Anti-contraception Movement... the Groundwork

On Monday I posted about the Christian Right’s coming battle against contraception (shorter version: none for anyone ever) and mentioned my grudging admiration for the morality brigades’ perseverance and dedication to to their mission, abhorrent as I personally find it. Part of the strategy has been to crank out the kids like bunnies, homeschool them, send them to evangelical colleges, and groom them to enter public life so as to influence legislation at every level, toward the ultimate goal of crafting laws reflecting conservative Christian values (or Biblical literalism, depending on how pessimistic you’re feeling at any given moment).

The articles in the Chicago Tribune and LA Times mentioned the intent to chip away at the availability of contraceptives, following the manner in which abortion access has been steadily constricted, in large part by enacting state laws giving pharmacists the right to refuse to dispense medications that violate their own personal consciences.

Four States (Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Dakota) have passed laws allowing a pharmacist to refuse to dispense emergency contraception drugs. Illinois passed an emergency rule that requires a pharmacist to dispense FDA approved contraception. Colorado, Florida, Maine and Tennesee have broad refusal clauses that do not specifically mention pharmacists.

California pharmacists have a duty to dispense prescriptions and can only refuse to dispense a prescription, including contraceptives, when their employer approves the refusal and the woman can still access her prescription in a timely manner.

Given the increasing presence of evangelicals in legislatures of all levels over the past decade or so, I wondered if they might be stacking the pharmaceutical deck as well. So it came as little surprise that the Christian Pharmacists Fellowship International has established student chapters in 30 pharmacy schools out of the 89 or so institutions granting at least a B.S. in pharmacy across the country, including at major players such as Purdue, North Carolina, and Florida.

The CPFI position on the “conscience clause” is as follows (emphases mine):

Pharmacists have the moral and legal responsibility to refuse to dispense a prescription that, in the pharmacist's judgment might be harmful to the patient, either directly or indirectly. Therefore, the Board of Directors of CPFI supports the right of all pharmacists to refuse to dispense a prescription that goes against their moral conscience.

No regulatory authority should be allowed to force a pharmacist to dispense a prescription against his/her best judgment or refer a patient to another healthcare provider. Likewise, a pharmacist should not engage in any activity that impairs a patient from seeking care from another provider.

Furthermore, the Board acknowledges the responsibility of Christian pharmacists to follow Biblical principles including the sanctity of life and life begins at the time of conception. Therefore, CPFI supports the right of Christian pharmacists, based upon Biblical principles and their moral convictions, to exercise their conscience within the realm of professional practice.

The “either directly or indirectly” phrase is quite vague, and it’s difficult to think that was unintentional. Indirect harm to a patient covers a troublingly wide expanse of territory, including that nebulous realm of the patient’s eternal soul—presumably the target of the conscience clause refusals. The insistence that pharmacists shall not be compelled to refer the patient to the other, non-evangelical pharmacist at Walgreen’s or to the CVS down the street is troubling. And the “responsibility” of Christian pharmacists to insist that life begins at conception is the grand finale, the big cake topper.

To be fair, CPFI maintains chapters at only slightly more than a third of the major pharmacy schools in the US (I did not consider associate-degree-only colleges and technical schools in this compilation), and most of these schools support a variety of student organizations. The faculty advisors don’t mention CPFI prominently in their online profiles, if at all, and there is no evidence that the organization is exerting undue influence within the respective colleges of pharmacy. Nor are hard membership numbers readily available.

In that sense, this posting may reflect more paranoia than imminent threat to freely accessible contraception in the US. However, given the numbers of students in the programs where CPFI is present*, it is an unavoidable fact that pharmacists who are very likely to invoke a conscience clause (or push for such legislation in states where it has not yet been enacted) are being churned out at a steady rate. Additionally, ample anedotal evidence exists documenting instances in which individuals have encountered absurd, near-Atwoodian barriers to acquiring emergency contraception. It is imperative that we remain vigilant as one segment of this society seeks to impose its own version of morality on all people, regardless of their personal belief systems. Find out where the candidates in your local races stand on conscience clauses and keep their asses out of office if they are even remotely conciliatory to the idea.

* sample numbers of students:

University of Arizona: 77-81 admitted annually

University of Florida (Gainesville): 450 pharmacy students plus 100 graduate/postdocs enrolled annually

University of Iowa: 108 students admitted annually to six-year program

University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill): 500 professional students and 100 graduate students, postdocs, residents, and fellows enrolled annually.

Nationwide, 7,488 professional degrees were reported awarded in 2003.

One Day, Two Hearings, Little New

Two separate congressional confabs today, although only one officially reached the level of "hearing." Naturally, that's the one I'm finding zero coverage of tonight on my first sweep through the online editions of the major papers. You know, the judiciary committee's hearings on whether it's okay to dispense with habeas corpus when dealing with suspected terrorists, unlawful combatants, shifty-lookin' Arabs acquired through dubious means... okay, after some digging I found a few stories. Interestingly, Specter's setting himself up as the anti-White House maverick on this one. It was certainly contentious.

Several witnesses told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the protections should be afforded all detainees.

Retired Adm. John Hutson says habeas corpus protects the innocent.

He says it would give "no comfort" to any terrorists who have fought the US.

But Texas Senator John Cornyn says "enemies of the US captured on the battlefield" shouldn't be afforded protections that are in the Constitution.

Never mind that an open-ended war on a noun makes the entire world a battlefield, to say nothing of the fact that I find it extremely curious that a man who has argued so vociferously that detainees should have no protections because they (1) don't wear a uniform or (2) fight out in the open in conventional ways should be so fixated on the no-rights detentions being okay because they were captured "on the battlefield" as if both sides were lining up in ranks and marching broadside into each other. As if they all actually had been captured with guns in their hands rather than being sold out by a rival warlord holding a grudge or maybe, just maybe, being grabbed under false pretenses on a layover in the States on their way home to Canada. Admiral Hutson summed it up best:

Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a former judge advocate general of the Navy who is now the president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H., told the senators they would be winning a “military victory’’ if they managed to preserve habeas corpus rights for detainees.

Terrorists “want to bring us down to their level,’’ he said. “Military doctrine says you have to hold the high ground.’’

The other event today was a Democrat-sponsored forum on the state of the war. This received considerable airplay and bandwidth, and featured three retired generals--all of whom served in Iraq--blasting the administration and Rumsfeld in particular.

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically."

Predictably, the Republican leadership (which was not in attendance; they were too busy whinging about the considerable costs involved in giving detainees basic judicial rights) called it a pre-election stunt (with straight faces!):

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Armed Services Committee, dismissed the Democratic-sponsored event as "an election-year smoke screen aimed at obscuring the Democrats' dismal record on national security."

"Today's stunt may rile up the liberal base, but it won't kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack," Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. He called Rumsfeld an "excellent secretary of defense."

No comments were forthcoming from Sen. McConnell about the recent National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the war in Iraq has actually created more terrorists and increased the likelihood of future attacks. Nor about the news today that we have, at present, no more than three combat brigades available for emergency deployment. That's 10,000 guys, tops.

Think about the billions of dollars that have been squandered in Iraq, the thousands of lives wasted for Bush's, Rumsfeld's, Cheney's lies. Think about the couple hundred who have died in Afghanistan as their troop numbers and equipment have been inexorably drawn down, down, to the point of such ineffectiveness that the Taliban are resurgent and Osama's boys have found new digs in Pakistan. These fuckwits abandoned their first war before it was over to start a new one we can never honorably end, and in the process have left this country more vulnerable and less ready to respond to a disaster than it has ever been. And still they have the gall to stand up there and defend themselves and chide those of us who are screaming that enough is enough.

Tap Tap Tap... Straight Folks? You're Next.

The evangelical wing will never be content demonizing only us urine-drinking, rectum-intromissing sodomites and the wicked, hedonistic liberals who get abortions at every opportunity. Now they're coming after anyone who uses contraception--yep, even the 91 percent of people who believe married folks should be able to decide when or if they're going to have a baby.

The new strategy, as summarized in the Chicago Tribune, was unveiled at an anti-abortion meeting in sunny Rosemont yesterday:

Experts at the gathering assailed contraception on the grounds that it devalues children, harms relationships between men and women, promotes sexual promiscuity and leads to falling birth rates, among social ills.

