We too must suffer all the suffering around us. What each of us possesses is not a body but a process of growth, and it conducts us through every pain, in this form or in that. Just as the child unfolds through all the stages of life to old age and death (and every stage seems unattainable to the previous one, whether in fear or longing) so we unfold (not less deeply bound to humanity than to ourselves) through all the sufferings of this world. In this process there is no place for justice, but no place either for dread of suffering or for the interpretation of suffering as a merit.

You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.

—Franz Kafka

Now, I famously hate salad bars. I don’t like buffets. When I see food sitting out, exposed to the elements, I see food dying. I see a big open petri dish where every passing serial sneezer can feel free to cough, drool, and fondle with spittle-flecked fingers. I see food not held at ideal temperatures, food rotated (or not) by person or persons unknown, left to fester in the open air unprotected from the passing fancies of the general public. Those New York delis with the giant salad bars where all the health-conscious office workers go for their light, sensible lunches? You’re eating more bacteria than the guy standing outside eating mystery meat on a stick.

—Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that displaying crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. It has ordered the Italian government to pay a $7390 fine to an Italian mother, Soile Lautsi, who has struggled for eight years to compel her children’s schools in northern Italy to remove crucifixes from the classrooms.

The Court rejected the government’s disingenuous argument that the crucifix is not a religious totem at all, but instead “a national symbol of culture, history, identity, tolerance, and”—get this—”secularism.”

Sanely, the Court concluded that secular, state-run schools, where attendance is compulsory, must “observe confessional neutrality in the context of public education,” and that crucifix-clogged classrooms “could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion.”

Crucifixes have been compulsory in Italian classrooms since the enactment in the 1920s of two laws under the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, a personage aided and enabled by the Catholic Church, which for millennia has been the premier peddler of crucifixes.

Lautsi’s husband, Massimo Albertin, said the family was satisfied with the court’s ruling. “We believe the ruling is a positive signal from Europe to Italy, which seems to increasingly lose its secularism,” he said from their home in Albano Terme. “The crucifix creates discrimination.”

The seven-judge panel did not order Italy to remove crucifixes from all Italian public schools, where they commonly cover the walls like fleas. The Court’s decision can be appealed to a grand chamber of 17 judges. The Italian government has announced plans to do just that. Which may not be so wise: decisions of that body are binding.

Lautsi filed her case with the European Court of Human Rights in July 2006, after Italy’s Constitutional Court dismissed her complaint. Lautsi is of Finnish origin, which has caused Italian mossbacks to publicly fulminate that if she wanted to de-crucifix her children, she should have reared them in heathen Scandinavia.

The country’s former culture minister, Rocco Buttiglione, howled that the Court’s ruling was “abhorrent,” and commanded that “[i]t must be rejected with firmness. Italy has its culture, its traditions and its history. Those who come among us must understand and accept this culture and this history.”

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini wept that the decision had dealt a “mortal blow to a Europe of values and rights.” Frattini’s boss, Premier Silvio Berlusconi, the crook currently in charge of the Italian government, said the decision “makes us doubt the common sense of Europe.” He then appealed to the nation’s Francophobes, by blaming The Wrongness on the godless Gauls.

“We must examine the situation. When the new European Constitution was drafted I already tried to defend Europe’s Jewish-Christian roots. Extremely secular countries like France, with former president Chirac, opposed our position and we were unable to convince them. Now a further step has been taken, denying the fact that Europe has Christian roots. This is not acceptable for us Italians, we are all Christians.”

Berlusconi went a little off-message there, as his government’s entire argument before the Court was that the crucifix couldn’t be cabined to Christianity. Even the Vatican dutifully dispatched its organ-grinders to sound this bent tune, as when Holy See Press Office Director Federico Lombardi opined that the crucifix is “a symbol of charity.”

Yesterday, however, the men in dresses did seem to adopt Berlusconi’s line that the mind of Europe has drifted loose from its moorings. Echoing the Italian premier’s questioning of “the common sense of Europe,” the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said: “I wonder if this ruling is a sign of rationality or not.”

