“Dreams From My Father”: Obama’s Fables

I read “Dreams from My Father” about a year ago.  It was pretty much what I expected, and I gave it little further thought.  But now that cynophagy and composite girlfriends have produced virtual reams of electronic copy across the internet, I realize I missed something.  I coudda been a contender.  Few of the millions who bought the book read it closely, if at all.

The juicy cuts have been ingested but, perhaps like a hungry man three days after Thanksgiving I can still pick something of interest from the carcass.

I quote from the 2004 edition, published just as State Senator Obama was in his first – and only – term.–

It doesn’t take long to see that Obama is a fabulist, and not a skillful one.  Anecdotes conveniently support his narrative of alienation and oppression with a clumsy didacticism that one would expect in a Stalin Prize winner.

 

From the Introduction:

 

“My wife’s cousin, only six years old, has already lost his innocence.  A few weeks ago he reported to his parents that some of his first grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark, unblemished skin”

This seemed unlikely. It’s just too pat.  The boy’s parents had moved to an affluent suburb so that he might flourish in a better school system and live in safety rather than perish in the gang culture of inner city neighborhood from which his parents came.  In this century with America’s institutionalized concern with race, fairness, and multiculturalism, I’m sure someone would watch out for a boy in such a situation, and I have faith in the general decency of my countrymen, even first graders.

Mr. Obama may have congratulated himself on his nice sense of irony as he wrote this, but I don’t buy it.  Notice that the racial slight is at one remove:  it’s something he heard, so, if it didn’t happen, or was exaggerated, it’s not his fault.

One might think that my reaction is rooted in my antipathy to the President, a feeling I freely acknowledge, but consider an anecdote in the first chapter.  The young Obama, living in a low rent apartment in Manhattan, hangs out on the fire escape where he observes whites from a nearby affluent neighborhood walking their dogs and letting them crap everywhere in an arrogant and demeaning challenge to the poor folk who live there.

Not only is the metaphor overdrawn and cartoonish; it’s simply not believable.  Any New Yorker could tell you this would be a very risky practice.  It’s crap all right.  It didn’t happen.

What did happen is that a publisher first paid well for Mr. Obama’s amateurish mythologizing, and years later, a nation is paying dearly for its belief in him and his empty fables.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day: A Personal Rubicon

In 2010 American cartoonist Molly Norris of Seattle proposed May 20 as “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day 20.”  This was in response to threats against the creators of South Park, who had named a bear suited character Mohammed.  A Facebook page sprung up and attracted a large number of followers.  Ms Norris’ own contribution was rather tame and did not in fact depict Islam’s prophet;  further, she disassociated herself from the Facebook page, which was the work of third parties.

Molly Norris’ contribution to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” After credible threats to her life, the cartoonist went underground, and remains in hiding.

Nevertheless, in the end, she received more serious and credible threats than had the South Park team, and was advised to go underground by the FBI.  This she did at her own expense, so that a citizen of the United States, exercising her constitutional rights, was on her own, while violent felons and turned terrorists flourish in government sponsored witness protection.

Since 9/11, when Islam roars, the West cowers, as it did the previous year during the furor over Muhammad cartoons in the Danish Newspaper Jyllands –Posten.  In that instance, after a lag of some months, protests began as internet provocateurs – Muslims themselves– distribute the pictures along with even more graphically offensive images which had never appeared in the Danish newspaper.  Rioting, arson and death spread through the Middle East and Central Asia. It is ironic that the depiction of Islam’s prophet is not clearly proscribed in the Koran itself, and there is a rich history of portraiture showing Muhammad and events in his life in the artistic traditions of Persia, Central Asia and the

A Persian depiction of the Angel Gabriel revealing the Koran to Mohammed.

Ottoman Empire.

Logo from OIC Website. This pretty much says it all: a world centered on Mecca.

Since then, the OIC(Organization of Islamic Cooperation) has pushed its “anti-blasphemy”(read: anti criticism of slam)   rules in the west, with officials of purported democracies all too eager to comply.  Free speech in regard to Islam, among other multicultural shibboleths has bee criminalized in Europe, and has only shaky protection in the Anglophone democracies of the former empire.  The mother country has all but capitulated as “public order” and “community cohesion” statutes muzzle critics in Britain.  Only in the United States does the Constitution’s second amendment remain as a bulwark for freedom.

I have been associated with Islam and Muslims for most of my life.  At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, I prayed that the actors not be Muslim.  Then came 9/11, the second and successful attack on the Twin Towers.  Even then, I made excuses and distinctions.  It was the violent and irrationally disproportionate  reaction to the Danish cartoons  of 2009 that led me to to examine Islamic tradition and scripture.

I did not like what I found, and am daily further appalled as I continue my exploration.  In the last few years, I toyed with the idea of posting something on May 20 each year, but refrained, telling myself that giving needless offense helped nothing.  There is validity to that argument, but, in truth, underlying it was moral cowardice, and personal sadness.  While I live in a  Muslim country, I am obscure enough that physical jeopardy is unlikely.  However, it is likely that some people for whom I have personal regard will not be able to see beyond their emotional attachment to  a religion which I am certain they do not fully comprehend, and our association will thus end.

So be it.

Like the larger part of my generation, I have never been called to stand for anything, as my father and grandfather were in the conflicts of their times.  Due to accidents of birth and class, Viet Nam passed me by.  This then is a small thing to do.

                     My contribution to “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day”

Art is not my forte, so my drawing requires some explication:

I show Muhammad as bearded and turbaned, as he is described in most traditions.  Note that I use the word “traditions” as the historical record is even scantier than support for the Christian Gospels.

The other sketches show aspects of Islamic belief and history:

1)”The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and his messenger, and strive for mischief n the land is execution, crucifixion, or the  cutting  off of hands and feet from opposite sides (Koran 5:32)

2)  While the Koran prescribes one hundred lashes for adultery (really, any extra marital sex) in the hadith( sayings and deeds  attributed to Muhammad and purportedly verified through a documented chain of transmission, which  are central to Islam, particularly the Sunni majority) quote the prophet as personally ordering death by stoning:  “Allah’s apostle commanded that she be stoned to death:  Sahih Bukhari

3) The sack of Alexandria 641E: Islamic  tradition and scripture support spreading the religion by the sword. It is a conundrum that today, as Arabs and Muslims protest the existence of Israel, and bemoan the horrors of the Crusades, with the support by much of the world, that the historical record is generally ignored.  The extra-Arabian  Middle East, Turkey  and North Africa, once Christian, and Greek, Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew, and Latin speaking, now is Arab  and Turkic, and almost  entirely        Islamic.  The war on Christians begun by the early caliphs is today in its final phase in Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

Holy war is an Islamic concept, as epitomized today on the Saudi flag, with the Muslim confession of faith surmounting a sword. For contrast, one need only look at the legacy of the European empires: only in the Americas, and the Philippines in Asia do we see indigenous religions vanquished by Christianity, inlands that were conquered by the Iberian powers in the century immediately after the end of their seven hundred year Muslim occupation.

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya( a tax required of non-Muslims under Islamic rule) with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” (Koran 9:29)

4)Some of Muhammad’s many wives.  While Islam limits the number of wives to four, its founder had many more, as well as numerous concubines, with some of each taken in war.  The small figure on the right is Aisha, the youngest of all.  Betrothed at six, bedded at nine.  She holds a doll.