Oh, but this takes me back to what passed for freshman theology in high school, particularly the semester-long "Reverence for Life" curriculum that left me alternately snoring and indignant. The ability of a man and woman to have sex without fearing an unwanted pregnancy--even if they're married--somehow means they're not selflessly sharing themselves with each other. Sex for pleasure rather than brusque, businesslike reproduction means you're selfishly closing yourselves off from God's gift of life (conveniently left out of this line of reasoning is why God's additional gifts in the nether region department included the clitoris, glans penis, and G-spot).

It's the let-them-eat-cake mentality, the same one we've seen endlessly applied to the poor (you can't afford health insurance? why, go out and get a second--or third--job!), to the hurricane-smacked (you didn't have a car to evacuate with? why, you should have just walked to Texas!), to HIV-infected women in Africa (you didn't want to get sick? why, you should have stopped having sex with your husband!). Now it's being applied to people who want rational family planning (you can't afford a[nother] child? why, just don't fuck!).

Commenters in the Trib article speculate that the no-BC'ers will push not for across-the-board contraception bans, but rather another creepy war of attrition similar to that waged against abortion rights over the past decade:

What's more likely, experts suggest, is an ongoing "chipping away" at access to contraceptive services. This could entail cuts to federal programs that pay for birth control. Likely it also would involve a state-by-state push to allow pharmacists to refuse to fill birth-control prescriptions for reasons of "conscience."

You gotta hand it to these folks. They have been very patient, taking years to groom candidates for entry in local-level public office with designs on hopping up the legislative ladder one level at a time. Now that the groundwork has been laid, with various states enacting the pharmacists' right of refusal laws, how many bible colleges will start adding pharmacy programs? Nothing like a little point-of-sale control to get the practitioners of your ideology firmly entrenched in the front lines.

And if you do not personally subscribe to this particular strain of Christian thinking that teaches birth control is unacceptable under any circumstances because it befouls the couple's relationship with each other and with God? If you perhaps think you should not be subject to religiously derived moral rules about a highly personal matter that do not proceed from your own beliefs? Well, tough shit, pal.

Success!

The UA-Portland game was okay, not as energetic as I might have hoped, but okay. The quest for photos of Boxxy was mostly successful.



























I snapped maybe ten before The Boy said, "You're obsessed." Oh. I put the camera away.

Ode to the Heartbroken Mosquito

Your sweet talk in my ear came off as so much high-pitched whining
You tried and tried but never managed to get under my skin
O Anistopheles
I never liked needles
You and me, we never stood a chance.

Seriously. This entire summer and post-monsoon mosquito season, I got two, maybe three bites total. The rest of my household is red, bumpy, itchy, and wondering if it has West Nile yet. Maybe my hide is tougher than I thought; they swarm around my ankles when I work in the yard, but if they manage to get their snoots in for a sip I don't notice. I was oddly immune to poison ivy as a kid too.

What Do You Want? Candy?

Humph. Two moderately well-researched, long posts in three days and nobody cares. Nobody sticks around to read. Fine. Breaking out a pointless list ostentatiously written in the royal we-person.

Our favorite late-night snack while reading in bed: was Pringle's until last night, when we noticed Pringle's are considerably thinner and more fragile than they used to be. Look at the damn chip cross-eyed and it crumbles. The lids also are much looser-fitting on the cans than they used to be. Question: how do people with large hands get them out of the can surreptitiously? They must have to pour them out. And then, given the obvious recent lapse in quality control, they'll have the very handful of pieces those painfully bad, then-cutting-edge hip-hop-derived commercials of 15 or so years ago constantly decried.

Personal Pringle's note: The worst cut we ever had on the bottom of our foot came from the old razor-edged, metal pop-top Pringle's used before public health standards forced them into paper. Naturally, this was incurred at the age of three while we were walking around in the back of our parents' Jeep whilst barrelling down the highway. Seat belts? It's a wonder any of us survived.

Our hopes for the early evening: We are going to watch the U of A women's soccer team (young, up-and-coming) play the U of Portland (veteran-heavy, and, oh yeah, defending national champs). Shannon Boxx will be doing color commentary for Fox Sports; we are taking our camera and hope to get close enough to wave. We were shameless enough to send our son to school with a note promising the play-by-play guy's daughter to be her Best! Friend! Forever! if she could get her dad to score us Boxxy's autograph.

Our hopes for the later evening: Heh. Yeah. Well, okay, our realistic hopes involve the backyard mosquito population suffering a quick die-off, and perhaps a run to Dairy Queen. Livin' large.

Tomorrow shall be devoted to: Power tools and beer.

107, contra

Today, a brief look at the opposition to Arizona Proposition 107...

No on Prop 107 is big on graphics, while I might question the choice of hellfire red as a background. The best contribution is a series of links explaining the deletrious effects of the proposal on all Arizonans, both gay and straight. I suppose I understand why they’ve chosen to frame their arguments in terms of straight people in unmarried relationships, senior citizens, and single parents, but I find it rather sad that people might vote this crap down only if they think it’s unfair to straight people--not simply because they might want to address civil inequalities that don't actually apply to them. GLBTQ issues finally come front and center in the fourth bullet point on the list, “Faith Communities,” but I wonder why they don’t simply make this point the centerpiece of their campaign, because it distills the issue perfectly:

What this amendment WILL do, if it passes, is take one group's definition of sin and force it on others through civil laws. The so-called "marriage protection" amendment is backed by the ultra-conservative Christian group the Center for Arizona Policy. Even within Christianity there is not agreement about the sinfulness of same-sex relationships, and yet this group seeks to define for everyone else in the state of Arizona a narrow and exclusive view of love and the will of God. Efforts and attitudes such as those behind this proposed amendment misrepresent and misuse the Christian faith in particular, and faith traditions overall.

Oddly, “LGBTQ Community” is the last on the list of potential impacts. Again, I’m thrilled for the support, but chafing mightily at the apparent attempt to underplay 107 as a gay issue. It’s completely a gay issue. Its proponents would not be attempting to force the state to disavow any recognition of unmarried couples if not for the threat of gay folks marching down the aisle; I never heard any grumblings about, for example, Arizona being forced to recognize common-law marriages (essentially, the state caving in the face of long-term unofficial heterosexual cohabitation, which I think the Bible calls “fornication, ” also, last I checked, a grievous sin) from other states. That it needs to be painted as an equal-opportunity offender in order to drum up opposition among the majority of voters is a sad irony.

Grumble. Arizona Prop 107 is a decent satire site. I wonder how many clicks it will take the True Believers to notice the SS officer’s hat in the logo, or to ask if Fred Phelps really has been booked for the victory party.

And that’s about it for dedicated websites. Arizona Stonewall Democrats are sponsoring a forum in Phoenix on September 26... the Daily Star printed a good op-ed piece on September 6 ... Arizona Together (the group sponsoring the No on Prop 107 website) is briefly profiled in the Echo, again playing up the unmarried hets angle.

Anyway. Get out the vote. Tracking the rhetoric between now and November 7 should be interesting. Hopefully it will not also be an exercise in despair.

Prop 107, round one

Here we go. Arizona is one of several states that will either put a state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage on their ballots for the first time in November, or will subject an amendment approved by their legislatures before the voters for ratification. Arizona's version is Proposition 107, heart-warmingly titled "Protect Marriage Arizona." Although gay marriage is already prohibited by statute here in cactus-and-canyonland, some municipalities have been forward-thinking enough to offer same-sex domestic partner benefits.

The text reads:

TO PRESERVE AND PROTECT MARRIAGE IN THIS STATE, ONLY A UNION BETWEEN ONE MAN AND ONE WOMAN SHALL BE VALID OR RECOGNIZED AS A MARRIAGE BY THIS STATE OR ITS POLITICAL SUBDIVISIONS AND NO LEGAL STATUS FOR UNMARRIED PERSONS SHALL BE CREATED OR RECOGNIZED BY THIS STATE OR ITS POLITICAL SUBDIVISIONS THAT IS SIMILAR TO THAT OF MARRIAGE.