Bertone then took a gratuitous shot at Halloween, whining that “[t]his Europe of the third millennium has left us only with the pumpkins of the recently celebrated feast and has eliminated the most beloved symbols.”

My heart truly bleeds for these people. They cheerily burnt pagan pumpkin people, and all their works, for more than a thousand years, and now they’re in a swoon because a couple grisly gimcracks have to come down.

It is predictable that the primates of the Vatican are rending their garments over this ruling. Just as they did in 1905, when France permanently threw off the yoke of the church that had oppressed it for centuries, declaring, among other things, that religious symbols should be removed from all public buildings.

That Gallic effrontery prompted the big hat of the moment, Pius X, to take a break from “a crackdown on Catholic intellectuals that has been called a form of theological McCarthyism,” in order to issue the encyclical Vehementer nos, which foamed as follows:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.

Pius later backed off a bit, sort of, trying first to simply subvert the French government, and then to bribe the French people by canonizing Joan of Arc. But none of it worked.

Pius was himself later canonized. This process was begun in 1944, while all Europe was aflame, by a successor Pius, numbered XII, who managed to attend to it when he was not busy beseeching God to grant victory to the Nazis: “as Hitler’s armies crossed the Russian frontier in June 1941,” Pius XII, with his female “aide,” “joined in joyful prayers,” and “said novenas for the Nazis and asked God to intercede for their total victory in Russia.”

Today’s big hat, Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a Benedict Some-Number-Or-Other, was of course himself then a Nazi, manning an anti-aircraft battery aimed at Allied planes.

The Italian crucifix crisis comes at a time when Ratzinger is already pretty darn busy.

There are holocaust-deniers to rehabilitate, and Anglican bigots to embrace. Even if it requires melting down all the gold candlesticks to pay for the crusade, stem-cell research must everywhere be stifled as ”terrorism with a human face,” and gays must be barred from marrying.

The government of the Philippines needs to be whacked around, so that women there can be condemned to suffering and death, rather than eschew their duty to exhaust themselves churning out more Catholics. Meanwhile, over in Spain, the people are, at last, 100 years on, going the way of the French, throwing off for good the shackles of the Church, running wild legalizing abortion and same-sex communion, even threatening to unearth all the ugly skeletons of the church’s decades-long complicity with the fascist traitor and dictator Francisco Franco; bishops there once assured Franco’s troops that they would shave off a year in purgatory for every person, loyal to the duly elected Spanish government, that they killed.

And of course lies about condoms must be spread throughout Africa; millions there will continue to die, but at least no sperm will be dammed.

Finally, there are the anti-semites among Ratzinger’s predecessors that must be canonized. Pius XII, the aforementioned Nazi cheerleader, and Pius IX, who dispatched gendarmes to kidnap a six-year-old Jewish boy, and then forcibly raised him as a Catholic.

When a delegation from Rome’s Jewish community petitioned for the boy’s release, Pius IX gave them the back of his hand. Noting that, out of his supreme magnanimity, he no longer forced the city’s Jews to attend Catholic services, he said:

“I suppose these are the thanks I get for all the benefits you have received from me! Take care, for I could have done you harm, I could have made you go back into your hole.”

It is imperative that Ratzinger succeed in making these creatures saints. Else how can he, a man who once wore a swastika armband, ever expect to also join that elect?

It is because of men like Ratzinger that Albertin is right: “The crucifix creates discrimination.” It should not be that way. The great mystery of the cross is that upon it Jesus, as both God and man, experienced all the suffering God willed unto man, by exiling him into existence. And that is what we are supposed to do, too: to feel through empathy the suffering of all creatures, and to do our best to ease it. When the Church forgets that, when it condones and enables suffering, it betrays itself. Because “Jesus Christ suffers from now until the end. On the cross. He goes on suffering. Until the death of the last human being.”

Not content with bombing the moon, NASA now plans to bombard monkeys with radiation, to “understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior.”

