Author: Maryscott OConnor

                                                               
I saw Star Wars: Episode III on Thursday. Yes, I saw the parallels to the Administration in power. But what struck me most viscerally was Anakin’s personal path to the Dark Side.

Anakin turns to the dark side driven by fear of losing what he has. Driven not by hatred, but by fear, he is ultimately consumed by evil — and still suffers the pain he hoped to bypass…

I have heard it said innumerable times that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I disagree. I believe it is paved with steel forged in fear.

He fears losing Padme, his lover. Determined to find a way to avoid the pain of such a loss, Anakin allows himself to believe the lies of Palatine. He convinces himself that the Jedi are the true enemy of Good; he needs to believe it, in order to open himself to the Dark Side and acquire the kind of power he thinks will save him the loss of what he loves.

Each step Anakin takes down the path to hell is increasingly indefensible. It starts with ignoring Windu’s order to stay at the Temple. By doing so, he unwittingly aids in Palatine’s murder of the Jedi Master. Having made such an irreversible error, he gives in to the Sith Lord — by deliberately ignoring the obvious lies and rationalizing his actions, telling himself he is still on the path of righteousness.

At each point thus far, Anakin is still redeemable. Even when he accepts the assignment to slay all the Jedi Knights, the good in him is still able to believe the lie that he is doing it to save the Republic. But on every man’s road to damnation there comes that fork — the decisive moment when he must choose to turn right or left, thereby cementing his spiritual fate.

Anakin’s Rubicon comes when he kills the “Younglings” — the children in Jedi training. There is no going back after that, and some part of him knows he has turned to the Dark Side completely.

Still, he rationalizes his conversion. He allows himself to believe he has saved Padme (though his true motive was not to save her, but to spare himself the pain of losing her), that he has strengthened the Republic (though in truth he has doomed it to years of fascism).

And the man who began his journey to hell finally gives himself over to it completely when Darth Sidious informs him he has killed Padme. Fully aware for the first time that he has been the instrument of his own damnation, the newly incarnated Darth Vader succumbs utterly to his Dark Side. For him, there is literally nothing left to lose.

But we all know he redeems himself in the end, right? Even those whose actions throughout their lives, born of their fears and their willingness to embrace evil rather than bear the pain of a life lived selflessly, have a chance to renounce it in the end.

That’s the theory, anyway, that the so-called religious right must be banking on like their souls depend upon it. Last minute forgiveness for sins — what a win-win situation they’ve created for themselves, eh?

Myself, I lean strongly in  the hope of redemption. But I don’t believe in painless forgiveness. That’s where I think the Catholics may have a slight edge in the theory department (though their interpretation of penance leaves much to be desired). Surely, anyone can be forgiven, redeemed and allowed into the kingdom of heaven, even after a lifetime of dissolution and despicable deeds? I hope so.

But I have a feeling that Purgatory isn’t as simple and swift an experience that people may think it is. When I imagine what sort of penance men like Hitler, Stalin, Bush, Rove, child molesters and corporate rapists face, I always see them reincarnated as their victims. (I don’t want to delve too deeply into that, into karma — because I don’t like what a believer in this theory must infer about those who suffer here and now. Smacks of Calvinism, in a way.)

Okay, so I got this idea from Robert Reich. I heard one of his spots on NPR several weeks ago and thought, “This makes SENSE. This could WORK.”

No wonder the government hasn’t done it.

The Public Education Solution, as Explained by Robert Reich… and likely mangled in the translation by me:

This is how public education works in the United States: Property taxes pay for it. (For the most part; I hear some states actually give the lottery profits to their public education systems, but for all those instant millionaires, schools still suck from sea to shining sea.) Property taxes, that is, from district to district.

See? A rich district, let’s call it District A, with major moolah invested in McMansions, pays one helluva lot of property tax (unless you’re in California, where the dipshits put a cap on it – possibly the dumbest thing to come out of California voters in decades); the rich district, then, has excellent public schools, because of all that property tax moolah rushing into its coffers. Meanwhile, down the block, the district changes. Welcome to District B.

District B is, as they say, on the wrong side of the tracks. Low rent, dilapidated homes, low property values – ergo, low property taxes, ergo… crappy schools. The schools get what they can afford, folks. (And let’s not even go into what the ravages of NCLB on these districts have been, and how the federal government has not fully funded this federal fucking program.)

So what was Robert Reich’s brilliantly simple solution? Can you guess? Because I did.

Fuck the districts. When it comes to paying for public education, this is how it should work:

You put the entire nation’s federal property taxes into One Big Pool. You take the number of schools in the country – the NECESSARY number, which means you add, say, a 25% increase in the number of schools – especially in those districts that have grotesquely overcrowded public schools, see? Then you divide the total amount collected EVENLY between each and every single public school in the country.

Sure, it’s a clusterfuck getting started – but we’d see vast improvement in virtually every goddamned public school in the country.

Imagine it: Every public school in the country, equally — and more than adequately — funded.