The second part, of course, is the kicker, inserted specifically to roll back those partner benefits and force Pima County, the City of Tucson, the City of Flagstaff, the University of Arizona, and other government agencies to rescind health insurance and family leave for folks like us. It's the mean-spirited final gob of spit to the face. No marriage, no civil unions, no benefits extended to a county worker's partner or their kids.

Lest anyone think marriage or civil unions are no big deal, that we should just cough up a couple thousand bucks, hire a lawyer, and draw up all the legal documents we will ever need, here's a little dose of reality. State-recognized marriage in this country confers 1,138 rights and responsibilities upon the couple. All the legal documents in the world won't mean shit if you find yourself in a state whose constitution explicitly forbids the recognition of same-sex relationships intended to approximate marriage. There are already hundreds of anecdotes out there about what happens when a gay couple's best intentions run afoul of some asshat who's more interested in validating his own narrow worldview by going by the book than in being a decent human being during someone's time of need. Read these for the barest glimmer of our worst nightmares come true.

Now let us run down some of the organizations supporting the Arizona legislation. The Center for Arizona Policy has supported a full roster of marriage-related legislation in Arizona, including the original gay marriage ban in 1996. They cite the support of Daddy Dobson, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, and Arizona Families for Home Education. Not surprisingly, they do battle with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU on a regular basis. Their front-page support for 107 is limited to calls for help with circulating petitions and joining in the 40-day-prayer cycle for the November elections, but links are provided to "issue briefs." Several of these are devoted to homosexuality; the "Civil Unions and Gay Marriage" brief focus on activist judges, "marriage counterfeits" (civil unions are actually intended to undermine authentic marriages), and the fact that state recognition of civil unions is nothing more than ammunition for lawsuits designed to redefine and destroy marriage once and for all.

The Protect Marriage Arizona website is decorated with photos of happy young heterosexual couples (see, they even threw in one of a white woman and a Latino man, to show how progressive they are!). Their talking points recycle--surprise!--the same tired rhetoric about activist judges and the necessity of both a mother and a father if kids are to have any chance of turning out normal, along with a giddy dose of what-will-they-allow-next hysteria, although, perhaps to their credit, they stop at polygamy and don't trot out the usual references to bestiality. These points have been refuted a thousand times over, and doing so again here would take me into the wee hours of the morning.

The argument against these people, for me, quite simply crystallizes around the notion that when perfect (and perfectly drunk) strangers can get married on a whim in Vegas, automatically accruing all 1,138 of those federal rights and responsibilities for the price of a xeroxed license and a cab ride, only to nullify the whole thing the next morning after the hangover subsides to a dull roar, rinse, repeat, as often as desired, there is little left of the institution of marriage to "protect." Believe in the sanctity of marriage? Then don't screw around, don't get divorced. Don't believe in gay marriage? Then don't marry someone of your same gender.

We are still going to find each other and fall in love (and even become a "couple," as scare-quoted by the PMA people; see the first question in the FAQ). We're going to buy houses together, raise kids together, go through everyday crises together. We will pay taxes into a Social Security system that refuses to recognize us when we are bereaved. We will raise children despite the state refusing to acknowledge our parental rights. We'll get up in the morning, go to work, come home, make dinner, and go to sleep, in order to get up in the morning and do it all over again.

In short, we're just like everybody else. Except that everybody else can go about their business without having to cart medical power of attorney papers around on vacation and then wonder if the emergency room in the middle of Kansas will pay attention to them. Everybody else can buy a house with the spouse without worrying that it will go into probate if one of them dies. Everybody else with a good pension can be confident that their spouses will inherit it tax-free. And everybody else can sleep well at night without having to worry that a hateful in-law will have sole legal claim to the child they've raised from birth, should their spouse die.

Read the posts from Republic of T listed above, and then come up with a coherent argument supporting the idea that any of those relationships somehow threaten the social fabric of our country. That they're somehow abominations not entitled to the same dignity and protections as the marriages of our straight neighbors and friends. That the extra dollop of agony those people suffered is somehow justified in the name of Jesus.

Tomorrow, links to the opposition.

All Hail Edition

I am gearing up for some Prop 107 posts--yup, it's anti-gay-marriage season again here in Arizona, in the run-up to the November elections--so before I veer off into that howling, here are some people speaking on other subjects I actually agree with.

All Hail Colin Powell:

"If you just look at how we are perceived in the world and the kind of criticism we have taken over Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and renditions," Powell said in an interview, "whether we believe it or not, people are now starting to question whether we're following our own high standards." ... "Suppose North Korea or somebody else wants to redefine or 'clarify' " Geneva Conventions provisions prohibiting "outrages against personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners, he said.

All Hail Anne Applebaum:

The day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by Western leaders -- not to mention Western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values -- are going to inspire regular violence, I don't feel that it's asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defense.

Note the crucial difference between the two lines of reasoning cited here; Powell rightly argues that action begets action, while Applebaum argues that words should beget only words--not actions that intrinsically negate the very words they're standing in for.

Excuse me, but which Afghanistan is W talking about now? Is there one with a free, democratic government that will never again be a safe haven for terrorists? One where we eliminated the Taliban? It must be different from the Afghanistan I keep reading about.

Speaking of King George, All Hail Tristero on Digby, commenting on John Yoo's imperialist sycophancy:

I remember the '70's very well thank you very much, and while the USSR was a threat, and so was the Middle East - I well remember the gas lines - the most serious threat of all to the security of the United States was the imperial presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Many of us who do recall how dangerous he was, including Krugman himself, now agree that Nixon was a piker compared to Bush. ... And these monarchy-loving assholes, these total losers who are literally smirking at the presumed ignorance of the people they dare to lead, these are populists?

Enough for today, unless, of course, W does happen to run into Ahmedinijad in the men's room at the UN and gives him a swirly.

My Arm Is Getting Tired From All This Ironing

Moaning about your Irony Meter exploding was a clever comment once or twice, maybe five years ago, but these days it's flying fast and thick enough to give even Magneto a serious headache. Let's content ourselves with only two examples from the past week...

Item the first: Steve Irwin preached the gospel of conservation and valuing even the uglier, weirder, less-cuddly members of the animal kingdom. He dies as a result of a one-in-a-million stingray spine to the heart, and a week later some of his devotees start... mutilating stingrays in retaliation.

Item the second: the pope gives a speech exploring the historical context of Islamic-Christian relations, apparently intended to argue against religious extremism of any kind. Unfortunately, a quote he included from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor instantly found legs as this irresistible soundbite: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Some Muslims, in retaliation for the pope portraying Islam as violent, firebombed five churches in the West Bank and Gaza Strip yesterday.

Irony Meter? Off the rails. Conclusion? People are stupid.

W Meets the Press

Ah shite. I tuned into the Bush presser toward the end and lasted a full five seconds before I screamed. In response to a question about why we aren't pursuing Osama more aggessively in Pakistan, in his best irritated, condescending, "you dumbass" voice:

Pakistan is a sovereign nation. And to send hundreds of thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we have to be invited.

FUUUUUUUUUUCK! We have to be invited unless that sovereign nation (1) starts with "I" and (2) doesn't have nukes, that is.

Ah shite. He's starting the Third Awakening thing again. He's noticed that people he encounters along the ropes are praying for him more now than in '94. He thinks "smart people" are seeing parallels between Lincoln's presidency (the "Second Awakening") and his own. I understand why he's desperate to keep flogging the parallels; it allows him to continue to lift passages from the Gettysburg Address and waggle them around free of context ("that they shall not have died in vain" has been the big favorite for years). And somehow Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus during a civil war fought on American soil means W gets to ignore all the other parts of the Constitution he finds inconvenient during the war-of-choice-foreign-civil-war incubator he set up in Iraq.

After taking a breath, another cup of coffee, and a gander at the transcripts as they become available, I see that he wants Geneva clarified. Well, again, trying to cut through the code, "clarified" here likely means "reinterpreted to allow 'harsh interrogations'" of terra suspects. What else... ah yes, apparently Colin Powell and John McCain are clueless about the nature of this conflict, the issues surrounding prisoners of war/enemy combatants, and likely all other things military.