Monkeys were routinely tormented and tortured in the early days of space flight—on both sides of the Cold War—but this will be the first time in decades that the doubledomes of NASA have decreed it is necessary to flog our cousins for the Greater Good of mankind.

“We realized there was a need for this kind of work,” intoned Jack Bergman, behavioral pharmacologist at Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital in Boston. “There’s a long-standing commitment on the part of NASA to deep space travel and with that commitment comes a need for knowing what kinds of adverse effects deep space travel might have, what are the risks to astronauts. That’s not been well assessed.”

That’s nice. However, as far as I am aware, monkeys are not interested in “deep space travel.” Human beings, apparently, are. Therefore, if it is “necessary” to determine the “adverse affects” of deep-space travel on human beings, it is human beings who should be employed as experimental subjects, not monkeys.

Perhaps, seeing as how he feels such research to be so “necessary,” Dr. Bergman can offer up his own children, bombarding them with radiation, rather than monkeys.

But no. Instead, 18 to 28 squirrel monkeys (like the guy to the right) will be exposed to radiation doses that human astronauts voyaging to Mars can expect to encounter.

The point of the experiments is to understand how the harsh radioactive environment of space affects human bodies and behavior and what countermeasures can be developed to make long-duration spaceflight safe for travelers beyond Earth’s protective magnetic shield.

Scientists are particularly interested in studying how the radiation impacts the monkeys’ central nervous systems and behaviors over time.

Rats and mice have previously been irradiated to test the effects of unprotected solar radiation upon human astronauts, but scientists aren’t satisfied with those experiments.

Eleanor Blakely, a biophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said: “Obviously, the closer we get to man, the better.”

I understand, Dr. Blakely. And that is why I suggest that you, as well as Dr. Bergman, sign up your own children to be bombarded with radiation. Let’s “study[] how the radiation impacts the [children's] central nervous systems and behaviors over time.”

You two, after all, would be in the best position to detect and note any such changes, having previously been intimately familiar with the experimental subjects.

Like Dr. Bergman says:

“The beauty of this is that we can assess at different time points after exposure, so not only do we get a sense of rather immediate effects, but then we can look again at longer time points.

“That kind of information just hasn’t been available.”

Say goodnight, little monkeys.

A little holiday music, for All Saints.

To get there, click on the “furthur.”

The creature to the right there is me.

In costume, in disguise.

This next one: the song is wonderful, but the video, well, when trolling for material on the tubes, as in everything else in life, “we work in the dark; we do what we can.”

Despite the often shiveringly inappropriate visual content, this number marks the transition in tonight’s programming from semi-frivolity, to The Big Mush.

The internet turned 40 this week. Astrologically speaking, having been born on October 29, it is a Scorpio, which helps explain the intensity and nastiness it brings out in people.

The first internet message was sent between the University of California in Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute, some 400 miles to the north. Actually, it is more precise to say “the first attempted message sent,” as the internet crashed some two letters into that first message. Which means Bill Gates must have been involved in the thing, even way back then.

The message was supposed to read “login,” but the web surfer was only able to type “lo” before the system went down.

“Lo” is actually a good first word to go out. It sort of has a “let there be light” feel to it. In fact, my Oxford English Dictionary tells me that “lo” was once an abbreviation for “Lord.”

Oo-ee-oo.

The internet began as a Defense Department brainshower, designed to enable military communication in a world incinerated by nuclear warfare. Presuming that on a planet consumed in nuclear fire, communications links might be severed here and there, war wizards developed DARPANET, which could intelligently route around damage.

DARPANET eschewed circuit switching, which limited communication to a single party at the other end of the circuit, in favor of packet switching.

In a packet-switched connection, a message from one computer is broken down into chunks, or packets, of data and sent through multiple routes to another computer.

Once all the packets arrive at their destination, they are pasted back together into the original message.

“It’s as if a long letter were written on a series of small postcards, and each postcard was mailed separately,” [UCLA computer engineer Leonard] Kleinrock said.

