news, in Catholic churches across the globe, no priest creepily molested any cute young altar boy named Daniel or maybe Gregory, and in fact most members of the clergy ministered carefully and sympathetically to the despondent and the destitute and the spiritually indigent and even to pampered yuppies and well-adjusted homosexuals and women, providing much-needed hope and emotional stability to the lives of many.
In fact, each clergy member went about his day in deference to a higher good, a profoundly altruistic calling, despite the deep flaws and the bitterly archaic dogma plaguing the organization as a whole, and many people were assuaged and loved and spiritually balmed.
This just in. Today in your neighborhood, happening right this moment, numerous people are going about their lives, right there, just outside your window, eating and laughing and crying and screwing and driving and pissing and sleeping and loving their dogs and children and significant others like mad crazy imperfect bipeds.
Some are craving enlightenment and cosmic reassurance and maybe a nap, almost every single one of them not really wanting war and not desiring to wallow in all this anxiety and existential angst and not really wanting to get caught up in all the turmoil or breathe bad air or kill a tree for no reason.
Breaking news: Most everyone is just trying to get through the day. Most everyone really only wants a decent soft bed and good food and warm shelter and to get through it all without suffering any major life-threatening flesh wounds or karmic trauma or embarrassingly protruding nose hairs.
Most people, in fact, care deeply and drive safely and have difficult-to-reach itches in almost exactly the same places you do, and just want to find someone in life to help scratch them.
Do not please turn to page C17 for more. Do not tune in later for details and colorful pie charts. Do not ever think what you read in any paper or see on any TV or hear from any talking head is all there is. This is obvious and common-sensical but needs to be repeated because we seem to so easily forget. Thank you and good night.
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Thoughts for the author? Email him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly email column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters/
I am an utter moron. I am a total imbecile. I am the enemy.
I am a disgrace, an amazingly off-the-mark hate-filled racist lefty coward Communist with his head so far up his ass he can see his tonsils and who wouldn't know a true patriot if one ran over me in his big stompin' SUV, which he should.
I am a typical SF liberal jackass no one listens to because I live in San Francisco and everyone knows San Francisco is a totally useless noncity full of weirdo snobby leftist tree-hugging pro-choice intellectual wine-drinking peacenik tofu-suckers who practice yoga and smoke a lot of legal pot and are all just mad because Gore lost and Bush hasn't spontaneously combusted just yet and everybody seems to have a nice shiny new gun except us.
I am apparently many, many very unpleasant things that can't be printed here, but simply recall all the absolute crudest, most juvenile curse words you ever heard from the thickest jock in junior high (don't forget the gross bodily functions) and rearrange them at will à la magnetic refrigerator poetry, and you'll have some idea of the feedback I often get.
But more than anything else, the absolute worst thing that can apparently be said about me among the spurts of hate mail I invariably receive whenever one of my more politically charged columns pokes at the oozing sores of rage over at some right-wing Web site, is this: I must be gay. Really, really gay.
No, not gay. A fag. A world-class spineless AIDS-ridden dope-smoking rainbow-flagged liberal whiner super-fag, one who lives in a city and in fact an entire state that apparently a very large contingent of "real" Americans genuinely wishes would "get bombed by the terrorists and fall off into the ocean after you all get f--king AIDS and die you liberal pussy faggot traitors." That is pretty much a direct quote.
This is not a joke. Or rather, it is, but the sentiment is rampant and virulent and common enough that it simply has to be mentioned and discussed here in more somber and/or baffled fashion, and not just in a "gosh there sure are a lot of homophobic sub-intellects out there" sort of way, but because it is a bizarre and distressing phenomenon.
It is a disease, this brand of spitting homophobia, a shockingly common hate-filled attitude running like liquid fire through a surprisingly large number of "patriotic" Christian Americans. I get a lot of this type of email. And I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
It happens at least once every column, and a great deal more whenever I write a piece openly criticizing the president or aggressively questioning this "war" or humorously insinuating that Dick Cheney is really a deeply frightening thin-lipped glob of toxic tapioca who scares small children and makes flowers wilt and perpetually looks like he just swallowed a large dung beetle.
I must be gay. I must be a fag. That this is the worst attack many people can think of, is more than distressing. It's shockingly puerile and stands as a stark reminder that we as a culture and as a patriotic progressive star-spangled country, one that claims to be so proud of our diversity and tolerance, still have some seriously debilitating issues of our own.
"I would expect nothing less from a pussy penny-loafer queer-boy," exclaims one deep thinker. "No wonder they say San Francisco is the land of 'fruits and nuts,'" another oh so cleverly snickered. "Go f--k yourself, fag!!!" charmed still another, in toto. And those are the mild ones.
Maybe you thought such strains of virulent homophobia were diminishing in this country. Maybe you thought some intellectual or gender-oriented progress had been made. Maybe you hoped such a degree of borderline violent hatred stemming from vaguely threatened manhoods was the sole domain of, say, Islamic fundamentalists. You would be wrong.
Would it be fair to call these types of conservatives sexual terrorists? Is there really that great a distance separating what a religious extremist is willing to perpetrate in the name of his angry martyring God, and what an extreme homophobe might do when faced with an apparent threat to his trembling machismo, in the name of his sexually confused deity?
It does not matter, of course, whether I'm actually gay or not. It does not matter that these fine upstanding American uber-patriots have no idea who I am or what my life is like. And it does not matter that I and most people I know wouldn't consider being called gay a slur anyway, that it is, in fact, in many ways complimentary and funny and good.
Being called gay simply has zero negative effect, just makes me shrug and smile and wonder and in fact only makes me more grateful to live in a city where such an "accusation" just means you probably dance really well and shun professional sports and get regular manicures and have really great sex and cool taste in shoes. Oh hell, maybe I am gay. Don't tell my girlfriend.