Okay, that's all I can stomach for now. It's much funner watching with the sound off as he becomes increasinly agitated.

Fitz Schmitz

The Arizona Daily Star's editorial cartoonist annoys the crap out of me sometimes. Unless today's effort is intended to be satire, he apparently doesn't recognize the difference between the Gettysburg Address (honoring the dead from America's Civil War) and Bush's September 11 speech (drumming up support for the Iraq war). The Gettysburg Address was anything but political.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Contrast Lincoln's words with W's.

We face an enemy determined to bring death and suffering into our homes. America did not ask for this war, and every American wishes it were over. So do I. But the war is not over - and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious.

First sentence: death and suffering, check. Second sentence: little outright lie; America (more accurately, the American administration) very much asked for this war, and in fact wanted it so badly that it perpetrated and perpetuated a series of lies designed to make the average sound-bite citizen believe that Iraq was intimately involved in the September 11 attacks. Note to self: try to find camera footage of Dick "there absolutely was a connection" Cheney's temples threatening to explode when W stated Saddam was not involved. Third sentence: war will never be over, check. Interestingly, his closing paragraph echoed Lincoln's:

Our Nation has endured trials - and we face a difficult road ahead. Winning this war will require the determined efforts of a unified country. So we must put aside our differences, and work together to meet the test that history has given us. We will defeat our enemies ... we will protect our people ... and we will lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty.

Sounds lovely, although it's difficult for me not to take the cynical view that "putting aside our differences" is code for "sit down and shaddup."

Keith.

Yesterday, Keith Olbermann delivered the most piercing, resonant, moving commentary on the fallout from the September 11 attacks I have yet heard. Period. Click on the link and listen, listen, listen again. The man's eloquence is beyond awesome.

When those who dissent are told time and time again — as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus — that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American…

When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"… look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Of course, since W has roughly the same relationship with the news as the Wicked Witch had with jacuzzis, it's preaching to the choir. Too bad he's unlikely to get this message directly.

CIA prisons, ABS mockumentaries, bah! It's hockeytime!

Hockey season starts in a month, and I'm almost ready. This was step one:











Step two will be the fleece Notre Dame hockey helmet hat! Isn't it the best? I will be the best-dressed fan at Icecats games this year.

Honeybee, Adieu

When I first moved here from Chicago, 12+ years ago, I had rather dewy-eyed notions of the West and its open spaces, namely, that preservation was a priority. Ha. Hoo ha ha. Honeybee Canyon was opened to development within a week of my arrival, and the stucco-and-red-tile-roofed menace has since spread over huge tracts of formerly open desert and grassland north and northwest of Tucson.

Zip forward to yesterday. One of the few remaining undeveloped parcels near Honeybee, within the boundaries of the monstrous Rancho Vistoso development, is slated for its own batch of cookie-cutter houses in the near future. The builder of these, however, finds archaeology interesting rather than simply inconvenient, and, since his parcel sits gobsmack on top of a large Hohokam village, he donated 13 acres in the center as an archaeological preserve. My company is excavating the houses and trash mounds surrounding this central area (for nice photos and descriptions of Hohokam pithouses, please read Homer's post).

Several of us toured the site yesterday. It was simultaneously fascinating and utterly depressing. Fascinating because of the hundreds of houses, some with thickly plastered floors still intact. Utterly depressing because it's going to be bladed within the year, the thousand-year-old houses replaced with as many slapdash frame-and-stucco clone houses as can be crammed into the space.

The ridgetop the site sits on overlooks a wide valley holding the main drainage from the north side of the Santa Catalina Mountains. The pithouses near the center of the site are arranged in small courtyard groups, with the entryways facing in to the common space they shared. The pithouses on the edge of the ridge, though, all face out to the breathtaking view of the valley below, with its streamcourse, rocky outcrops, and saguaros marching up the foothills toward the mountains. Of course, the view now also includes roads bladed into the sides of the foothills to reach house lots bladed onto the hilltops, footprints of the march of the rich and influential to see who can get the site the farthest up the mountain before the national forest starts and physics make construction prohibitive. All for the vacation house that's lived in a month or two out of the year, but wrecks the view year-round.

I'm a bit cynical (shocking, yes) about the future of the central preserve. It was difficult yesterday to walk without stepping on artifacts. Seriously. Potsherds and stone flakes and groundstone tools are everywhere on the ground. Our instinct, thanks to our training as archaeologists, is to step around them, looking but not touching, or, if we pick something up to examine it more closely, putting it back exactly where it was rather than stuffing our pockets. The people who will be moving into the houses to be built here will not, I'm guessing, have the same scruples. Kids are going to pick up everything they find--not that I blame them; I couldn't resist arrowheads on the ground when I was a kid either--and I'd wager that more than a few of their parents will venture into the preserve at night and take a shovel to a trash mound in search of treasure. The standing stone walls of a compound at the center of the preserve will probably be augmented by well-meaning amateur reconstructionists. Coffee tables and mantels throughout the place will end up holding people's souvenirs; even though residents will likely be strongly cautioned against spoiling the preserve, the thousands of artifacts on the ground will make it hard for people to resist taking just one or two or a dozen.

All of this gone for a rabbit warren of crap houses and lousy traffic. And none of them will give a shit about what was destroyed so they can live in a house exactly like their neighbors' and exactly like any number of houses across the way in Continental Ranch, or in the upcoming Homes At Red Rock, or in Gilbert, or in Mesa, or in Anthem. What the hell. At least they won't need to ask where the bathroom is when they visit each other.

I Guess You're Only An Appeaser If Rummy Says You Are

How fascinating. Hot on the heels of Rumsfeld's "lessons of history" speech, in which he unfavorably compared anti-war folks to Neville Chamberlain, Pakistan has one-upped all of us over here who have been pointing out that the war in Iraq might be the wrong way to go about stopping al Qaeda (and al Qaeda "types," as Cheney likes to say, you know, the ones who were emboldened when Lieberman lost in his primary). Pakistan announced today that, should he be in Pakistan after all, Osama bin Laden will not be taken into custody as long as he "lives like a peaceful person." And, oh yeah, captured al Qaeda and Taliban fighters will be released from jail. And their weapons will be given back.

This is coming from the country that was trumpeted as our Number One Ally, the key to securing a foothold in the Middle East and vanquishing the Islamofascists at their source. Now they're throwing up their hands, throwing open the cell doors, and saying they've had it with even the cursory bits of anti-terrorism actions they'd undertaken so far. Note to Rummy: this is what appeasement looks like, asshole. Questioning the proper application of American military force and foreign policy is not appeasing al Qaeda. Telling Osama to put his feet up and set a spell while you rummage through the shed to get all those AKs you took from his boys most certainly is.

Not that anyone reading this likely needs reminding, but the Pakistanis also have nukes. Where do they fall, now, on that fabled You're Either With Us Or With The Terrorists continuum the president so swaggeringly trotted out a few years ago? Think he was planning on this nifty little turn of events when he said that? Think anyone at the White House who supported Pakistan's nuclear bid is wondering now what the hell happens when this bit of Osama appeasement morphs into something more closely resembling collaboration?

I'm holding my breath for the official reaction. It's Saudi without the oil, but with bigger guns. Maybe Bush will skip around Crawford holding hands with Musharraf now.

Our Lady of Perpetual Adolescence

In a refreshing change, the drive to Flagstaff was much more of an ordeal than the visit itself. We actually had a very pleasant time with the folks. The trip up there, unfortunately, joins the annals of Travel Disasters on I-17. Several years ago--my first trip up there, in fact, after my dad had moved from Illinois--we were delayed for a few hours by a minivan hauling a trailer that flipped on the winding, windy stretch of road south of Black Canyon City. It's an unpopulated area of desert mountains with no frontage roads, alternate routes, or easy access to services, so when you're stuck there, you're stuck. It's why you never travel without a couple of gallons of water, even for a routine 4-hour-drive up the hill.