Thus, in a newly nuclear-crisped world, if General Bloor, under what used to be Colorado Springs, needs to order Captain Heem, in a silo under what used to be Nebraska, to let loose the rest of his nukes, Bloor can let fly the message through what ex-Senator Ted Stevens immortally termed “a series of tubes.” In a world on fire, some tubes will be blocked, but others will remain open; DARPANET sniffs out the open tubes, artfully routes the packets, and Heem ultimately receives the reassembled message.

The internet, via the civilian application ARPANET, is DARPANET’s child, and it works in the same way. It is the first attempted message sent between two ARPANET-enabled machines that is celebrated as the internet’s birthday.

In every apple, there is a maggot, and so, 40-some years on, we have today, dementedly fouling up the intertubes, that misinformation vortex known as Wikipedia—a veritable snakes’ nest of knuckledraggers, smoothbrains, deniers, and cranks, which at present lies that the nukeheads did not give birth to the intertubes.

Earlier this month, Finland became the first country to declare broadband access to the lies, inanities, and balderdash of Wikipedia a “legal right” for all of its 5.2 million citizens. This is because, pace Wikipedia, there is useful information out there on the tubes, and an increasing number of people have come to rely on it.

“I don’t think it’s quite on the level of food and water yet, but it’s pretty close,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Annenberg School for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.

The current tussle over “net neutrality” involves the efforts of Rich and Wrong people to clog the tubes with Sites They Like. The intertubes are at present an anarchic medium: internet service providers are required to provide equal access to each and every site. The Rich and the Wrong would like to change that. The tubes of their dreams is one in which Drudge would load instantly, while sites like this one would crawl onscreen slow as molasses. More than a billion people access the internet each month, and the Rich and the Wrong would like very much if the technology itself would guide people only to those sites that would help them to remain rich and wrong.

The future of the intertubes appears to be mobile. While one billion people use Apple computers, and those other things, some four billion people on this earth own mobile phones.

“When we started in 1999, it was already clear that the Internet was going to transform communications,” Cole said.

“What we could never have imagined is that it would transform virtually every element of business and social activity.”

Cole predicts that in the future, more people will access the Internet through mobile devices such as the iPhone than via personal computers and laptops.

“We think the Internet is moving completely toward mobile.”

I’ve been looking for an excuse to post the murder of HAL, the maltreated computer in 2001: a Space Odyssey. I guess this is as good an excuse as any. HAL’s unheeded advice to Dave—”take a stress pill”—remains an excellent suggestion for anyone seeking to venture into the tubes.

I was interested in learning more about how young and troubled children perceive things and before filming started I showed some paintings to the children. The results were very revealing and mysterious. I remember one, an Italian renaissance painting which had in the background an entire city with castles and harbours and hundreds of people weaseling around unloading ships, all sorts of things going on. I would project a slide of the picture for maybe ten seconds and then turn it off and ask the children, “What have you seen?” And four or five of them in one voice shouted, “A horse! A horse!” “Where on earth is the horse?” I said to myself. So I put the slide back on and searched. “Down there!” they all shouted. And yes, in the corner of the picture was a single horse and a single horseman with a lance. It makes me think to this very day.

—Werner Herzog, Herzog On Herzog

Jane Mayer, our correspondent from The Dark Side, has filed a valuable piece with the New Yorker on the increased use of predator drones in the War on Terra. Mayer’s piece makes four important points:

—Drones are a weapon of targeted assassination. Though traditionally disfavored or actually prohibited in this country, targeted assassination has become, with little or no public debate, the primary means by which the US wages the War on Terra.

—Drones are ineffective. Sixteen separate drone strikes targeting one individual killed more than 300 other people before the targeted man was himself killed.

—Drones create enemies. “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

—Drones corrupt and debase our people. From 8000 miles away, Americans observe on video screens “little people scurrying”; they then push a button, and end those people’s lives. People now smugly derided, among those who kill them, as “squirters.”