Now, what would happen next? The rich folks, seeing their children’s rich public school brought to equal footing with all the other public schools, either send their kids to private school (more room for other kids, no reduction in property taxes) – or the kids stay and we witness an educational revolution the likes of which hasn’t been seen since FDR.

And think of all the new jobs, for heaven’s sake. The Department of Education’s payroll would have to increase. More jobs for more teachers. More textbooks being bought. More computers. Hell, more PENCILS.

Now, I don’t know shit about this stuff, not really. You’ve pretty much got everything I know about the country’s public school system in a few sentences. So, if I’ve oversimplified the proposal, do let me know. But I think I’ve basically distilled Reich’s idea – and goddamnit, it’s a GOOD one. Level the playing field – level it for REAL.

We are the richest goddamned country in the world. There is simply no reason for the disparities between our public schools.

Of course, there’s no reason for the disparities in our healthcare, either… but that, my friends, is another story.

If you don’t know me from my posts here, let me introduce myself: I am a far-left, anti-war Democrat with a pragmatic streak the size of a continent. If you don’t quite see how someone like me can classify herself as a political pragmatist, ask an oldtimer about my days as a Kerry Cheerleader Extraordinaire…

I hereby reiterate the conclusion to which I came some time after the election: Pragmatism has ceased to be an option.

We, the Democrats and progressives and leftists and liberals who believe this war to be wrong, must appeal to our representatives in Congress. We must hammer them with insistent demands.

Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi should get every single Democratic member of Congress out on the wide open space in front of the Vietnam Memorial for a press conference… and declare the war in Iraq to be a mess that will, if not withdrawn from immediately, make Vietnam look like a school ground rumble.

People are dying and suffering for nothing. This is no fucking chess game; this is a rock bottom issue of morality. Anyone who supported or supports this war supports murder and mayhem. And anyone who stands by and does nothing, says nothing — is also supporting death and destruction.

It is INDEFENSIBLE. No good can come of our presence in Iraq; it will simply continue as it has and eventually get worse. More people will die and suffer maiming, more children will lose their parents… and another generation in the Middle East will grow up despising the United States as a mortal enemy. And, frankly, I can’t blame them.

I, of course, have the luxury of wearing my broken heart on my sleeve, of speaking out vociferously against the war and agitating for immediate withdrawal of all coalition forces — because I am not a politician, much less up for re-election in 18 months.

Likewise, the Democrats have the dubious luxury of not having to make the decision — because they do not yet, unfortunately, have the numbers to force Bush to pull us out of Iraq, let alone impeach the motherfucker, which any RATIONAL legislature would already have DONE by now.

The sensible and prudent Democrats almost all advocate, among other things, international support achieved through making the UN a full partner in “help(ing) the Iraqis build a stable, peaceful and pluralistic society.” (from John F. Kerry’s Op-Ed Piece in the Washington Post, Tuesday, April 13, 2004.) Certainly it has become the only “safe” position to take in the face of our woeful lack of influence or power in Congress.

I am thoroughly acquainted with the perilous vicissitudes of retaining what little hope for making up lost ground in 2006 we may have, of how imperiled so many Democrats already are in their re-election bids.

Some, whom I have had the displeasure to witness on various blogs, are taking every opportunity to employ the kind of vicious, counterproductive rhetoric against the deluded pragmatism displayed by these Democrats, which Ralph Nader used to such great and terrible effect against Al Gore in 2000.

Such behaviour, should it affect the mid-term races the way it affected Mr. Gore and put the election within Mr. Bush’s reach, will do nothing to further the goals of these so-called “progressives.” If the previous term is any indication of the cutthroat hubris with which this Administration will use its power to complete its goals (by now transparent to everyone at a third grade reading level)… the next four years under Bush and a Republican dominated legislature may result in a disfiguration of the world as envisioned by the likes of George Orwell and company.

But there comes a time when pragmatic caution is not only regrettable but damned immoral. This is one of those times. Every Democrat in Congress should band together and in one voice, declare the war in Iraq to have been a dreadful mistake on their part — and deliberate deception on the part of the Administration.

The onus is on these Democrats and everyone who feels in his heart as I do — that this war is folly on a tragic scale — to speak the truth as loudly and as often as possible. And since they show absolutely no signs of neither being willing to do so nor even believing that pulling out is the only possible solution — it is no longer enough on our part to merely work to ensure a net gain in 2006. It is incumbent upon every man and woman of conscience to persist in demanding of our leaders that they unravel the Gordian knot tied so tightly and recklessly by George W. Bush.

I am not delusional. The Byzantine ways of war, while utterly unfamiliar to me as a civilian, are obviously complex, and unimaginable to me.

Which is why the raising of voices, the carrying of signs, the marching en masse to declare to the leaders of the world and the peoples of the world that we must end this conflagration NOW is so vital to a (relatively) positive outcome. Delay in our support for withdrawal further delays the decision-makers’ beginning the process of withdrawal.