Hadith – Bukhari 8:151, Narrated ‘Aisha

I used to play with the dolls in the presence of the Prophet , and my girl friends also used to play with me. When Allah’s Apostle used to enter (my dwelling place) they used to hide themselves, but the Prophet would call them to join and play with me. (The playing with the dolls and similar images is forbidden, but it was allowed for ‘Aisha at that time, as she was a little girl, not yet reached the age of puberty.) (Fateh-al-Bari page 143, Vol.13)

5) The Battle of the Trench 627 CE.  After defeating the Jewish tribes and their allies who had been besieging the Muslims in Medina, between 600-900 men and boys were beheaded in the public square.  Muhammad presided, and in some accounts, participated.  Boys without pubic hair were spared and joined the women and girls in slavery.

Such practices are common through the histories of many peoples, in many times.  What is different here is that the conduct is not reexamined in the light of modern mores, but rather, celebrated, extolled, and emulated. One simply does not find traditions depicting the founder of any other major religion engaging in such actions.

My examination of Islam has lead me to the firm conclusion that this belief system, in its core doctrines and traditions, offers nothing but supremacist delusion , which is daily expressed in violence and repression, throughout the word, with the majority of victims themselves Muslims. There will be no peace until Islam reforms – and I consider this highly unlikely – or until it is turned back on physical an moral battlefields.  If not, one hopes, not though actual war, but a rhetorical, economic and moral equivalent of Tours, Lepanto, Vienna, and the defeat of the Ottomans.     It is a conflict that the West denies, and of which only the proponents of Islamic dominance speak the truth.

6) 9/11  A latter day incident in a very old war

Impenetrable Care: Parsing the 2446 Pages of “Obamacare.”

Speaker Pelosi signing bill she hasn't read. She wasn't the only one, and not the first, or the last, to do so.

As have many ,I’ve railed against Congress for passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act without reading it. The bill famously had to be passed to find out what was in it, as Speaker Pelosi explained.

Since, like many, perhaps millions of Americans, I’m convinced I’m as smart as at least half the folks in Washington, It occurred to me that the time had come to walk the walk.  I’m going to read the whole damn thing – 2464 ages with the reconciliation – with the aim of finishing before the Supremes rule.

What do I bring to the job?  First, time. I’m retired.   This sucker is long!  A

The Emperor Justinian's Corpus Iuris is quite succinct by modern standards.

cursory search indicates that, so far, the Act runs to about 1.1 million words.  The Revised Standard Version(King James ) Bible is something  in excess of 700,000 words.  Justinian’s 7th Century code of Roman law is estimated at between two and three bibles.

I have no legal training, but rigorous high school English, four years of Latin and five of French – for that latinate legal vocabulary – and a master’s in English should help. And I spent many years in a job requiring me to read complex commercial contract language.  I am, I think, better equipped than many citizens for this task. Let’s  see if I’m up to it

 So we begin

“In the Senate of the United States,

December 24, 2009.

Resolved, That the bill from the House of Representatives (H.R. 3590) entitled ‘‘An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain

other Federal employees, and for other purposes.’’, do pass with the following…”

 Huh? Homebuyer’s credit?

“AMENDMENTS:

Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert:

1 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.

2 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’’.

Oh,here we are. Congress does work in mysterious ways.

A fifteen page table of contents follows. Then after striking this, that, and the other thing we get to this:

“TITLE I—QUALITY, AFFORDABLE  HEALTH CARE FOR ALL AMERICANS

 Subtitle A—Immediate Improvements in Health Care Coverage  for All Americans”

Section 2711 states that there shall be no benefit limit, either per annum or lifetime. Coverage, which may not be revoked except for fraud.   However, those benefits not considered essential under section 1302 b can be limited. Maybe. I guess we’ll see when we get to 1302(b) . Also referenced are some IRS codes. I’ll never finish this if I go and look them up as I go along.

“Providers must cover

evidence-based items or services that have in

effect a rating of ‘A’ or ‘B’ in the current recommendations of the United States Preventive Services Task Force.”(page 21)

Huh? Who are they?

“…an independent panel of non-Federal experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine and is composed of primary care providers (such as internists, pediatricians, family physicians, gynecologists/obstetricians, nurses, and health behavior specialists who work under the auspices of the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research.”

Never heard of them either? Me too. They hang out at HHS. Another to add to the collection of alphabet agencies such as BATF, ICE, and so on. I wonder if they have a SWAT tram.

‘‘(2) immunizations that have in effect a recommendation from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with respect to the individual involved;”

 So again, a reference to standards to beset by a government agency. At least I’ve heard of these guys, as we all have.

Here is also a philosophical question: what is the meaning of insurance, if we insure ourselves for foreseeable needs, such as childhood immunizations, or Ms. Fluke’s birth control pills? I really don’t remember, but I thin I got my shots at the doctor’s office, and my parent’s paid. In the 50s there was the polio epidemic and I remember getting the vaccine at school.

20 ‘‘(3) with respect to infants, children, and adolescents, evidence-informed preventive care and screenings provided for in the comprehensive guide lines supported by the Health Resources and Services “evidence -informed preventive care.”

 

I understand every word and semiotic unit in this phrase, yet have no idea what they are talking about.

“The process of distilling and disseminating the best available evidence from research, practice and experience and using that evidence to inform and improve public health policy and practice. “

Now I get it. Somebody, or, rather, a whole lot of somebodies, will decide what’s best for younger people, and that’s what they will get. Interesting that the first reference I found was in Canada.

‘‘(4) with respect to women, such additional preventive care and screenings not described in paragraph (1) as provided for in comprehensive guidelines supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration for purposes of this paragraph.”(page 21)

Wait a minute. Health Resources and Services Administration? Another bunch?  I scrolled back and checked; Yup, first reference. So who are these folks?

“The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency for improving access to health care services for people who are uninsured, isolated or medically vulnerable. ‘ And..”Comprising six bureaus and ten offices .”

Fabulous!

‘‘(c) VALUE-BASED INSURANCE DESIGN.—The Secretary may develop guidelines to permit a group health 7 plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage to utilize value-based insurance designs.”(page 22)

Value based?

“…the idea that consumers’ out-of-pocket medical costs should be based on the value of a service to their health rather than its price.”( From the Washington Post.)

So is that clear? I thought so.

“REGULATIONS.—The Secretary shall promulgate regulations to define the dependents to which coverage shall be made available under subsection (a).”(page 22)

The Slackercare clause

Well, well, well, no wonder insurance companies wanted in on this. This next section smacks of the industrial codes of the New Deals National Reconstruction Act.

‘‘(a) IN GENERAL.—Not later than 12 months after the date of enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Secretary shall develop standards for use by a group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage, in compiling and providing to enrollees a summary of benefits and coverage explanation that accurately describes the benefits and coverage under the applicable plan or coverage. In developing such standards, the Secretary shall consult with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (referred to in this section as the ‘NAIC’), a working group composed of representatives of health insurance-related consumer advocacy organizations, health insurance issuers, health care professionals, patient advocates including those representing individuals with limited English proficiency, and other qualified individuals.”

"Your plan for coordination of industry follows precisely our lines of cooperation." Benito Mussolini, speaking in open letter to FDR, 1933.

Pure corporatism, which is a polite way of saying classically fascist: industry, advocates and qualified individuals, all working together to tell us what w e need and what we’ll get. Given current practice, those “advocates” will likely be funded in part by the government, just as the EPA funds NGOs that then sue it.