Mayer provides new information on the drone hunt for Baitullah Mehsud (which I previously diaried here). Mehsud was a Pakistani Taliban figure who, now that he is dead, the Pakistani government is conveniently and retroactively blaming for most of what has Gone Wrong in that country over the past several years, including the December 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

All horseshit, of course. As an anonymous Pakistani investigator told the New York Times, shortly after Mehsud’s death: “They used him as a brand to project their power across Pakistan. He didn’t have the power, the skills or the money. It was Al Qaeda that did. They used him as a prop.”

Mehsud’s death solved nothing: as I diaried here, his position has been taken by his brother, who recently held an open-air, seven-hour press conference, where he announced the commencement of a series of renewed, revenge attacks; these began the next day, with the bombing of a UN facility in Islamabad.

Mehsud was assassinated August 5 on the rooftop of his father-in-law’s house, while receiving a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. The drone strike also killed an additional 11 people, including Mehsud’s wife and father-in-law.

A Predator drone hovering some two miles from the home had provided CIA operatives back in the United States with crisp video images of Mehsud and company.

“It was a perfect picture,” gushed Pakistani Interior Minister A. Rehman Malik. “We used to see James Bond movies where he talked into his shoe or his watch. We thought it was a fairy tale. But this was fact!”

Mehsud, and eleven other people, were then killed from the United States.

The image remained just as stable when the CIA remotely launched two Hellfire missiles from the Predator. Authorities watched the fiery blast in real time. After the dust cloud dissipated, all that remained of Mehsud was a detached torso.

Mayer notes that this was the sixteenth drone attack targeting Mehsud. The previous fifteen failed.

It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the CIA succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed, depending on which news accounts you rely upon. It’s all but impossible to get a complete picture of whom the CIA killed during this campaign, which took place largely in Waziristan. Not only has the Pakistani government closed off the region to the outside press; it has also shut out international humanitarian organizations like the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

I put this into perspective this way. I, like Mehsud, live in a mountainous region (though one not so remote and forbidding). I stand out on my deck, and I gaze out across these peaks, and I wonder what would be the reaction in this country if the FBI identified, in them there hills, a Bad Man. And then, over the next fifteen months, the FBI launched fifteen attacks that did not succeed in killing the Bad Man, but did succeed in killing more than 300 other people.

I think the reaction would be that there would be no more FBI.

This is the sort of hapless, ham-handed, blood-soaked, Wild-Bill-Donovan-meets-Inspector-Clouseau type of “counterterrorism” operation that is instantly mocked and derided by people in the US when it is engaged in by the Russians—”saving” hostages in a Moscow theater by gassing and killing them, “rescuing” children in a school by crisping them with flamethrowers and assaulting them with tanks.

In the War on Terra, the old Anglo-American legal dictum that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” has been turned on its head. It is now, apparently, better that hundreds of innocents be made to suffer, than that one miscreant get away. In this we have become Otto von Bismarck, who once said “it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape.” We just don’t have guts enough to say it.

As Mayer makes clear, it is precisely because BushCo abandoned the American legal system, and widened the nation’s understanding of what is “war,” that the US is now in the business of extrajudicial killings—targeting people for assassination via remote-controlled drone.

“By classifying terrorism as an act of war,” she writes, “rather than a crime, the Bush Administration reasoned that it was no longer bound by legal constraints requiring the government to give suspected terrorists due process.” Further, George II signed, in the days following 9/11, a secret memorandum authorizing the CIA to kill members of Al Qaeda & Co. anywhere in the world—which, using pilotless drones, is exactly what it’s doing.

Though just prior to 9/11, BushCo officials were screaming that targeted assassinations were anathema, when it was the Israelis who were engaging in them. “The United States government is very clearly on record as against targeted assassinations,” intoned Martin Indyk, American Ambassador to Israel, in July 2001. “They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”

Apparently US officials initially attempted to model their targeted-assassination program on the Israeli example, but eventually gave it up when they concluded the Israelis were too wimpy and nitpicky.

