Flag (and fag) burning

I read Hendrik Hertzberg's awesome commentary on the flag burning Constitutional amendment that was defeated this week in the July 3 The New Yorker. Here's an excerpt:

The American flag is an abstraction, an idea expressed in a certain arrangement of colors and shapes.
Any particular flag is merely a representation of that idea; and the idea of the flag, in turn, is a symbol of something else. That something else is certainly not the government of the day; nor is it, at bottom, the land or the nation, or even the people. It is, again, an idea—the idea of liberty, made real by institutional arrangements that protect the freedom of citizens to think and speak as they will. Liberty, which is a big idea, protects itself by protecting the expression (though not, of course, guaranteeing the triumph) of other, smaller ideas, good and bad. And the idea of liberty is embodied in the Constitution.

“Desecration” is a word foreign to the vocabulary of that fiercely secular document, whose only references to religion are in its stern proscriptions of any religious test for public office and any government establishment of, or infringement upon, religious practice. Still, almost all Americans, whatever their religious beliefs or lack thereof, would probably agree that both the flag and the Constitution have a certain sacred character. Most would probably agree on a hierarchy of sacredness that places the flag below the Constitution, and the Constitution’s instrumental passages—those dealing with the mechanics of government—below the Bill of Rights. If the proposed amendment is adopted, it will be the first time that the First Amendment, which is the Constitution’s crowning glory, has itself been amended—and to constrict it, not expand it.

The flag is not a piece of cloth, any more than the Constitution is a piece of paper; and the flag’s sacredness is not damaged when a piece of cloth representing it is burned or trampled or used as an autograph book, any more than the Constitution can be damaged by the destruction of a printed copy. But the Constitution can and would be damaged, to the nation’s shame, by the addition of something as inimical to its spirit as the flag-desecration amendment.

And for a lighter look at the subject, read on about the fag burning amendment... :-)

Have a wonderful Fourth of July weekend, everyone!

Stonewall!

Today is the 37th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 event that marked a major turning point in the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. A year later, the first pride march was held in New York, and pride events quickly spread to other cities.

When I came out in 1987, one of my first forays into the community was attending a weekly coming out group at Stanford. I remember one of the other newly out men complaining that too often the media chose to portray drag queens and other out-of-the-mainstream gays and lesbians whenever they covered gay issues. My response: it was those drag queens, those "freaks" that he spoke of, who were the first to stand up to police harassment and fight back. For the millions of gays and lesbians around the world who now enjoy the freedom to be out and proud, it's important to remember that we stand on the sequined shoulders of those at Stonewall... the gay men, lesbians, and transgendered people who had had enough that night 37 years ago.

If you want the truth try asking the questions

This afternoon I picked up a copy of The Bohemian, a local Marin County paper, and read an article about Dr. David Ray Griffin. Griffin, a retired professor who taught at the Claremont School of Theology, is the author of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, and the soon to be released Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action.

Steve Bhaerman's Bohemian article "Unquestioned Answers" discusses the inconsistencies in the official 9/11 story that Griffin details in both his books and speaking engagements (Bhaerman has heard him three times). He also highlights one of Griffin's key themes: that the official 9/11 story has become a "sacred myth." As Griffin explains, "the official story is itself a conspiracy theory" in which "al Qaida operatives conspired to hijack four jetliners, did so undetected and were able to complete their mission with no interception or even interference from the best-prepared air force on the face of the earth."

Further, "the crime was solved immediately, and the official story was in place before the day of the attack was over."

And the official story "must be taken on faith. It is not a matter of debate or even discussion. Anyone who brings up anything that contradicts the official story is either ignored or denounced as a conspiracy nut." But as Griffin points out, "when the official account of 9-11 is stripped of its halo and treated simply as a theory rather than an unquestionable dogma, it cannot be defended as the best theory to account for the relevant facts. When challenges to it are not treated as blasphemy, it can easily be seen to not correspond with reality."

Griffin's objective is to educate enough people about the problems he sees in the orthodox account of what happened on 9/11 so that the events will be re-investigated by a commission which will produce a truth-driven rather than politically-driven report.

While Griffin's books have gotten little coverage in the mainstream media, The New Pearl Harbor has sold over 100,000 copies. (Make that 100,001... I just bought mine. :-)

I found a couple of videos on Google: one from 2004 in which Griffin debunks the 9/11 Commission Report and a second from 2005 in which he discusses how religious people should respond to America's subsequent actions.

For more information, check out 911Truth.org. A great quote from their site:

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all. -- Michael Rivero

DANIEL ELLSBERG, WHO LEAKED THE PENTAGON PAPERS, speaks out on what he describes as our current "constitutional crisis"--the Bush administration's claims that it can do almost anything, including torture and unauthorized domestic surveillance, in the name of fighting terrorism--in this video:

Global warming: what you can do today

I found a cheap and easy way to offset the carbon emissions from driving my car today. TerraPass provides free emissions reports for all major automobile makes and models and sells annual passes that offset those emissions.