Friday, of course, was the start of the three-day weekend, so traffic sucked even before we got out of Tucson. We'd made it to north Phoenix when the interstate message boards flashed the warning that a crash at Sunset Point (near Black Canyon City) had closed both northbound lanes, backing traffic up over 20 miles to Anthem (godforsaken Pulte insta-city development just north of Phoenix). It was 6 pm at this point and still ungodly hot. I weighed the options for no more than a minute before deciding to divert to the west, approaching Flagstaff via Prescott and Sedona. Looking at the map, I guessed it might add an hour to the trip, but at least I'd be moving rather than sitting and roasting on the highway.

Note to self: sitting and roasting might be preferable to trying to drive through freaking Sun City at 6:30 on a Friday. Christ on a Triscuit. We crawled and sweated and finally made it to Surprise, then Wickenburg (alarmingly full of Len Munsil for Governor placards), and eventually Prescott. I have decided that when I publish an atlas, I will color-code the roads according to average speed limit. The reassuringly short linear distance from Prescott to Sedona to Flagstaff is, in reality, spanned by a road that twists up and down several mountains via no fewer than seven bezillion switchbacks.

I might have averaged 20 miles an hour. The clock marched along merrily; the odometer sullenly refused to budge. 9:30, 10:30, 11:00. The small patches of sky visible through the pine canopy were pitch black and occasionally illuminated by distant lightning; for the most part I was driving on an unfamiliar road in a very small bubble lit by my headlights in front and closing to nothing behind. Dark, twisting, dark, brake, dark, hairpin curve, dark, accelerate, dark, 20 minutes gone, 5 miles traveled, the litany starting in my head, fuckinfuckFUCKfuckwherethefuckarewe?

As it got later and traffic fell off to nothing but me, the constant curves provided enough stimulation to keep me awake and functional, but the weirdness of it all started to play with my brain. Maybe we were the wreck on I-17 after all, I thought, and now while my dad waits for us we're driving around in Purgatory for the next bit of forever before the universe decides whether to spit us up or down. Maybe we're driving on a giant cosmic treadmill. Maybe that isn't ponderosa pine and wood smoke I'm smelling, but incense. Are we dead? Have we really been driving forever? What the fuck?

Then a cop pulled me over outside Jerome for a busted license plate light. Apparently we weren't dead after all, or the dead bulb was a metaphor for minimal karmic transgressions, and we got to Flag alive, if tired, at 11:30.

It occurred to me on the (mercifully uneventful) drive home that these visits are somehow juvenilizing. I don't know if that's a real word. If it is, it encompasses me going to Dad's house and barely noticing that it's twice the size of my house and filled with real wood floors, fine tilework, matched furniture, lots of tools. This doesn't register with me much more than the blue sky does, because it's always been that way. He picks up the tab at the pool hall and at the restaurant because that's what dads do. We walk down to my uncle's house, which is even bigger than Dad's, and while I marvel at the new addition he's built, some part of my brain kicks in to tell me that this is the natural order of things.

I'm up there with my kid, but, for whatever reason, this doesn't make me feel like more of an adult. We sit obediently side-by-side at the counter while the folks serve up breakfast and ask if we'd like more eggs, we carry our plates to the sink and brush up our crumbs. Maybe it's because my partner's not there; her presence might have jolted me into some vague recognition that I'm not the same little kid on the same visit I've always made...

It isn't until I pull away from his house that I wonder why I don't feel any more grownup when I'm up there. It isn't a resentful thing; I don't feel like I'm being treated like a child. It's simply that our relative status hasn't changed that much. I have maybe 25 bucks in my pocket and not much more in the bank to last the week. He slips me money to pay for the new starter I had to put in the truck last week. I come home, buy groceries, figure out what I can cook to last a few days, what I can send with the kid for lunch. I wonder if I will ever feel like an equal to my father and his brothers, or if I will always be the overgrown kid waiting for full adulthood to somehow magically happen.

Spambusters

I love my brother, truly I do. I generally ignore the right-wing crap he forwards my way, figuring that his time in Baghdad bought him several years' worth of me not taking his head off for not critically evaluating the stuff in his e-mails. I couldn't let this one go, although I did show admirable restraint in not sending my response to everyone else on his distribution list.

Have we all seen this one yet?

I found an interesting statistic for those who think we should pull out of Iraq because we have lost some military personel. I do not belittle their sacrifice, just trying to make a point. It may very well be safer to go to Iraq then to stay in the USA. Read this snippet: If you consider that there have been an average of 160,000 troops in the Iraq Theater of operations during the last 22 months, and a total of 2112 deaths, that gives a firearm death rate of 60 per 100,000. The firearm death rate in Washington D.C. is 80.6 per 100,000. That means that you are about 25% more likely to be shot and killed in our Nation's Capitol, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, than you are in Iraq. Conclusion: We should immediately pull out of Washington.

Groan. Basic math. Basic math, people! My response is below:

Statistics are fun! A correction to the stats provided: 2,112 deaths in an average population of 160,000 comes to 1,320 deaths per 100,000, although the majority of those are due to IED rather than gunfire. The original e-mail also assumes that the entire deployed force saw the same casualty rates, although the majority of the violence is centered in the Sunni Triangle. For comparison, troop strength in Baghdad has been increased over the summer to roughly 13,500 from 8,000. Working from the larger number, the 668 casualties from Baghdad still gives a rate of 4,948 per 100,000.

Current murders in DC stand at 188 in a population of roughly 550,000, which comes to roughly 34 deaths per 100,000.

In any event, neither is a particularly good place to be.

The dishonest use of casualty stats to justify the continued occupation of Iraq (hey, some guys died, but it's not as bad as... the Battle of the Somme!) or to vaguely argue against gun control laws is fairly distasteful. And what really pisses me off is the likelihood that probably 75% of the people on my bro's mailing list will read that stuff uncritically and swallow it whole.

Wheeeeeeee

The amazing find we can't talk about continues to consume the days. People file in and out of the room I work in, looking and looking at the artifacts, marveling at how this or that is the most incredible example of ________ they've ever seen. The energy level approaches giddiness; despite how jaded I have felt from time to time over the years (ho hum, here's another pile of artifacts to analyze), the buzz from this one still hasn't receded from the level of DAMN.

Meanwhile, my hand cramps from clutching a pen for hours on end. Note to all you Rapidograph warriors out there: the Staedtler Pigment Liner comes in 0.05 and 0.10 widths, nice one-piece throwaway pens that come very close to Rapidograph line quality with the added bonus of not bleeding or clogging in low-humidity settings when you stop drawing for more than 20 seconds. Drying time is longer than for Rapidograph india ink, but moving on to the next two, three, thirty points gives plenty of lag time before erasing.

While I've been busy, Rummy's been talking.

"What bothers me the most is how clever the enemy is," he said. Islamic extremist groups are trying to undermine Western support for the war on terror, he said.

"They are actively manipulating the media in this country" by, for example, falsely blaming U.S. troops for civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

That was Monday, reported without comment. Then, yesterday, he delivered what shall surely stand the test of time as the Gem of the Week as he managed to fulfill Godwin's Law in a rant against people who are calling for a phased withdrawal from Iraq:

Rumsfeld alluded to the failure to stop Nazism in the 1930s. Without naming Bush critics at home or abroad, he said, "It is apparent that many have still not learned history's lessons. I recount this history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism," he said.

Oh, no doubt, the man is finally speaking the truth. He just didn't realize exactly what he was talking about.

Another Sunday, Another Hike

Saturday was taken up with a bunch of stuff I don't quite remember, not due to any altered states of consciousness, but rather to my brain increasingly failing to remember the mundane shit. Laundry may have been involved, if the pile of unfolded but clean clothes on the nightstand is a reliable indicator.

Sunday was far more interesting. The Boy and I hiked part of the Butterfly Trail up in the Catalinas, starting at 7900 feet and dropping a couple hundred over the first mile. So of course we practically skipped down for the first hour and a half. He also skipped the hour and a half back; I trudged. I swear it's a miracle I can even fucking walk around on level ground since I apparently have no quads any more.

Anyway. It was lovely. Yellow columbine claimed the best sunny spots, competing with red penstemons and blue lupine.

Here is a junco enjoying the bird bath provided by a big puddle caught in a fallen tree. Several juncos and some smaller birds that wouldn't hold still long enough for me to identify flitted around the water.