[Israeli] military lawyers have to be convinced that the target can’t reasonably be captured, and that he poses a threat to national security. Military specialists in Arab culture also have to be convinced that the hit will do more good than harm. “You have to be incredibly cautious,” Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, says. From 1994 to 1997 he advised Israeli commanders on targeted killings in the Gaza Strip. “Not everyone is at the level appropriate for targeted killing,” he says. “You want a leader, the hub with many spokes.”

The US seems satisfied with the spokes. Or perhaps with the space between the spokes, or maybe someone who once touched or even glanced at the spokes. Mayer notes that to keep the Pakistani government happy, the Obama administration has recently presented President Asif Ali Zardari with more control over those targeted by drones. As a result, she writes, “only six of the forty-one CIA drone strikes conducted by the Obama Administration in Pakistan have targeted Al Qaeda members.” Some of those the Pakistanis have chosen to kill and dismember were “obscure in US counterterrorism circles,” and there is some concern that, just as so many War on Terra prisoners were dumped into the American gulag by people who had fingered them for money or revenge, so too may the drone program be used by Pakistani officials to settle scores.

And yes, folks, with the Obama Administration, this is not something that is getting better.

Mayer’s report makes clear that the drone casualty figures I have been using, which cover mostly that period pre-Obama, and which I obtained from the Pakistani News, are seriously out of date. Those read as follows:

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

But according to Mayer:

[T]he number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many CIA aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office . . . [T]he Obama administration has sanctioned at least forty-one CIA missile strikes in Pakistan since taking office—a rate of approximately one bombing a week. So far this year, various estimates suggest, the CIA attacks have killed between three hundred and twenty six and five hundred and thirty-eight people. Critics say that many of the victims have been innocent bystanders, including children.

This follows the pattern of Democratic presidents since Vietnam. Loath to have the body bags of Americans dumped on their doorstep, they search for seemingly more fastidious ways to wage war. So Jimmy Carter responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by financing and arming Islamic zealots from around the world, and Bill Clinton intervened in Kosovo by bombing Yugoslavia. As he gingerly seeks to withdraw troops from George II’s war in Iraq, and fend off a maddened hornet swarm of General Jack D. Rippers buzzing for Vietnam-era levels of troops in Afghanistan, Obama chooses to send waves of unmanned drones into the latter—and into an undeclared, but very real, war in Pakistan.

I’m not the only one who finds this sort of thing sick-making. Mayer quotes former Army Ranger Andrew Exum, who says “there’s something about pilotless drones that doesn’t strike me as an honorable way of warfare.”

That it is not. Blowing Baitullah Mehsud off a rooftop in Pakistan, while he received medical treatment, killing him from an air-conditioned bunker some 8000 miles away, is, in my opinion, and as I’ve stated before, an act of cowardly back-shooting, akin to li’l Bobby Ford’s “targeted assassination” of Jesse James. Too, all it does, in Pakistan in 2009, as in Missouri in 1882, is make a martyr of the victim. And there is an axiom in war, as in all of human life, that what goes around comes around. The victims of unmanned drones, there in the poorest regions of Pakistan, of course do not have access to such sophisticated and fastidious technology. But then, such folks have proven they don’t need to. They are perfectly capable of transforming commercial airliners into drones of their own.

Congress could and should be exercising oversight over the drone program. But: it is to laugh. The Founders intended the legislative to be the “first among equals” of the three branches of our government, but over my lifetime Congress has willingly transformed itself into a sort of vestigial organ, like the appendix: it’s still there, but nobody’s really sure quite why, as it performs no real function.

Since Harry Truman inaugurated the National Security State, Congress has progressively ceded all of its war-making powers, granted it by the Constitution, to the executive. Ours is now an atavistic state, devolved to something more resembling a European monarchy of the 18th Century, than the America of that same era.

It is precisely because BushCo classified terrorism as a war problem, rather than a legal problem, that Congress is obligated to oversee the American effort against it. But such a notion is now so alien to not only Congress, but the American people, that it barely seems conceivable. This site is a perfect example. Here we ceaselessly “strike at the king”—the president—laying all praise and blame and calls for action at his feet, when we should be over at Congress Matters, lighting the torches and bringing out the pitchforks to get after those folks to wake up from the freaking Rip Van Winkle sleep and start doing something.