At least, that’s the way I see it.  I suspect the people who out this together view it as a collaborative effort of the “healthcare community.”

And yet another group involved, without even a name yet, but they will no doubt get plenty of office space and a snazzy web page, funding and per diems.

Pages 25-27 describe benefits summary standards. This seems harmless though rather prescriptive, but it is noteworthy that the sections preempts any state regulation.Is it really harmless? A government controlled consortium of “interestd” parties will define the language in which we describe insurance terms and medical procedures. Will they think out of the box, or box us in?

Also, there is the philosophical question: would not insurance companies that gave out fraudulent or impenetrable benefit summaries suffer in the marketplace? In making such market based objections one is in the position of howling after a train that is disappearing down the track or more accurately left before the passenger arrived,or should this legislation stand, the metaphor would be that the station is closed, and grass has overgrown the rusting rails.

I have barely reached page 30, but have already learned that the Federal government is even  more vast than I knew and is set to be even more so, beyond  imagination as that is.  This act, with its multi-aency involvement, working groups and standard setting, is set to loose great torrents of administrative law that will in time seep into every aspect of our lives  It is classically fascist in that it aims  to shepherd disparate social and economic groups to an ostensibly mutually beneficial agreement under the eye and ultimately enforcement, of the state.

The emperor Diocletian used coercion, micromanagement and a debased currency in trying to halt economic decline. Sound familiar?

The urge to control economic activity is an old one, and the record of failure for such efforts is equally ancient.

  (More to come)

 

 

 

Tearing George Zimmerman a New One: Prison Rape Isn’t Funny

No sooner had George Zimmerman been arrested than the Twitterverse exploded with gleeful speculation as to his fate in prison.

Considering the number of black men in prison, it is ironically likely that many of these tweeters have a friend or family member in jeopardy of prison sexual abuse. Perhaps even themselves, one day.

I will admit here that in the past I too used to joke about prison fate. “Gonna tear that boy a new one” and so on.

Then one day, I realized it wasn’t funny. And I am ashamed to have ever seen it as so. Whether one sees prison as the power structure’s holding pen for the oppressed of society, an institution with a humane mission of reformation and possible redemption, or simply a place to keep dangerous people, one principle applies.

"Big Stan" Rob Schneider in a 2007 movie themed on fear of prison rape. Billed as a comedy. Disgusting.

In a humane, rather human society that sees itself as an enterprise that exists for the good of all its members, there must be a fundamental understanding that if the state takes custody of your body, it has a duty to maintain the integrity of that body.

Thus, while it can be argued that prisoners have no rights to communications, college educations, cable TV, and other privileges and opportunities afforded free citizens, a free society that respects the individual must still see prisoners as autonomous beings with the same basic right to life as anyone else.

And more fundamental to this duty than adequate food, housing and medical care is personal security.

Andy(Tim Boggs) manages to avoid rape in the "Shawshank Redemption," but the issue is used as an opportunity for a bit of gay soft porn. A reprehensible aspect of an otherwise admirable film.

Prison rape is not funny. It is an abomination, and a stain on America’s character of a repugnance equal to that of the segregation of the past, for all it is far lesser known. This country has the ability and means to safeguard the only rights prisoners have, life and integrity of person, but it does not have the will.

The Prison Rape Elimination (PREA) Act of 2003 requires that the Department of Justice collect statistics and work to reduction of these crimes, committed by both inmates and staff. As I write this, for some reason I cannot access any of the Justice department sites dealing with PREA. The incidence of prison rape as reported by advocacy groups varies, but there is no doubt that these crimes number in the tens of thousands annually.

Prisoner request for AIDS test results after being raped. From Gabriel Films, "Prison Rape," a documentary instrumental in the passage of PREA.

Prison rape is not funny. A culture of tolerance, and even encouragement, not only within the prison system, but in the country at large, is one step on the road to Auschwitz.

 

(For survivors’ stories, and information and contacts to work for an end to prison sexual abuse, see: Just Detention

Legislative Inflation: The Weimar Solution

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in physical form

As the Supreme court considers the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) it is meet to consider this statute in another light: length.

The bill which famously had to be read to determine its contents is often referenced as being around 1500 pages – estimates vary.  How many pages of regulations and administrative law cases this will spawn is anybody’s guess, but the exponent will be very large.

Lengthy laws and codes are nothing new, as is s alack of consensus on the exact length The Code of Justinian was two to three times the length of the bible( I.m not sure which one) according to a cursory internet search.

The Anglo Saxon tradition seems to be a bit more pithy, and to have survived the Norman invasion as  as the Magna Carta fit on a single length of parchment, and the quite succinct United Sates  Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Tend: Holding steady. See http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/ for more fun stuff.

But that was then.  Now there is  for example,  the monstrous United States Tax code, which metastasizes daily.  16,000 plus pages, by some counts.  That’s a lot of dead trees, but the pulp based holocaust is at least tempered by digital formatting..

If ignorance of the law is no excuse, then, at this point we are all guilty of something,

When the inflation on Germany’s Weimar republic reached a height where the denominations were simply beyond human comprehension, they did find a solution.

I would suggest the same for many of our statutes.

 

 

 

The Toulouse Murders: Anti-Zionism is Racism

This week in Toulouse, France Mohammad Merah killed a rabbi and three children, dragging the youngest by her hair before he blew her brains out.   Merah stated that he was avenging Israeli murders of Palestinian children.

On November 10, 1975,  the United Nations passed General Assembly Resolution 3379. Which condemned Zionism as a form of racism.

Thirty years after the ovens went cold, the Jews were again labeled a people apart.   We have since reached the point where anti-Semitism, disguised as empathy for “opressed Palestinians” is not only acceptable, but fashionable.

Immediately following the killings in France, we heard from the Baroness Ashton, E.U. foreign policy chief, deploring the murders but somehow equating the with dead children in Gaza.  She has since somewhat nuanced her words, but not so far as to acknowledge that the innocent dead in Gaza have been and always are, killed as a result of conflict initiated by Palestinians.

And  when Islamists kill it’s not their fault.

Tarik Ramadan, Oxford Don, and doyen of the Islamic apologetic circuit, said this:

(Merah was)”…A French citizen frustrated at being unable to find his place, to give his life dignity and meaning in his own country, he would find two political causes through which he could articulate his distress: Afghanistan and Palestine. He attacked symbols like the army, and killed Jews, Christians and Muslims without distinction.“

Mera hmade his motives quite clear, targeting Jews in the name of Palestine, and French soldiers as revenge for France’s role in Afghanistan.  What do Palestine and Afghanistan have in common?  Of course, it is Islam

Ramadan’s air brushing is typical of his ilk; that such people are lionized n western intellectual circles demonstrates that we are, in our own way, as sick as the Islamic world,
where Jew hatred has a provenance almost as ancient as that of Europe.

Sahih Bukhari Hadith Volume 4, Book 52, Number 177: Narrated by Abu Huraira: Allah’s Apostle said, “The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”

It is time to dispense with the term “anti-Semitism.”  Let’s call it what it is, Jew  hatred. and those who practice it what they are – Jew haters.

You who toss a keffiyeh around your neck and sip coffee as you discuss “Israeli apartheid,“ you are Jew haters.  Your black and whitechecked fashion accessory is your brown shirt.  Call yourself progressive, antifash, or whatver you like, but only the empty  abstraction and post modern obfuscation of your mimicked discourses distinguish you from Stormfront.