I drive a 2005 Mazda RX-8, and TerraPass estimated that I'm generating about 7,500 pounds of CO2 per year by driving 8,000 miles. For $39.95, they sold me a pass which offsets 8,000 pounds of CO2 by funding projects that reduce industrial carbon dioxide emissions. These projects include "clean energy such as wind and biodiesel; biomass such as dairy farm methane; and industrial efficiency."

Along with the peace of mind that I've done something, I get a decal and bumper sticker to help spread the word.

I'm flying to Portland for their gay pride festival on Friday, and I paid $2.26 to offset the CO2 emissions for my seat on the flight at CarbonNeutral flights, again by financing projects such as small scale hydroelectric and biomass energy production. The CarbonNeutral Shop offers a variety of other products for reducing carbon emissions. There are similar sites on the web, and most seem to be based in the UK, but it was easy both to enter my flight information and pay with a U.S. credit card. A U.S.-based option for offsetting carbon emissions from home energy use, cars, and travel is NativeEnergy.

For more information on reducing your carbon footprint, see Carbon Footprint.

Hanging out in eastern Oregon

Last week I spent four days in eastern Oregon, staying in a house surrounded by a horse corral and corn fields. Despite growing up in Kansas and working on the family farm, it had been a very long time since I had spent any significant time in rural America.

It is strange how much of one's life one can forget. And by that I don't mean that the memories are gone, but rather that they are so rarely recalled that what they represent is no longer substantial. I have a collection of stories about my life before I moved to California in 1985, but before my trip last week I had very little direct experience of the flavor and pace of life that defined my first 18 years. The stories have lost some of their evocative power; being in Oregon provided cues that brought the past back powerfully.

There was driving on long stretches of roads with few other vehicles. Rocking on a porch swing with a beer on a warm night. Burning a brush pile. Running along country roads in the heat of the afternoon. Looking under the hood of the pickup with the neighbors. Playing catch with the kids in the front yard. Going to Dairy Queen and A&W. Hanging out with people who know everyone in town. Pulling into the driveway and being greeted by the family pack of dogs. The twittering and chirping of birds.

Rural Oregon anchored the ends of several chains for me. There was my own re-connection with my past and the quiet lifestyle that it represents. There was the opportunity to experience the roots of the young man that I'm dating, to see the other end of the life that he has now planted in the Bay Area.

And there was the getting in touch with what I've been reading about lately: the industrial agricultural machine that feeds us. Right outside my window were the acres of irrigated corn that Michael Pollan wrote about in The Omnivore's Dilemma, something that I blogged about in early May. Like so many things in life, when seen up close, growing corn is simply people putting in a hard day's work. It's only from a distance that the price of feeding ourselves this way becomes clear.

My trip to Oregon was a spontaneous but significant step in getting to know someone and the world that shaped the curve of his life. It was an opportunity to relive some of my own early experiences. And it was an archetypical American road trip, that metaphor for life's changes and transitions that we've seen and read so many times. I'm back, and having been let into someone else's world, my own life isn't quite the same now. I'm on the road again, so to speak, and just possibly running with scissors. Augusten would be proud. :-)

UPDATES

Saw An Inconvenient Truth last Thursday. Go! (But carpool if you can. :-)

The Center for Food Safety has a campaign underway to support the labeling of genetically engineered food, the idea being to empower consumers to make informed choices about what they are eating and which food chains they are supporting. Click here to send an email to your representative in Congress.

What is past is prologue

Okay, how did this happen? I thought I had received a decent education, and I've certainly spent a good amount of time around intelligent, well-informed people. But somehow I totally missed a pretty significant piece of American history.

The other night I watched The Pentagon Papers; the movie chronicles the story of Daniel Ellsberg, a dedicated Pentagon staffer who became disillusioned with the war in Vietnam and leaked a classified history of U.S. involvement there to The New York Times.

I rented the movie because I knew enough of the story to appreciate some of the parallels to contemporary events: the manipulation of intelligence to gain support for going to war, domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens, and Attorney General Gonzales' threats to prosecute journalists who publish leaked government secrets. But what I didn't know was what the Pentagon Papers themselves contained, and after watching the movie I found myself wondering why I hadn't learned about them in high school or college.

In short, the Pentagon Papers, or as they were actually titled, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, detailed in 7000 pages the history of how four presidents (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson) lied to the American public about our involvement in Vietnam. They, along with their administrations, lied about why we were in Vietnam and about how well the war was going. They lied to conceal airstrikes and the presence of U.S. troops on the ground. They lied about the Gulf of Tonkin attack in order to justify stepping up our military involvement.