I also discovered that the "foliage" preset on the Canon SureShot 3.2 works well for closeups of flowers, but defaults to a sloooooow shutter speed. Greens and yellows are nicely enhanced, but the small LCD display doesn't always clue you in to minor blurring. Thus the lack of more than a few good shots from this hike.

In real world news, the primaries are coming up. If you live in AZ-8, please consider Jeff Latas.

Yowza

I've been busy the past couple of days, called out for emergency duty manning the map on one of our sites. Several profound legal issues apparently make it impossible to publicize any specifics, so for now I will leave it at the appropriately vague "wow" level of commentary. I got to watch the most amazing archaeological feature I've ever seen be excavated, and I got to draw the pictures of it. I even got to pick some of the cool stuff out of the screens. The heat exhaustion and dehydration were definitely worth it.

Grand Finale

Did I mention the wonderful monsoon? It's winding up with some short-lived but intense evening storms that hit at just about the right time to be lit up by the sunset.

This one dumped seven minutes of rain on TEP.




















Nuthin' like the glow of the sun half an hour before it sets.

Oops!

Okay, he finally said it. All you numbnuts out there who have clung stubbornly to the fictitious Iraq-September 11 link, you now have it from the lips of your War President himself: what did Iraq have to do with the attacks? Nothing.

Click, play, repeat, as many times as it takes for reality to sink in. Iraq was not connected to the September 11 attacks. The war you so heartily supported was sold to you like a Nigerian inheritance scam, with only slightly less flowery language and generally good subject-verb agreements.

Remember Osama? He's the relevant bad guy here. As you go to the polls this November, think about the thousands of good American soldiers, marines, and sailors who have been blown apart in your megalomaniacal president's exercise in ego-stroking, and then ask yourself how many of those deaths and life-ruining maimings have brought us even one step closer to catching Osama, or ensuring the nation's security.

Pretty Pretty Mud

The monsoon this year has been just capital. After a few years of fizzling storms that didn't deliver much moisture, the Rillito River actually looked like a river for much of the summer, rather than its usual state as a 15-foot-deep, 100-yard-wide dry ditch. Monster storms at the end of July had it running bankful. We were drawn to the edges to gawk at All That Water.

I set out last week along the river path to enjoy the last bit of gurgling water sounds. Evidence of the water's depth and power were still evident everywhere, with tree branches and uprooted desert broom wrapped head-high around power poles and bridge supports.













This cottonwood was putting out new leaves like mad, oblivious to the debris wrapped around its trunk.

A few days ago the same walk was weirdly quiet, unaccompanied by the soothing water sounds that had been surprisingly easy to get accustomed to. Except for a few patches of damp sand and mud shaded by bushes laid low by the now-gone torrent, the riverbed was dry, littered with rocks, brush, the occasional shoe, the odd shopping cart. Water is a marvelous sculptor and painter, shaping the bed and dropping different sizes of sediment as its velocity decreases and its trajectory is changed by the very mud it itself changes.

I thought they were fascinating, anyway, these wet little moonscapes doomed to crumble in the sun. I'll leave you with four of them (oh, only four pictures of flippin' mud? yes, I am cruel).

Birthday

Today I turn 39, round about 3:12 pm Illinois time. Birthdays stopped being a big deal a while ago. I'm not really concerned about adding years to my age; it clearly beats the alternative. The part-time housemate is taking me, the partner, and the kids to Vivace tonight in honor of both birthdays (the partner's birthday is tomorrow). Crab-stuffed chicken breast and tiramisu, here I come. It will be a welcome and (hopefully) mellow denouement to a draining week.

I certainly never expected this level of grief. It's on par with how wrecked I felt after my grandfather passed.

Anyway. Moving on. The upside is having had contact with people I haven't talked to for 20 years. Feeling a sense of community after so much time even when it's from far, far away and delivered by pixels on a screen is a fairly awesome experience.

Well, hell. It's my birthday. I might just possibly have ice cream for lunch, because I can.

A Peep of Reason

Finally. The NSA warrantless wiretapping program has been ruled unconstitutional, and the government has been ordered to halt it immediately. Holding for the official WH response...

Anyway, the federal judge's ruling is the peep of reason. In other news, it seems that the immediate threat of the British liquid bomb plot may have been played up just a tad. I won't get into the discussion of whether some exaggerations were made or the schedule pushed up at American insistence to satisfy political ends--no energy for it this morning--but this, on the heels of the revelation that the three guys arrested in Michigan for mass cell-phone purchases (allegedly to blow up the Mackinac Bridge) were not, after all, terrorists, but just three guys looking to run an eBay scam... well, it makes a body weary. Credibility has to be one of the basic tools of the Homeland Security folks; without it they're some amalgamation of the boy who cried wolf and Chicken Little when they should be that industrious ant (it was an ant, right? the one being dissed by the grasshopper or cricket or other random ornithoptera).

Some people will stay ever-vigilant, ready to turn in the neighbors at the slightest whiff of strange activity, but I'm betting the majority of the public is going to become jaded by the constant stream of hysterical terror alerts that increasingly (not "inevitably;" I'm not that cynical yet) are followed by an official Never Mind. If they're not that jaded already.

Navel-Gazing Music

I love Mogwai. Mogwai works particularly well when it's a rainy day and you're feeling introspective. Go here and click away.

This is why, still.

I'll get back to the political yowling in a day or so. For now I'm contemplating the impact one man had on hundreds of people, evidenced by the numbers who showed up at the first memorial service. A lot of people have come to this blog by way of googling his name (hi, Tish!). He was the kind of teacher they make movies about, and I'd venture that the sheer numbers of us who count ourselves lucky to have been his students make it a happy ending.

How We Grieve

Terse e-mails from former classmates. Entries in the funeral home's electronic guestbook. I didn't really cry until I read his obituary today. I suppose if I were still the good little Catholic girl who sat in his classroom 22 years ago, I would have spent last night at a church, lighting candles and saying a couple decades of the rosary for the repose of his eternal soul. But I figure if a merit-based heaven does exist, he doesn't need my help to sail to the front of the line.

I wandered around a few bookstores instead, remembering how he introduced me to the amazing world of used books, how he gave everyone in his class a card from The Haunted Bookshop with his signature on the back guaranteeing the bearer a 10% discount. I still have the card, someplace, and I still have all the books I bought there in my junior year, the big Collected Works of Emerson, the Thoreau, the Hawthorne. So last night I stood in Bookman's feeling stupid to have tears in my eyes when I reached out to touch the titles--some of them the same editions--I'd written papers from back then.

I housesat for him and his wife for a week the summer after I graduated. One of the rooms downstairs in their little house was his library, all its walls covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with great literature. I made it a point to write down every author on those shelves so that someday I could have the same library. Last night I bought a few more volumes toward that end, Cooper, Chekhov, Stein. It seemed the most fitting tribute I could make, at least of the quiet, personal variety.

Tom Gerencher, Rest...

E-mail came in at 2:11 this afternoon to say that Tom had died this morning. The finest teacher I ever had, the fabled high school mentor who made all the difference. He was... for a while there he was everything in my life. Taught me how to write, how to think. Books, books, books.

He was walking around the track at the school and had a heart attack. It's fitting, I suppose, that he died there. He graduated from the school himself and came back after college to teach literature and media (which essentially boiled down to all Beatles, all the time). This would have been his 34th year there, if memory serves. He commanded respect and not a little fear, but allowed students to call him by his first name. My early papers were handed back with so much red ink on them they looked like they'd been used to mop up a car wreck. My later papers were college level writing and clean.

We kept in touch over the years, primarily through Christmas cards. My consolation is that I did make sure to tell him exactly how much he meant to me and how important his touch on my life has been. Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him or some lesson he taught me. He's in my head always.

Godspeed, Tom, and God help St. Peter if he stammers and says "um..." at the pearly gates, or tries to pass off an uninformed bias as a well-supported argument.

The Job I'm Glad I Don't Have

Channeling Michael Chertoff is not the way I prefer to pass time in the shower, but sometimes it just happens.