When you sign  “Boycott and Divestment“ petition you are a Jew hater.

Your hatred, you think, is chic concern for the down trodden  You are an engage.  In fact, you are appallingly stupid.  Your hatred is born in ignorance and intellectual superstition,  What you regard as facts are instead mythical incantations, intended to conjure up a past that never was, and to transform the present into a future that will never be.

You repeat the baseless and self important assertions of whichever half lettered disciple of Edward Said filled your vacuous, but selfish minds in some overpriced classroom.  Israel you say, is a colonial construct, a Western imposition on the Arab World.  Yet you cannot make the parallel conclusion that the map lines which define every Arab country today were drawn in Western foreign ministries.  All of these ramshackle polities calling themselves Arab states, miserable failures at providing anything but want and strife for their populations, hate Jews.  And so do you.

“Palestinians deserve to be free,” you say. Yet Israel is the only country in the middle East where all can worship freely, or not at all, and whose citizens can choose to live as religous, atheists, gays, secualar democrats, indeed any identity the wish to choose  or fashion on their own.   The extant Palestinian territories are morasses of petty despotism, extortion and nepotism.  This you would extend to a tiny, but highly successful, country in the name of a freedom that the Palestinians have long since shown they have no wish for, and you wish this on Israel because you are a Jew hater.

You would laugh at a Greek irredentist demanding a march on Constantinople.  While vast areas of Central and Eastern Europe  were once German and now are not, you do not demand right of return for Silesians, Pomeranians and Prussians.

But you do so for Palestinian Arabs.

Because you hate Jews.

If you truly cared for the Palestinians you would not urge them to continue on their fruitless absolutist quest.  For when Palestine is free, from the River to the Sea, it will be the freedom of utter devastation.

It would be a lesser rhetorical excess than those you use against to Jews to say that the blood of Janathan Sandler, his sons Aryeh and Gabirel, and the little girl Miriam are on you  hands, but it is fair to say that your are close enough to catch the spatter.

Tarik Ramadan is a liar. And so are you when you say You aren’t anti Jew, just anti-Zionist, so you support the One State “solution.”  Jews understand when they hear talk of “solutions.

Muammed Merah was honest.  You should be too.

Say it.

I don’t love Palestine.

I hate Jews.

Death Spiral: Kathleen Sibelius and W.B. Yeats

On 29 February,  HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius was on the Hill testifying as to why the Affordable Care Act is not the cause of the decline in employer provided health insurance.  When asked about the decline in employer provided health insurance coverage, the Secretary replied:*

“Well again, Congressman, what you’re seeing…  It wouldn’t have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not. The private market is in a death spiral.”

In health insurance parlance, a “death spiral” is:

“The health insurance death spiral occurs when individuals with higher health expenses are driven by market forces towards one particular plan. The higher costs associated with individuals who have pre-existing health conditions cause premiums and out-of-pocket costs to escalate, which drives healthier individuals out of the plan, because the cost becomes too high for the small amount of need they anticipate. This causes premiums and out-of-pocket costs escalate further because there aren’t as many healthy individuals left to absorb the risk, so even more healthy people leave the plan, and prices climb even higher. This cycle continues spiraling on and on until prices are so high that the coverage is unaffordable.”.(source)

This describes Obamacare.  Of course the private market is dying.  That’s the idea.  It always was.

It is something of a cliche to quote the most well known of Yeats, but when I read the word death spiral could not but hep think of the falcon’s gyre in “The Second Coming.”

                                     Turning and turning in the widening gyre
                                     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                                     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                                     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

This administration’s attack on the insurance market is only one instance of the anarchy they have loosed  Obama promised fundamental change.  This is one promise he has kept.

                                     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                                      he ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Marx and Engels condemned the bourgeoisie in that  ” It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors.”   That of course was what led to the great advances in human prosperity and freedom.  The modern Left wishes to sunder the ties of law and civic responsibility that have made Western  Civilization so successful,  and reestablish those feudal ties to our natural superiors, the governing class. The sundering of of ancient ties to our freedoms has been accomplished without the blood once foretold by the likes of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, but that “ceremony of innocence,” our confident sense of self, the optimism and energy that so entranced deTocqueville, are indeed drowning.. And thus we turn to government, even for something so basic as deciding who will care for our bodies, and how this should be done.

And those who should be guarding our institutions, seem helpless, lost, or worse, indifferent, while the new vanguard advances heedless to all objection

                                   The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                                   Are full of passionate intensity.

There is no question as to the “passionate Intensity” of this administration in pursuing its goals. Indeed, the death spiral Ms Sibelius cites is an unintended metaphor for what may be yet to come, as she testified on March 2nd:

Sebelius told a House panel Thursday that a reduction in the number of human beings born in the United States will compensate employers and insurers for the cost of complying with the new HHS mandate that will require all health-care plans to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives, including those that cause abortions.

“The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius said. She went on to say the estimated cost is “down not up.”

On the less weighty side of things, Ms Sibleius’ comment is typical of the kind of flip accounting gimmicks that are thrown up by all sides in political discourse.  In the longer view, it is deeply troubling. The Secretary is then perhaps unaware unaware of the demographic death spiral in the old cultures of Europe, where the birthrates for native Europeans – and yes, that means whites – have long since fallen below  replacement.

Or perhaps she is, and subscribes to the notion that the shortfall in human beings can be replaced with industrious immigrants.  One need only look to Britain where population has increased due to immigration from countries with a much lower level of economic, and human development, resulting in vast welfare dependency, defiant and resistant enclaves committed to Islamic rule, and a government that submits to the demands  of the invaders for whom it threw open the gates. Such a society most certainly “lacks all confidence.”

In the U.S., births were at replacement rate as recently as 2007, after thirty- five years  below that rate, 2.2 live births per woman, necessary to maintain a population, but has since dropped again.

“The rule which we intend to promulgate in the near future around implementation will require insurance companies, not a religious employer, but the insurance company to provide coverage for contraceptives,” Sibelius told the subcommittee.

The key word is “promulgate”.  It smacks of the arrogance of imperium. The praetors of the left know best. What we have here is a whiff of the totalitarian population control fantasies of the 1970s, a leading exponent of which was  John Holden, Obama’s “Science Czar.” He has since tepidly disavowed these views( rather recently, in fact, when they came to view), but the lesson is that he was wrong then, yet this administration is once again looking to population control, and, one could say, the eugenics of Margaret Sanger, when one considers African -American abortion rates, to manage a perceived problem.

The lLft simply doesn’t like people, other than those who form their self anointed elects( and not always then, as the history of leftist purges demonstrates)  The communist regimes of Europe and Asia spoke of their love of the masses, then slaughtered them.  The soft totalitarianism of the modern left will keep them from being born.

Coda: Finally, in a story that has hardly blazed across the airwaves, The estimated ten year cost of affordable Care, according to the CBO has doubled and the impact on employer provided coverage far more severe than anticipated.  Isn’t it always so?

*On these posts, it is my habit to use only “mainstream media”  as sources.  I am often alerted to stories by “right wing blogs,” but as I hope, in my small way, to perhaps , one at a time, convince the unconvinced, I research the stories in the traditional media which, quite undeservedly, retain a reputation for accuracy and even handedness.Yet, I was unable to find any reference on to Ms Sibelius’ testimony in the alphabet services. It’s real – you can see the video here.