For the record, I also get a ton of incredibly positive feedback, bravos and huzzahs and marriage proposals and offers to bear my children, heaping dollops of incredibly generous praise I don't even have to pay for. The hate mail is but a fraction, and the hissing homophobia, smaller still.
But all the positive feedback, in effect, only serves to highlight and underscore the stunning virulence of the hateful comments, the frightening similarities between this type of often homophobic rage and the type of religious bile with which we claim to be at war in the Mideast and elsewhere.
Perhaps our political agenda is slightly misdirected. Perhaps we have some brutish strains of macho religious-based hostility simmering in the melting pot of our own nation, festering and lying in wait.
Perhaps there's another type of inbred terrorist-type sentiment we should be focusing on, as well. United we stand, unless you're gay or nonviolent or progressive or sexually secure or from San Francisco. Really makes the heart swell with all-American pride.
Let Us Now Crush Everybody
Just in time to kill any sense of hope and progress, it's America's new "attack first" policy
Do you feel it? That electric charge in the air? That faintly metallic taste of gunpowder on your teeth? That renewed sense that you just really really want to run people over with your shiny new knobby-tired Escalade and not only would it be fully justified, but righteous and Christian and good? That's patriotism, friend.
It is a time of renewed bitterness and fabricated rage and many heavyset white males who scowl and prognosticate and claim they're in power to make you feel all safe and secure and cuddled in big swaths of paternal nuclear quilts, but who only manage to make you uneasy and chilled and more than a little bit ill.
It is a time of stern warmongering and a renewed macho kick-ass American attitude in which this country will no longer stand idly by like some pansy doe-eyed wallflower, pretending to be a nation of rationality and peace and warmth and good microbrews and open-heartedness and caution and careful consideration of our military actions and reactions. That is just so, you know, wimpy.
Cheney announced it and Bush mispronounced it and it will be in the new national security strategy document presented to Congress this fall: We will now become a "strike first" nation.
We will no longer wait around for an excuse to bomb swarthy countries whose names our president has difficulty spelling. We are officially Changing Our Tune to include lots of heavily beating war drums and angry oboes and "The Ride of the Valkyries" on infinite loop.
We are now apparently going to be nimble and mean and quick and foolproof, just like in the movies. We will now attack the evildoers first and ask questions later except we'll just skip the part about the questions.
This is the message. This is our new attitude. Boom crash attack. Utter destruction of our enemies. Crush through mostly violent means any sign of anti-Americanism, no matter the cause, no matter that we can't actually pinpoint the source, no matter that we claim to be the most peaceful and progressive and intellectually advanced superpower on Earth. Be pre-emptive and destructive and bomb-happy, or be a tree-hugging traitorous liberal commie sympathizer. There is no in-between.
The Cold War is over, Cheney & Co. remind us; ideas of negotiations or compromise or a possible reassessment of our hate-generating foreign policies are useless. Because they said so, that's why.
And if there was any doubt about how flagrantly this current administration intends to leverage the horror and sadness of 9/11 to turn America from a place of nonpanicky relatively calm defense into a seething pit-bull death squad of desultory military aggression, this announcement killed it for good.
Sure you could see this new kill-'em-all American posture as an excuse to bomb whomever we want for just about any reason we desire and call it "homeland security" and no one will ask questions. But of course, that would be unpatriotic.
Sure you could see the recent rash of falsely manufactured terrorist attack warnings from the government as a hollow ploy to generate more fear among the populace to the point where more Americans cower and whine and forsake even more personal freedoms, allowing the FBI to read their email and cavity search their daughters, all so no one will dare question anything when we start a full-scale assault of Iraq and Iran and maybe parts of Egypt and what the hell, let's say Colombia. What, you're going to argue?
And sure you could see how this new attack-first policy provides a beautiful and even poetic, circular excuse for us to enrage more nations and spawn more terrorist factions, who will then make ugly noises against America that will then give the Cheney war machine a fresh excuse to blow them up and build more missiles and thus create more terrorists and keep the whole machine rolling along as long as possible. Do you see it? The brilliant self-regenerating loop? This is the plan.
How easily we forget there was more than one possible reaction to 9/11. How quickly we forget that a massive raging ongoing multibillion-dollar military assault on a nearly defenseless and rubble-strewn Afghanistan was not the only path to be taken.
Or that declaring war against an abstract term only served to validate the religious zealotry and perpetuate the terrorist cause and make the relatively tiny imbecilic fringe factions much more looming and omnipresent than they really are. But maybe that was the point.
We forget that maybe a unified and aggressive UN police action combined with a thorough reassessment of our oil policies and Saudi Arabian connections and general Mideast egomania might've gone a lot further and served a much greater good than simply bombing for six months straight with zero tangible results, except for a lot of very happy Bush pals in the military-industrial complex.
Yes there were other alternatives. And yes there are still other options than becoming a nasty first-strike violently pre-emptive nation. But that is not up for discussion. We are being told what to believe in, and apparently most are believing in it. Or else.
Will this new thick-necked first-strike posture actually intimidate some terrorist groups? Possibly. Will it gratify and satiate the more paranoid and gun-happy God-fearing right-wingers among us? Very likely.
Will it also make us more loathed and tumultuous and combative and confrontational and openly despised among the international community for our isolationist attitude and immature cockiness and love of ham-fisted reactionary politics? No question.
But so be it. It's Us against Them, baby. This is what they want you to believe. And as the saying goes, if you don't like the way America drives, stay off the damn sidewalk. Mark Morford's "Morning Fix"
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