Ellsberg leaked the papers in 1971 during the Nixon administration. The Times published the first of a series of articles on their contents in June, and the government immediately sought and obtained a court injunction against its printing any additional installments. This, the first instance of the U.S. government exercising "prior restraint" against the media, became a legal battle which quickly reached the Supreme Court. In a historic decision, the Court voted 6-3 to overturn the injunction and allow The Times, as well as The Washington Post which had also obtained the papers, to continue to publish their stories. In the majority opinion, Justice Hugo Black stated:

In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.

Further:

The word "security" is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic. The Framers of the First Amendment, fully aware of both the need to defend a new nation and the abuses of the English and Colonial governments, sought to give this new society strength and security by providing that freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not be abridged.

(More details on the arguments before the Court and the decision may be found here.)

In a 1998 interview, Ellsberg described the transformation he went through which led him to lead the papers. From childhood, Ellsberg had dreamed of being one "of the President's men," an advisor with the ear of the President. In his job at the Pentagon, working for Assistant Secretary of the Defense John McNaughton, Ellsberg realized that dream. After returning to the Rand Corporation, a top think tank, he was tasked with writing on Vietnam; his analysis became part of the Pentagon Papers. His request to obtain a copy of the entire 47 volume publication was--remarkably--granted, and in reading it he found a common pattern in presidential decision making: namely, that politics trumped other considerations. Regardless of whether the president was a Democrat or a Republican, and in situations ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to our involvement in Vietnam, what ultimately mattered in choosing a path, regardless of what was stated to the public, was pure politics. From the interview:

By the way, from the president's point of view, that is the essence of rationality: staying in office, winning the election. He can always rationalize that in terms of larger interests by saying it's very important that my party and I bring our wisdom to bear on these decisions, rather than those other guys. It's terribly important that Goldwater not succeed. Of course there was really little likelihood that Goldwater would win. But you could say, rather than let Goldwater win, we had to do this and that. Just as, of course, the president's men, Mitchell and Haldeman and Ehrlichman, said during Watergate, "Of course we did these things to prevent McGovern from being president, that would have been catastrophic." Again, McGovern was quite unlikely to win. Again, in both cases what you were looking at was a landslide, not a close election. But still that was their rationale. So when you say, "It wasn't rational," what I'm saying is that the rationality had to do with domestic political power, domestic staying in office, self esteem, prestige of presidents, which presidents and the presidents' men very easily confound with the interests of the nation. They find it, in fact, very hard to distinguish between those two.

And here is where I get confused. If the American people have been given such damning evidence of presidents' putting their interests above the nation's, why isn't the lesson more strongly reinforced with each generation? I grew up thinking that somehow Nixon was an aberration, one of those "bad apples" who are responsible for breakdowns in democracy like Watergate. But if all presidents behave this way, then why aren't we teaching our children how important it is to be vigilant against government lies?

And further: how is it that so many Americans are willing to simply accept the "trust us" line from the Bush administration when it tells us that NSA wiretapping is only of suspected terrorists? Why are so many willing to believe the bill of goods that we were sold about Iraq? Where is the skepticism in the face of everything we are told about the war on terrorism and, even, the events of 9/11?

Presidents are human. Like each of us, they will say and do things in the heat of a moment, in a moment of weakness, that serve their best interests without regard for others' well being. Like you and me, they will lie.

And yet our system can work. The Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case is proof of that. But the people have to care. The people have to stand for something.

When asked who had ultimately influenced him to turn on the government he had so long wanted to serve, Ellsberg answered:

Less ... the [anti-war] demonstrators, actually, than by people that I'd met who were paying a much higher price in their lives to make a very strong message than people who were in a demonstration. People who were going to jail rather than go to the draft and Vietnam, and rather than go to Canada or become conscientious objectors or go in the National Guard like Clinton made an effort to do, and so forth, or Quayle or others. They had a number of options to avoid combat in Vietnam, including being a conscientious objector. But they chose, actually, to make the strongest statement that you could that the war was wrong, that it should end, and that they would not cooperate with it in any way, even by accepting CO status. And they accepted prison as a result.

I met one in particular named Randall Keeler in late August of 1969, and when I understood to my amazement that he was on his way to prison shortly, that he was about to be tried for draft resistance and expected to go to prison, where he did go for two years, it had a shattering effect on me to realize that we were in a situation where men as attractive in their intelligence and commitment as Randy Keeler found that the best thing they could do was to accept prison to try to raise a moral issue to their countrymen.

Our democracy works when people educated and informed, when they are involved, and when they are willing to speak out. And ultimately, when they are willing to sacrifice something personal in the face of losing something much larger.

So I say this: if people truly care about the future of their children, the best they can do for them is to ensure that they grow up to live in a Republic that still respects the rule of law and preserves the rights so carefully enshrined in the Constitution.

What life does mere security offer if the living enjoy no liberty?

(For more information on the Pentagon Papers, read Time Magazine's June 28, 1971 cover story.)