Breitbart’s First Post Mortem Pitch Falls Short

Conservative New Media star Andrew’ Breitbart’s last article appeared today, the first in the series in  which, despite his death this week at 43, his organization intends to vet the President this time around, and promises to do the same with the President’s rivals.

The piece centers on a Chicano avant garde play put on in 1998, after the performance of which on one occasion then State Senator Baraka(sic) Obama appeared as a panelist. It’s pretty far left stuff, the details of which you can read here.

But in the end, it’s inside baseball.

Breitbart establishes Obama’s place in a chain of transmission going back to the thirties, even, at only two degrees of separation, touching Trotsky.  Bill Ayers and other heirs of the old left make appearances, as does writer Suds Terkel,

Fascinating stuff.

Some years ago, I was reading Sidney Hook’s autobiography “Out of Step,” In which he went after other public intellectuals, such as Irving Howe, for hiding their radical pasts and flirtations – or worse – with totalitarianism, when I remarked to a friend that, interesting as the book was, it seemed a bit quaint. In the wake of the collapse of the East Bloc.  What relevance did intellectual squabbles and confusing metamorphoses of Trotskyite splinter groups matter?  Who even gets the “Splittist” scene in “Life of Brian” anymore?  You have to be of a certain age.

I was wrong, and naïve to think the Left had ever gone away, or just become Liberals, annoying, but hardly subversive. Mr. Hook, who died in 1989, would recognize what the President has accomplished in obscuring his roots. I do not say “hide”, because the truth about Barrack Obama was there for anyone who cared to know before his election.

The problem was that “vetting” has traditionally – and foolishly – been entrusted to a restricted group of voices. In 2008, bias was not enough, and obscurantism, distortion, and outright falsehood were deployed in candidate Obama’s favor.  Making up for this egregious betrayal of trust was the project on which Mr. Breitbart had embarked before his death, and his people vow to finish it.

I hope they have more, and better, than this. When I call it inside baseball, I mean to say that those who can understand the significance of such associations and histories constitute a limited demographic. And they have long since made up their minds in regards to Mr. Obama, one way or the other.

The cause of anti leftism was dealt a blow by  its conflation with Senator McCarthy’s methods from which it has never recovered.  Even an aggressive Soviet Union, Maoist and Cambodian genocides, and countless smaller atrocities could not give it legitimacy. The left retains its mantle of altruism, seen as sometimes misguided perhaps, but altruism nevertheless. Those who oppose it on principle are, of course, fascists. This is the narrative Breitbart fought, but the battle is yet barely joined.

It is simply beyond the capacity or interest of the “crucial independent voters” to take an interest in ideological history, even were it to be fairly aired across the old media to which they maintain habitual allegiance,

Trotsy? Alinsky?   The Republic Steel strike in 1938? Sounds like history, dude. Boring. Studs Terkel?  Wasn’t he that nice old guy on PBS back when?

And in fairness, why should they take notice?  Disentangling the conflicting stories, stripping the layers and finding the truth is a pretty serious hobby for anyone, if not a full time job as it was for Andrew Breitbart.  Many would simply hope to go with their lives, trusting their government to do its best for them, and for their television and newspapers to tell them the truth,

To extend the baseball metaphor, Breitbart’s vetting roll out piece is like the statistics laced commentary during a  no hitter, a game that real fans love, but a lot of us just go to the park now and then and we want to see hits.

To score on Obama, will require no longer taking his pitches, but throwing some hard, fast balls his way, indelible messages that demonstrate this man’s antipathy to the kind of country I believe, or perhaps only hope, a majority still wants.

The Republicans throw like girls.  They need a relief pitcher.  One can only hope Breitbart is savings  its best stuff  for the later innings.

Highway 60: Four Days in the American Interior: Day Two: Socorro, NM to Hereford, TX

I really should get started earlier.

(For Day One, go here.)

Morning.

There’s a supermarket across the way.  A local outfit, with the aisles a bit bedraggled, as these rural places usually are. No olive bar, international cheese spread or charcuterie, but a couple of bucks and tax gets you plenty of hot coffee and glazed deliciousness. Bear claw and a maple log. This stuff just doesn’t exist anywhere outside the U.S.

Sit on the porch, put your feet up. Retire in Socorro?

A guy, white, scraggly, bearded, dressed in layers, probably homeless, is talking to himself sitting at one of the tables. The Latina serving me rolls her eyes. I ask if he’s a problem. No, she says, but the smell. ?Que va a hacer? What can you do?  I remember the week before, chatting with a convenience store clerk in Santa Cruz, California, who was terrified of the crack head who hung out in the parking lot. She’d seen him decline over a year or so, from a hippie pothead type, to a hallucinatory shambles uttering threats to everyone and no one.

Even here, I think. Best to breakfast in the room.

Time for a quick look at Socorro. Back to the square. The town is named for the succor the local Indians gave the first group of Spaniards staggering out of the nearby desert in 1598.   A little less than a hundred years later the Pueblo Indians revolted and Spanish rule did not recommence until 1815. Socorro’s core retains a very nineteenth century look. I n an unexpected segue from Fort Apache the day before, it turns out the Socorro was the home of Elfego Baca, hero of a Disney series for TV in the 50s, “The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca.”

Robert Loggia as Elfego Baca, New Mexico lawbreaker turned sheriff,and later lawyer advocate for the Hispanic community. With Audrey Dalton. Anette Funicello also played a character named "Chiquita." Cringe!. Still, despite color blind casting and goofy accents, the series was the first to bring a Mexican- American hero to a nationwide audience.

There’s enough in the area to keep one busy for days; I figure I have about fifteen minutes to spare. Some of the buildings around the square date to the old municipio. I don’t know why people say history is boring.  Look at a Spanish town in North America, like this one, or Sonoma in Northern California, and you are looking at a Roman colonia.

The building style  combines adobe and timber, of which there is a good supply in the nearby mountains, reminding me of Patzcuaro Iin the pine forests of Michoacan. Government offices are in new buildings off the square and the old places are occupied by lawyers, accountants, and a cafe advertising live acoustic music and poetry readings.

Stopping the wars in Socorro. Somehow, not expecting Occupy Socorro anytime soon.

Adobe of the desert Southwest combined with mountain pine.

A stretch of interstate is unavoidable as 60 joins it for a few miles running north before heading due west again. I don’t mind because this part runs along the Rio Grande valley, the river bottoms glorious in color against the low austere mountain.  , At a rest stop to get rid of the morning coffee I find a marker for the Acomila Buttes nearby. These formed a choke point on the El Camino Real(Royal Road) along the river and was a place where caravans were frequently ambushed by the Apache.

There is that about New Mexico: it seems to exist in different times simultaneously. One can feel the past here. It is part of America,and the Southwest, but there is something in the air,and the light, that sets the state apart in both space and time.

I had been in the state once before, in 71. It was October then, too, and the autumn color reminds of that time. A college drop out, waiting for my draft call up, I took to the road, uncertain of why or where I wanted to go, and spent a couple of months in the state, hitching, sometimes sleeping rough, doing a bit of day labor here and there.