I was thinking of him standing there at his presser, detailing the new security rules that don't ban all liquids but allow up to four ounces of nonprescription meds, solid lipstick, and gel-based diabetic supplies, and imaginging what maybe he would like to say, were he able to shed his bureaucratic flunky shell and be nakedly honest for a few minutes:

Hello, my name is Michael Chertoff. Please make sure your cameras are powered up, your satellite feeds clean, and your pencils sharp, because I am about to commit political suicide and I'm only going to say this once.

The TSA is taking away your toothpaste, shampoo, and Chanel No. 5 because we have to do something to make it look like we're on top of things. We hope that if you're stuck in line for five hours waiting to pour your Diet Coke into an official trash can with all the other liquids, gels, soft solids, and random goos we can strip from your fellow travelers, you'll be too exhausted and frazzled to think about the thousands of pounds of cargo riding in the belly of the jet under your feet.

Because we don't look at that stuff. We don't have the funding or personnel, and if you think a GOP-controlled Congress will mandate security measures the airlines have to pay for themselves, well, you're wrong. So we put on our dog-and-pony show at the security gate with a handful of underpaid, undertrained workers and hope that makes you feel safe enough that you won't ask the hard questions.

The simple fact, ladies and gents, is that the potential for terrorist attacks is this big, with "this big" representing roughly the size of the universe.


And what we're able to do to ameliorate that is about this big on a good day. This "this big" is actual size.

The country's just too damn big and technology allows nefarious devices to be ever smaller, more concealable. Communication is instant. Very destructive materials can be packaged in very small delivery systems. If al Qaeda or my crazy Uncle Joe want to blow ten airliners out of the air simultaneously, they can do it and there's not a damn thing the US government can do to stop them.

The only impediment, really, is the incompetence of the foot soldiers they send out to do the job. Will somebody get nervous and blow his cover, or panic and back out at the last second? That's about the best we can hope for. Richard Reid can't quite get his sneaker lit, so the TSA makes everyone send their shoes through the X-ray machine. The Brits find a ring of guys trying to get their liquid explosives straightened out and the TSA bans lip gloss. Does this make you any more than marginally safer? No. It doesn't.

The point is that it doesn't matter what we find out about and add to the list of hoops you have to jump through before getting on a plane. There are always other ways, other things we just haven't thought of yet and won't until somebody tries them. We could, as so many people have groused, simply strip you all naked and have you ride in cages. That wouldn't do a damn thing to keep a Semtex-stuffed teddy bear wired to a timer sitting inside an iPod shell in checked baggage or undisguised Semtex in an air cargo crate from blowing the 6:15 to Cleveland right out of the sky. It won't do a damn thing to keep the uninspected suitcases on the Sunset Limited (read: all of them) from detonating as the train chugs past the munitions depot in Yuma or pulls into downtown LA. It won't do jack to stop coordinated hits in small towns throughout the Midwest--you know, away from any targets of tactical value, but right in the heart of what you thought were the last safe spots in America.

We can't do shit. We can, at best, protect you from the really stupid or incompetent terrorists who can't think outside the traditional knife-to-the-throat box of airplane hijackings. So we make you traipse through the security gate barefoot and dry to assuage your fears with the veneer of Doing Something, and hope that the majority of you will think that's great and continue to consider Republicans the Party of Strong on Terror.

You want consolation? Here's your consolation. In a nation of 300 million people, your odds of survival are pretty good. Thank you and have a nice day.

I Don't Fly, But Still...

Oh, where to start? It bothers me that I have become so jaded by the administration's breathless announcements of terra situations--coincidentally timed to wipe out negative news like Libby's indictment or Lieberman's primary loss--that my first reaction to the Liquid Bombs On A Plane story is to doubt it, or at least to question the true extent and signficance of it compared to the ominous picture initally painted.

Questions? I got questions. If the bad guys have been rounded up and the threat neutralized, why is the terra alert system jacked up to Kiss-You-Ass-Goodbye red? Isn't this more of a parallel How Bad It Could Have Been system at work instead?

If liquids pose such a deadly threat, to the extent that even the minute volumes contained in eyewetting drop bottles or lip gloss could destroy an aircraft, why did the TSA have passengers dumping them all indiscriminantly into the same plastic trash barrels at the security gate (as pointed out on AmericaBlog)? Seriously, how are we supposed to trust either the claimed level of the threat or the measures put in place to ameliorate it when this is the response?

Were I a terrorist mastermind (note to my NSA minders: I'm not really a terrorist mastermind, not yet, so this is pure conjecture), I swear I would send my lower-level flunkies onto planes with all sorts of absurd incendiary modifications in their clothing and necessary personal items. I'd pack plastique into a female flunky's underwire but leave the detonator cord dangling in plain view, so it would be discovered and the TSA would require all female passengers to shed their bras before boarding. I'd have an eldery flunky attempt to ignite his hearing aid. I'd have one make frequent trips to the bathroom, where he would make ominous clanking and beeping noises, to ensure that all the bathrooms on every jet would be boarded up.

Dance, dammit! Lemme see you dance!!!

Or maybe I'd just realize that every piece of checked baggage isn't opened and screened. If you're sophisticated enough to measure out quantities of explosives and disguise them as eyeliner, you're sure as hell sophisticated enough to put together a device that will detonate in the cargo hold. 60% of that stuff goes uninspected.

Anecdote time. Traveling more than ten miles through Peru can be a hassle, and was especially hassle-ish in the late '80s when the Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso was quite effectively blowing stuff up and killing people throughout the southern Andes. Airport security was unbelievably tight, but efficient. You showed up two hours before your flight, and the boarding process involved going to the waiting room designated for your flight, displaying your ticket, having it matched to your passport, and then plopping your checked bag on a table and opening it for the nice army officer to go through. Every folded bit of clothing was patted down, containers opened, unfamiliar items required to be explained (case in point: tampons). When the inspection was finished, you closed your bag and they sealed it with tape, and it went to the cart. The cart was then escorted to the plane by armed guards.

Nerve-wracking but effective, and definitely made more efficient by the sheer numbers of guys they had working the inspection tables. It would, of course, require a complete reconfiguration of airport security in this country. But I can't help thinking it would do more to actually ensure the security of an airplane than patting down a random sample of passengers, taking their shoes off, or confiscating their potentially deadly liquids by mixing them all in the same vat.

Death By Yoga

I have discovered a pathway that opens up heretofore unknown levels of self-loathing. It is called "Gentle Kripalu Yoga" and I am certain it was spawned by Satan, as I exited the hour and a half class (hour and a half!) contemplating the many forms of suicide that might be immediately available between the yoga room door and the front desk of the racquet club.

KRIPALU - A gentle class for a beginner or OLDER yoga student.

I love how "older" is double-emphasized, although I guess they could have twisted the knife a bit more with boldface and italics. Anyway. I think I was supposed to tap into my inner consciouness and external energy patterns and some fountain of light, but I ended up spending 90 minutes cataloguing all the body parts I hate and the new, wonderful ways my new friend Kripalu was making them hurt.

In rough order, I hate my ripped-up knees that keep me from sitting cross-legged like a good little yogista, my tweaked hip flexor that compounds the cross-legged-sitting pain, and my beer gut that gets in the way of the legs and prevents the key breathing from (through? I wasn't sure) my navel, then I circle back around for a fresh round of specific hate directed at the surgically repaired left knee that can't tolerate being knelt on, even on a squishy yoga mat, for more than about 15 seconds, then more general hate of my left achilles tendon, which refuses to be anything approaching pliable, of my repeatedly banged and partially separated and now arthritic shoulders, and finally of my neck, which grinds and pops alarmingly when put through what are supposed to be soothing rotations.

I turn 39 next week. The last 30 years of competetive sports have apparently aged my joints a bit ahead of the rest of me. All in all, a discouraging experience, although it was an interesting study in good old negative spiraling. It made me want to run up to the weight room and do pulldowns in a blind rage, but the instructor had cunningly put her mat right in front of the door, so there was no escaping.

On my list of things to do once I have attained that marvelous grownup age next Friday is to be more accepting of both the moment and my existence within it. Hoo ha ha. I'll keep you all posted on how that's going.

Not Much Else Going On, So How About Some Abstinence Talk?