How much sooner would the lamentable and catastrophic Vietnam war have ended had the protests begun years earlier? We are no longer the naive population we once were, blindly and trustingly acquiescing to the patriarchal edicts of our leaders. Ill-informed as we may be collectively, we have FAR more access to the truth now than we did then. We know enough, now, to speak up when we notice a naked emperor strutting down our streets. We MUST.

It is tragic and outrageous that these words must be spoken once again: How much longer, how many more people must die in service of George W. Bush’s insane folly? Must we surpass the official death toll of Vietnam before we collectively run out of snooze alarms? What will it fucking TAKE to stop this madness? How can you ask someone to die for a mistake?

3/14/2005

Bitches For Babies:

Sometimes the Bush administration just makes you wanna hang your head in shame and suck back the entire bottle of cheap vodka you keep in your freezer. Sometimes it’s like watching your mother argue to the death with a grocery clerk over the ten-cent price difference on a goddamn can of tomato soup.

So it was that the President sent a delegation from the United States to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s 49th Session, which was organized to look at the progress made since 1995, when the organization passed a significant declaration of the rights of women at the Fourth World Conference on Women.

Among other things, that declaration made in Beijing, done in the Clinton era, when “freedom” was a word that meant “freedom,” said,“The Fourth World Conference on Women reaffirms that reproductive rights rest on the recognition of the basic right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes their right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents.”

Seems civilized, no? And, indeed, in this time of “culture of life” savagery, it seems almost Geneva-Convention-like quaint.

Ellen Sauerbrey led the U.S. delegation, as she is the U.S. Representative to the Commission since 2003. Sauerbrey, a two-time loser for governor of Maryland, spoke time and again at the conference that the Beijing document did not create any new, binding international rights.

Because, you know, the Bush administration is so sensitive to abiding by such documents.

Sauerbrey and the United States practically shut down the conference by demanding that the original document must be amended to say, specifically, that abortion is not a right. Sauerbrey, who looks like a plate of sour brie, was actually booed by the 6,000 delegates when she declared that not only is abortion not a right, but she also flogged the U.S. position on abstinence education on HIV/AIDS. In a grave in Uganda, the corpse of a sore-ridden thirteen year-old female rape victim rolled over.

Under pressure from the other nations, with only Qatar, Egypt, and the baboon-like visage of the dead Pope on its side, the U.S. dropped its demand for the amendment to the decade-old document.

Sauerbrey (c’mon, get it? “Sauerbrey,” “sour brie”?), in a speech transcribed on the website for United Families International (motto: “You’re Keepin’ That Fuckin’ Kid, You Brown Bitch”), she criticizes the U.N.’s policies towards families as “Hillary Clinton’s vision,” referencing Clinton’s participation in the Beijing conference.

Said Sauerbrey, “Sean Hannity, this morning, talked about visions and the differences in visions. My perception is that this prevailing vision at the U.N. is one that is based on rights, but rights without responsibility. Family, whatever you want it to be. Sexual freedom, anything goes. Practically every resolution that goes before the U.N. … somebody tries to figure out a way to put in “reproductive services” . . . “Parental leave is the solution in many countries because women need to always be out in the work force and we need to have government parental leave so that the women can take at least a little time, or maybe the husband, so the woman should stay in the work force, and the husband should stay with the children for a short period of time before they go into a daycare arena. This is not the vision that most Americans share.”

Sauerbrey was joined in the U.S. delegation at the UNCSW Conference by Janet Parshall, who hosts a popular conservative Christian radio program, Janet Parshall’s America, which promotes a vision of “America” that would make Cotton Mather say, “Man, don’t you people have any fuckin’ fun?” before giving up the cloth and taking up the moonshine and fuckin’ syphilitic whores and lovin’ the itchin’ ’cause it makes him feel alive.

Parshall is a former spokesperson for James Dobson’s Family Research Council (motto: “You’re Keepin’ That Fuckin’ Kid, Bitch, and You’re Gonna Spank It”) who opposes embryonic cell research, abortion, and nose picking. Parshall said that the “sanctity of human life is the definitive issue in America,” railing against a “doctrine of death” before she condemned gays to eternal damnation in a fiery hell and pushed the button on the lethal injection for a retarded minor.

The final member of the Bush triumvirate of official delegates to the conference is Susan Hirschmann, former Tom DeLay chief of staff who went with the Hammer on a gambling lobbyists’ funded golfing trip to England. As chief of the FEC investigated 527 the Leadership Forum, Hirschmann suckled at the soft money teat like a baby mole snuggling through the cold dirt to its mother. Now, she’s a lobbyist for whatever corporate johns wanna pay her to shake her K Street-cred in the faces of members of Congress.

Yep, quite a face the United States presented to the world, from wacko right-wing to not-as-wacko right wing, as Bush’s bitches took another giant shit for America at a gathering of nations.

Oh, the rest of the world celebrated the conference. So perhaps the choice here is between being a pussy or a cunt.