Somewhere in a river valley, ranch homes along the banks sheltered by groves of crimson Lombardy poplar, and then a town. I got out at a Dairy Queen. The place was very quiet. The social tide of the 60s had left this place alone, but the war had taken the young men. A man  asked me where I was going, and when I told him no place in particular, he asked if I could stand a bit of work. A neat fellow with brilliantined hair, plaid shirt, jeans and a string tie. I felt disheveled next to him as I climbed into his truck.

Looking north from Highway 60 going west to Mountainair

He put me up for a couple of days. His own son son was overseas. I wasn’t of a lot of use, but his wife fed me, and the work made me not quite a guest, but less than a beggar.

Acomilla Buttes

After shifting a heap of firewood, he put me to work scraping and sanding the walls of the house, which he intended to paint.   Pleased with my first few hours work, I looked up to see him regarding it. His cheek twitched, and the toothpick always in his mouth shifted from one side to another. I knew I had to start over.

It would be a great story if I could write how that old boy taught me to rope and ride, but a couple of days was about all he wanted me around for. I’m still meticulous on surface preparation. I’m not sure why he took me in.   After supper I was invited to watch the news on the big Magnavox in the parlor. They were particularly intent when a story came on from the war zone in Viet Nam.

“Roy’s not anywhere near there,” he said. And the woman smiled and freshened my ice tea.  I slept in the bunk house. The place must have been more active once, but now there were just the bed frames with rolled up mattresses.

60 to the west towards the-40

After two days, the rancher took me back to the Dairy Queen. We shook hands and then he handed me two twenties. I had never thought about pay and one would have been more than fair.

“Never mind, you earned it he said”, and drove away.

60 East All mine in both directions

Right on 60, and I am alone on a glorious two lane blacktop skirting mountains and heading gently up. A storm brewing.  Stop to take some pictures, and there is not a car in any direction.  What a country this is, that can build and maintain these perfect roads that so few will take.

Alone. No one coming in either direction, no sound save the rising wind.

Hippie crashes in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The Mescaleros, pine fresh in the morning, the plain of Alamogordo crimson in dusk.

Late one night, a state trooper stopped and asked for my ID. Perhaps no older than I, he put on an air of sternness, but as he looked through my passport ( I had no license) and saw the Asian stamps, he couldn’t contain his curiosity.  He took me forty miles down the road just to hear some of my stories of far countries, and allowed he’d travel one day too.

The trooper dropped me off in Roswell, where I washed dishes for a while. Met a girl there and when she had satisfied her curiosity over the California boy, and I knew that I couldn’t ever be from there, moved on.

Finally, I see someone.  A fellow riding a grass cutting machine, trimming the verge. Not only is the road surface perfect, but the shoulders are manicured. You have to have lived in very different countries to realize what a miracle this is.

Picked up one day by two middle aged cowpunchers with all their possessions in a station wagon, suitcases, saddles and tack, driving hopefully off to a new gig. Left me at the side of the road when they turned off, with the gift of a half pint of bourbon, and best wishes for my time in the service. They had been in Korea.

Taos in the rain. Braided Indian women selling baskets, kids in jacked up chevies cruising the slick streets.

Maybe looking for trouble, thumbing around with my huge  white kid ‘fro and Guatemalan quetzal jacket, but treated with great kindness by people who seemed to find some small happiness in helping me on my way,

When I tired of these wanderings and with winter setting in, I went back to California, where an induction notice had arrived, followed soon by another notice canceling it. Back to real life, finishing school, work, and the long road that brought me back here this morning, once again, to the autumn Rio Grande on a New Mexico morning.

I speak a silent  thank you to New Mexico, for what it gave me then, and is now.    I hope all those people’s lives have been or were full, and happy. I hope the girl married well; I hope Roy came home o.k.

Salinas Puebos National Monument New Mexico

Driving on, the question arises:what it is it about so many rural folk that leads them to collect, and display intheir front yards,large amounts of mechanical junk. The houses I see are surrounded by broken equipment, and lots of battered trailers and mobile homes. These are perhaps, still in use as migrant housing. The ranches are not the prosperous showcases one sees in California.

The map shows that the Salinas Pueblo Mission National Monument is not far off my way. There are three sites, Abo, Quarai and Gran Quivara. Gran Quivara I’ve known about since my boyhood interest in archeology, and it is just a little too far off the route. Abo, however, is just before the the town of Mountainair on 60.

Abo Mission ruins

Buttress use unique to Abo

There’s a small ranger station. The ranger is out to make his rounds and waves as he drives off. There is a light dusting of snow on the red rock ruins. Settled by the Indians as far back as 1300, The Spanish Franciscans established a mission there around 1620, but only stayed for around fifty years. Historic American Buildings Survey,
Engineering Record, Landscapes Survey Library of Congress says this about the architecture:”The Mission is notable for the construction method using buttresses to support relatively thin walls, a method used in European church architecture. San Gregorio de Abo is the only example of the use of this method for a seventeenth-century New Mexican church.”

I have the place to myself. The starkness of the ruined walls against the perfect cobalt sky is overwhelming.Time weighs heavily, all the vanished unknown lives. But, I see here is one, that is happily memorialized. Don Federico, Fred Sisneros whose family once owned the site, spent his declining years caring for the site as “the nation’s oldest park ranger.” His family had once owned the land,and later deeded it to the state. This reminds me again of eh ancient roots of the Hispanic settlement in New Mexcio. Descendants of old families like the Sisneros proudly, and accurately, say that their ancestors predated the United States. Another branch of the family runs Casa de Abo nearby, producing sculptures and landscape ornaments into the New Mexican style.

Grave of Fred Sisneros, "the Nation's oldest Park Ranger."

On to Mountainair and as the road rises it begins to snow. I am delighted. It is a light fall, not enough to close the roads, but enough for me to see New Mexico in winter as well as autumn.

Train Station, Mountainair New Mexico

Railside business in Mountainair. Probably a feed and grain outfit once,now plastic injection molding, You have to hand it to anybody making a go of something in a tiny place like this,

The town is a small place, and looks as if it were never too much more than a whistle stop. There is an old Santa Fe station, closed off to the public, a maintenance center now. Work, I’m sure, is scarce around here. Lucky is he – or she – who is a railroader these days.

There ‘s time for me to make Quarai and I head out of town as the road quickly descends into a nearly featureless plain, now white, totted at great distances by homesteads. Then the way turns north and east and rises again.   Of course. The settlement would be sited on higher ground both for defense and access to, and control of, water from the mountains. There is a town, or hamlet, not large enough to warrant a sign, and

Shaffer Hotel, Mountainair

Quarai mission ruins

Massive walls, six feet wide in places

seventeenth century.

The  nearby town of Manzano (Pop. 54)  has a church, and a churchyard, as well as an automotive graveyard that appears to date from the 30s. Again, that tendency of the rural poor to collect junk.

There’s time for a quick look at the main street in Mountainair. An old hotel that has a coffee shop going, warm and inviting. The icon of every small town where a kid woke up and said I’m getting out of here one day. A

Downtown Moutainair

defunct Greyhound station, a local bank long gone, a John Deere place still in business.

Back to 60 . I’m following the railroad now, one train after another. There is sometime about seeing a pair of diesels pulling a long string of cars across a western landscape. It speaks of power, the raw energy that bound these immense vistas with steel.