Aimee Short (of the BreakDown abstinence Shorts, as ABB might say) is back. She left a lengthy comment while I was away, so I've not gotten around to responding until now. I'll give her this much; she's persistent.

Now about the blog posted on June 18th in response to my comment. It is encouraging to know that the blogger is not heartless and has the ability to step away from her strong opinions and see not just the values of another person, but the PERSON behind those values. It's easy to put another person into a box that they do not deserve when you know very little about them or what they really do. I have been guilty of that myself from time to time. But, I do not, nor does BreakDown as an organization fit into the "abstinence" box.

There is one major difficulty that I have with this blog. It is stated as a fact that "Ms. Short offers no solution beyond don't have sex." Now how would you know that? Have you been to a high school classroom with me anytime over the last 6 years while I am teaching a 5 hour course on sex, abstinence and relationships? How can you be so sure that I say "just say no" for 5 hours and throw a ring or a pledge card at the students as they are running as fast as they can from my class? Let me answer my own question. Because you put me, and the entire "abstinence movement" into a tiny little box.

Well, like you are with your responses to the postings and comments on my blog, I'm only going with the information I have. The newspaper articles I referenced didn't give details about the curriculum of your five-hour classes; they focused on encouraging abstinence through dancing and positive messages about self-worth. If I came away with the impression that your abstinence program presented an overly simplified view of human sexuality, it's because that's how it was presented.

You are correct when you say that sex is a powerful, powerful thing. I agree wholeheartedly. That's why I do what I do. Because sex is so powerful it has the potential to be so painful. 2 minutes of sex can destroy a lifetime. Young people usually find this out the hard way. I just want to be the voice of encouragement that inspires some young people to avoid the consequences all together, possibly even save their lives. People can write what they want and criticize, but I for one do not want to be remembered for sitting back and allowing the young people around me to have the accuse that nobody cared enough to tell them the truth and that they are worth more than our society gives them credit for. I want to be one who offers hope of a better way, inspires young people to believe in and value themselves, their bodies and their futures.

I'm all over that. Seriously, I am. Could it be that you've done your own bit of box-building, assuming that people like me, who object to abstinence-only education, are hedonists trying to rid society of the last remaining strictures against personal pleasure at all costs? I think abstinence is absolutely necessary for the vast majority of teenagers. Hell, there are plenty of emotionally immature or unstable adults who would do well to take a vow fo chastity until they get their personal shit together.

My objection has never been to the idea of abstinence for kids, but to the school of thought that demands abstinence education be completely devoid of accurate information about physiology and birth control methods. Let's face it--if you communicate your message of abstinence effectively enough, if it really takes root in a kid's head, the additional knowledge about condoms and less risky sexual behaviors is not going to compel him to run out and have sex despite truly believing he shouldn't. If your message doesn't convince a kid to remain abstinent until marriage, accurate information about safer sex practices will greatly reduce the risk of him impregnating someone or contracting a disease. I mean, it was drilled into me fairly early in life that shooting people is wrong. Subsequently learning to fire a rifle when I was in high school didn't make me more disposed to chuck my moral framework and start plinking folks from a clock tower.

I fail to understand how presenting the full spectrum of information necessary for healthy sexual behavior falls into the category of disrespecting kids, or is somehow designed to convince them their intrinsic worth is less than if we don't bother to teach them about condoms, or mutual masturbation, or piggybacking barrier contraception with the pill.

Yes, I understand that abstinence is the best way to avoid pregnancy and STDs. I truly hope that your curriculum does all you claim, that you present kids with realistic, workable options for making good choices and protecting themselves against coercion. I simply don't believe that withholding information about protection is morally defensible, given human nature and the extent to which teenagers are hard-wired to get it on. Yes, I believe that humans can rise above their instincts, if you want to look at it that way, and that teaching kids accurately about the risks of sexual behavior should and can make them decide to put it off until they're physically and emotionally ready. But knowledge about contraception has to be there as a backup. Withholding that knowledge puts kids at sea without a life raft, and I find that unconscionable.

Good old anecdotal evidence can prove anything you want it to, but I was fully versed in the physiology of reproduction from a young age. The sex ed curriculum in my grammar school covered the range of contraception available at that time, along with the effectiveness rates of each when used correctly. It also talked about the emotional risks of becoming sexually active too early. I decided I wasn't ready to do something that had even the remotest chance of landing me in the spot my parents found themselves in as teenagers (namely, pregnant with me and frog-marched to the altar). I made it through high school with my virginity intact, and when I later became sexually active, it was a carefully considered decision fortified with highly reliable, properly used birth control. My sole pregnancy was carefully planned, the baby wanted. Storybook. And in that storybook, knowledge is power.

So keep fighting your good fight, Aimee. I hope you can understand why those of us on this side of the fence think your curriculum should be augmented with precise instruction on what to do should the individual's informed conscience lead him or her into sexual activity before marriage.

Road Trip

Been away for a week, the annual trip up to Colorado to visit Mom and the grandparents.

Modest Mouse’s most recent CD is titled This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About. The drive from Tucson to Pagosa Springs (Colorado) is pretty long, but for the most part void of the dead spots, the long stretches of featureless interstate that put you to sleep despite gallons of coffee. Be that as it may, I still had plenty to think about over 11 and a half hours there last Sunday and back yesterday.

Uncharacteristic pea soup fog between Winkelman and Globe, wistful poetry composed in my head:

I liked you better when you drove that beat up old Rodeo
And wore your hair wild and free
Before you married that preacher man
And one of the pushpins on your wall map meant you and me
And a tent and a couple of dogs
In the Galiuros Mountains
A cold night curled up like kittens
And I could almost believe the world was all right after all.

Solid, steady, winter-like rain from St. Johns to I-40:

Driving through Apache lands
A water tank lies on its side
An impromptu pile of dirt keeping it
From rolling down the side of the hill
In a grassland town named for a shell
Hundreds of miles from the sea.

Okay, the poetry buzz ran out round about hour five. The rain lasted, unabated, through to Tohatchi on the Navajo rez north of Gallup. That’s pretty weird for this time of year. Other things I saw this time I’d not seen on the previous many many times I’ve made this drive:

1. Actual non-captive, alive javelinas north of Globe. Unfortunately, I think I also saw them on the return trip, on the same stretch of road, squished. Wasn't me.

2. On the “Watch For Animals” sign outside Show Low, “And Bigfoot” scrawled in Sharpie.

3. Munoz Avenue in Gallup under construction between I-40 and NM491. No, just kidding. I’ve actually never seen it NOT under construction in 12 years of annual to semi-annual trips. Gallup, as always, blows. The sole upside was GasMax, a nice little Navajo-run station selling 86 octane for 2.99, a full 16 cents under the price at the few remaining stations that have not yet succumbed to the decade of construction-induced chaos.

4. Almost all the washes running on the Navajo reservation between Gallup and Shiprock.

In Pagosa Springs news, the march toward Aspen-ization is meeting some local resistance, with a few scattered bumper stickers reading “Keep Pagosa Pagosa” and “Save an elk: Shoot a developer.” The downtown river area has been spruced up a bit with extra large boulders replacing the smaller cobbles that used to line the banks—better for basking in the sun—and a few little boulder pools have been constructed to catch the runoff from the hot springs on the public side of the river. So now us poor folk can enjoy the sensation of being slowly boiled alive in sulfrous water for free, rather than ponying up the 15 bucks for the same experience—albeit with more lobster pots to choose from—on the resort side of the river.

After I typed this I looked at the map of the pay-to-play pools and found that one is, indeed, actually called the Lobster Pot.

The most curious addition to downtown has to be the new bell tower sitting under the new stoplight at the Pagosa and Lewis intersection. It’s a nice little tower. More accurately, it’s a nice little handicapped-accessible unisex bathroom with a belfry. You’d think they might have put the door on the backside of the structure, so people in need of the facilities could enter somewhat discreetly rather than being on full display to cars waiting at the intersection. I don’t know if the locals are in the habit yet of honking when some unfortunate soul goes inside. Or maybe that’s what triggers the bell.

More scenery tomorrow; I know you're all just dying to see.