The train are different from those I saw a child. Boxcar Willie would find no shelter, as boxcar has almost vanished, Instead, containers on flats, RORO, chemical carriers, livestock cars. And the caboose must have disappeared decades ago. The containers are all Asian: COSCO, Han IL, Yonsei. Gone too is the variety, the many logos that a child would count to while away the long hours on a cross country drive: Rock Island, B&O, Erie, Great Northern, Burlington, Northwestern, Rio Grande, Union Pacific, Wabash and so many more, so that a train bore emblems of every region of the country, a rolling history of railroad commerce for the US and Canada as well.

The Santa Fe, my childhood favorite, because it was the line that brought grandparents from back east, survives and thrives. The Chesapeake has long been CSX which just isn’t very evocative. There are occasional Canadian National and Pacific Cars. Still, the lines of cars form horizon to horizon still and thrill I wonder if this is what rolls during a time of low growth, what must it be like when times are good?

Humans and vehicles at rest

Manzano church

The snowy horizon extends in every direction with a few ranches until I reach the town of Willard. I’m hungry, and the roadside Willard Cafe looks like it might be just the thing. Now here it’s time for a bit of shameful confession. Like so many coastals, I know my fellow Americans from the interior more as types seen in the movies., than as real people I might actually enjoy meeting.

There is a large bar and games area, empty at this time of day, and a small, cozy lunch room. One table is occupied by four bearded guys in billed caps and camos. In the movies, they would be militia types, ready to kick some urban ass. Perhaps they are hunters, or just guys from around here who like to dress that way.

A friendly blond waitress seats me, bringing me my ice tea and a menu along with chips and salsa. The place specializes in deep fried Serrano Chiles. A green Chile combo comes a taco, beans, and sopapilla, New Mexican fry bread. It strikes me that on every table is a dispenser of Karo syrup. I haven’t seen that since I was last in the south. But then Texas is not that far, and there were Confederate militias in New Mexico.

The food is just right for a winter day, hearty, , spicy, but not fiery, satisfying for its earthiness. At the next table are two men and women, an Anglo and Hispanic of each gender. Government workers from different agencies, County, Forestry, Police, sharing lunch. The conversation switches back and forth between Spanish and English, everybody bilingual, from inter-agency topics to local gossip and family news. Their easy camaraderie adds a warmth to the room already glowing with the aroma of good food.

Lisa, owner operator of the Willard Cafe. Original exterior wall in the background

The room clears and I linger to chat with the waitress when she esquires as to my enjoyment of the food, which I am happy to verify. Her name is Lisa, and in fact, she is the owner. Lisa tells me that she’s worked there since she was sixteen, off and on, and after forays to Denver and Albuquerque, came home, and about six years ago when the owners wanted to retire they offered to sell he business to her. It hasn’t always been easy, but in addition  rhinsto the local clientele, she has fans from road trips, stopping by like I did, to return again and again. One son helps her, another is up in the Northern part of the state, installing wind turbines. There are big wind farms in the area, and for a while, the crews brought in a lot of business before they moved on. Her son was able to get on part time, did well, and was taken up for training and permanent hire. Her pleasure in the life she has made for herself and her kids in her hometown, where here isn’t much, is warming.

Lunch at the Willard cafe. Local custom seems to be to drench the sopapilla with Karo. Passed on that.

Back on the road, and the terrain is in a long decline, that continental slope, which I can see in the rail line that tilts to the horizon.  This is the Belen cut-off, an Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe route that once sowed settlements across this empty land, and I come to the remains of one such at Yeso.  There must be some people around as there is a Porta-Post office, but I don’t see anyone, and the businesses that once sold travelers cokes and gas are in ruins.  The trains remain, chuffing along, backing up and moving on, framed by half fallen walls. 

General store, Yeso, New MexicoPost Office, Yeso

One building must have been constructed very early on, and by someone with little capital.  The Overton Merc. Co, which I would take to have a general store is built of undressed stone, and without visible mortar, yet it is in better shape than the frame and plaster buildings nearby. (For more on Yeso, see City of Dust, a fine blog by a New Mexican, fascinated by vanished roadside America.  Eloquent writing and photography)

Then it’s another twenty miles or so to Fort Sumner.  Rolling country, better watered, a bit more populated.  This is horse country.  It is always good for the soul to see horses watering, trotting about open pasture of an afternoon as the light softens and  catches their colors.

Fort Sumner straggles along the Pecos River, and that very name is enough to evoke a another 50s series, Judge Roy Bean.  Bean operated much further down the river, in southwest Texas, but I am certainly in an important site for Old West history.

Fort Sumner is where billy the Kid is buried.  Probably, but exactly where is subject to some dispute.  As an article in Roadside America details , the gunman and psychopath  William Bonney, aka Blily the Kid, is most likely resting somewhere in the cemetery next to the Billy the Kid Museum outside of town, but whether is directly under the often filched tombstone is another question.

The museum, which looks more like what my dad used to call “tourist traps,” as he refused to stop despite all our begging to see whatever lurid attraction we were passing, was closed for the season, and directed interested parties back to a branch in town.  Had it been open, I would have tarried.  At one time I affected some sense of post modern irony in enjoying such  places, but now I’m ready to admit, I just like them.  There is also, a few hundred yards on, a memorial and exhibit to some atrocity by the government against the local Indians.  I’ve decided that I want to sleep in Texas that night, so content myself with some quick pics, and move on

Fort Sumner attractions

The low hills around Fort Sumner disappear, and I’m moving towards the Texas panhandle.  On the last elevation I’ll see until I get well  into  Oklahoma,  to the north, a troop of wind turbines claws the sky, skeletal in the fading glow as more weather moves in.

Billy the Kid's headstone. Grave...maybe

A bit of four lane and then Clovis, the concrete mushroom of the Air base control tower to the right,  gas and motel strip thorough town,   The first grain elevators.  Entering the great agricultural heartland, the North American granary that goes form here to Canada and all the way to the Alleghenies.

.Texas

State borders may be imaginary lines on a map, bu the differences are very real. Crossing in to Texas, which is just a matter of crossing the street in Clovis, from New Mexico it is immediately clear that I am in a far more prosperous place and one with very different economic organization. Instead of the small ranches of eastern New Mexico, very Big Ag.  I can smell cows immediately and even in the gathering darkness  there are black spills of them all across the plain on both sides of the road. Oil too.  Now and then a hissing injection well lit up like a Christmas tree.

Have I been away so long that I have no perspective, so that that what seems wondrous to me is merely ordinary?  Were communication masts always so tall,  rising hundreds of feet, with their summits even blurred by low lying mist?. There are many of them, the cherries of their warning lights blinking off in a line to the distance.   Some last light escapes from the setting sun already obscured behind an approaching storm front and the guy wires, gossamer with the last light  flicker like lines of fairy dust.

The towns spread light crossways to the darkened highway like the elliptical discs of distant galaxies. And they are like worlds, with their own histories, matrices of relationships of blood and commerce, that l, as would a voyager through space en route to a distant destination, can only wonder about.

Bovina. You have to love these names.   And up ahead, Hereford. Sure enough, a black and white cow on a plinth announces the town, Hereford, Deaf smith County county seat. Smith, the man who took the last letter out of the Alamo to General Houston, was someone I learned about in those long ago fifties popular juvenile histories.

A good place to stop.  Another Indian run motel, south of forty a night, with a liquor store and Mexican restaurant across the street and a McD’s that will serve for  breakfast.

Taqueria Jalisco has more than tacos, a near full house, and friendly, pretty waitresses. 

Chile verde at Taqueria Jalisco, Hereford, TX

Did I want corn or flour tortillas?  I explain that this is a treat for me, there not being any real Mexican food where I live so I’m having trouble making this simple decision.  Have both she says and I do with my Chile Verde.  Tender pork shoulder simmered for hours in in a piquant green sauce based on jalapeno, tomatillo, cilantro and  other goodies.  Real beans, no healthy cuisine nonsense, cooked with lard.  Sides of red salsa and escabeche to make it all even hotter.

As I pay the bill, a Sikh family stops in to pick up a take out order.

For dessert, I grab a big Stella at the liquor store. The low prices and variety of alcohol everywhere are amazing.  You have to live in in Asia  to appreciate it. On the cable, talk shows on cattle futures, ads for irrigation piping, and a show for women horse owners, all the little girls who grew up reading “Black Beauty,” and here in Texas actually get their own horses.

Drifting off, thinking of the day past and the next, it’s like life: you can’t know if what’s ahead will be as good, or better or worse than what’s past until  you move on.

 

Hamza Kashgari Returned to Saudi Arabia: Where the 7th Century and 1984 Converge in the 21st Century

Malaysian authorities have deported a Saudi journalist accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a tweet. -BBC(12 February 2012)

In typical Beeb style, this is a rather measured statement of what actually happened.  And that is this: A young man exercising speech rights enshrined in the U.N. human rights convention, but not recognized anywhere  in the Islamic world, was seized while in lawful transit en route to a third country,  by Malaysia’s “soft” theocratic state, and turned over to agents of world’s most repressive religious regime for rendition to Saudi Arabia, with the collusion of an international policing agency answerable to no one.

Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia's glittering gateway. I plan on staying away.

And now Hamza Kashgari, journalist and blogger from Jeddah, awaits retribution for his thought crime. It is interesting to not that Kashgari means “of Kashgar” a city in Southwest China, once known as a great caravan terminus in Chinese Turkestan. There has been great diversity within Islam, but the Wahhabi/Salafi/Muslim Brotherhood assault is bent on destroying these differences in the name of the  suffocating orthodoxy challenged by the young Saudi.

Malaysia acted in response to a “red notice” issued by Interpol at tthe request of Saudis.

The Guardian notes :

In response to past criticisms of the red notice system, it has said: “There are safeguards in place. The subject of a red notice can challenge it through an independent body, the commission for the control of Interpol’s files (CCF).”

One can only imagine the cost of the legal resources that would need to be brought to bear to achieve any result.  Mr. Kashgari will not have the benefit of civil society organizations that would be able to help in some societies.

These “safeguards” were of no avail to the 22 year old Saudi. It makes me want to weep.  Can you imagine how this boy felt, his young life in ruins behind him, but still with hope before him, as he flew east?

Then he lands in  KLIA (Kuala Lumpur), transiting to New Zealand, and the  grim face of Islamism greets him.  Perhaps his hope continued to flicker for the few hours he was held, hoping that a world outcry would save him.

Human rights organizations did shout his case out to a largely heedless world, but those who could have helped, the foreign offices of Europe, and the  United States State Department were, and of this writing, still are, silent.

How he felt on the flight “home” is too awful to contemplate.

I spit on “moderate Malaysia.”

This is the face Malaysia presents to the world. Not a hijab in sight when, in fact, most Malaysian Muslim women have taken up the head scarf since the 1980s.

Mr. Kashgari’s remarks would

Malasian Pas(Islamist Party) members demonstrate. This is more representative of current developments in Malaysia.

seem innocuous to those unfamiliar with the parameters defining blasphemy in Islamic jurisprudence:

In the first, Kashgari declared “I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me,” but then added: “I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.” He followed that with a second tweet, “I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.”

In a third, Kashgari said: “I shall not bow to you.  I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.”

Reminiscent of one seeking a personal relationship with Jesus, but given the unquestioning regard of Muslim believers for the Islamic prophet, which only misses being fairly termed  idolatry in that images of this “Perfect Man” are forbidden, the Saudi blogger’s tweets were enough to bring the wrath of the entire Kingdom, from royals to ordinary citizens.

The twats at Twitter should say something about it, but don’t count on it, as they have picked up a stack of Saudi Petrodollars recently

The Red Notice system has been the subject of abuse before, as in this 2004 Congressional Record discussion of bogus notices issued by Uzbekistan. What we have here is a system that allows repressive governments to pursue their nationals for crimes that would not be offenses in free countries, to suppress dissent, and purse their rulers’ personal vendettas..

During World War II, Interpol, then headquartered in Vienna, was headed by such SS luminaries as as Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Reinhard Heydrich.  Now based in Lyon, France,  it is headed by Ronald K. Noble, Clinton era U.S. Justice Department Undersecretary for Enforcement, and head of the Department’s “Waco Administrative Review Team.”  In other words, there is more than a whiff of sympathy for coercive statism in the agency’s history.

And it is this  that made Kashgari’s apprehension possible, even certain.

He fled his native country with thousands quite literally calling for his head.accusing him of apostasy.  This is no surprise as, although the Koran itself does not state a temporal punishment for the crime, a widely accepted  hadith (saying of Islam’s prophet Muhmmad) does:

Whoever changed his (Islamic) religion, then kill him” Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:84:57

Muhammad himslef was no mean axeman, at least by proxy, as the story of the Jewish Banu Qurayza, among other traditions,  will attest.

While Mr.Kashgari did not deny Muhammad as Allah’s messenger,  mere mockery of Allah or the prophet can constitute apostasy. The journalist is in jeopardy of great harm, not the least of which is time in a Saudi jail.  Yet, I do not think his life will be taken.  The case  does have some visibility, and the suave spokesmen the Saudis send to the West will, one

Adel A. Al-Jubeir, current Saudi ambassador to the U.S.

hopes,counsel moderation for the sake of good PR.

A Saudi beheading. A regular Friday crowd pelaser at "Chop Square" in Riyadh. Plenty more where this came from: perennial favorites on YouTube

Rather, Hamza Kashgari’s fate will recall that of Winston  Smith in 1984  Some schools of Islamic jurisprudence allow the apostate to recant and thus avoid death.  This is the line taken against Christians accused of apostasy from Islam by Iran.  Remember how in Orwell’s book, Winston, after his torture and breaking, was allowed his physical freedom, for a while.

One can almost wonder is Kashgari’s flight towards the western world was like the way the Inner Party played with its victims, before erasing them. Kashgari, too will learn to love Big Brother, or at least to convince all around that he does so.  Islam is more merciful than Ingsoc, in that it requires only outward submission for survival in this world, leaving damnation for the secret denier to the next.

Nevertheless, the end result is the same: “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

 

What you can do:

Contact your foreign office.

Contact the Saudi Embassy in your country.

Express your anger to Malaysian representation in your country.

Contact Tourism Malaysia and let them know you will not be visiting Malaysia as a result of their country’s complicity in the Kashgari affair.  This page provides contact information for Malaysian tourism promotion offices in various countries.

For the U.S.  go here to email Secretary Clinton

or call: 202-647-4000

Email Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington

Telephone: (202) 342-3800

Information/Press Office: (202) 337-4076

Malaysian Embassy, Washington

Email: malwashdc@kln.gov.my

Telephone (202) 342-3800

Sign on line petitions.  Here is one, and there are many more.

Tweet and Facebook Kashgari’s story.  Use the links in this piece, or find your own, but spread the news.  Talk to your friends and family.