Scott Horton, over on Harper’s, puts this in a more genteel way:

In the sixties and seventies, Congressional heavyweights kept meticulous track of command-and-control systems relating to the use of the nation’s latest military hardware. Protocols were insisted upon and carefully scrutinized in congressional hearings. Legal principles of accountability—particularly the notion of civilian control over the use of weapons of mass destruction—were a matter of rigorous oversight. Over the last twenty years, this legacy—pursued with equal zeal by Democrats and Republicans—seems moribund. In a sense, the current attitudes bear witness to the growing irrelevance of Congress and the diminished role of legal accountability.

If Congress were to decide to take some interest in the drone program, it would discover a CIA program that is “‘flown’ by civilians, both intelligence officers and private contractors. According to a former counterterrorism official, the contractors are ’seasoned professionals—often retired military and intelligence officials.’” According to Mayer, some of those private contractors are from our old friend Blackwater, now misnamed XE, which maintains and loads the Hellfire missiles on the drones.

It would find, as detailed in this earlier report, that this is how this sort of “war” is waged:

From their cockpit at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the pilot and co-pilot are flying a pilotless Predator on a bombing mission over Afghanistan, 8,000 miles away. A forward air controller in another unmanned drone spots the target and the Predator bomber takes off under local control from Kandahar in Afghanistan. Minutes later, control of the bomber is handed over to satellite control in the cockpit at Creech.

Two hours later, the crew sees on the cockpit screen two suburban vehicles stop in front of the targeted mud-baked house. Half a dozen bearded men hurry into the dwelling that intelligence had spotted as a Taliban command post. Seconds later, the bombardier in Nevada squeezed the trigger and a 500-pound bomb flattened the Taliban dwelling with a direct hit.

Watching the action on identical screens are CIA operators at Langley, Va., who can call in last-minute course corrections.

Their eight-hour mission over, pilot and co-pilot climb into their vehicles and drive home. Thirty minutes later, they are playing with their children.

When people appear on the drone screens, those in air-conditioned comfort back here in the States see “little figures scurrying,” as one such person told Mayer. After the explosion, when the smoke clears, there is “just rubble and charred stuff.” Some of the “charred stuff” is what were, moments before, people running for cover. People who are now known, in the parlance of those who kill them, as “squirters.”

I am not a “squirter.” Neither is anyone I know a “squirter.” I am not interested in reducing any human being, anywhere on this earth, or any living creature, for that matter, to a “squirter.” I am also not at all interested in having anything to do with any entity that employs people who think of people as “squirters.”

We disgrace ourselves, with this sort of “warfare.” And in disgrace we shall lose. As novelist John le Carre in The Honourable Schoolboy described, through the eyes of occasional spy Jerry Westerby, how we lost in Vietnam:

The windows overlooking the airfield were smoked and double glazed. On the runway aircraft landed and took off without making a sound. This is how they tried to win, Jerry thought: from inside sound-proof rooms, through smoked glass, using machines at arm’s length. This is how they lost.

It is a convention in Anglo-American vocal music that the lyrics should make some sort of sense. The meaning may be dense, or multi-layered, but the lines should not be completely impenetrable, or flat-out imbecilic. A person of reasonable intelligence and attention should be able to suss out what is being said without herculean effort. The music reproduced below, for example, just won’t do: something more than the words “in the frog/perpen-dicular to the frog/far away from the frog/without the frog” must be imparted to the listener.

Generally the search for meaning isn’t a problem. This is particularly so because, in the popular tradition, the message is almost always both straight-forward, and the same—though usually it is at least somewhat veiled. Pop music is all about loin-joining: urging the joining of loins, celebrating the joining of loins, recalling when loins once joined. Ninety percent of all the vocal music that has ever made it onto the radio bespeaks an urgent chemical roiling that may be summarized as follows: “I feel great lust for you, and desire that we engage in sexual congress as soon as possible.” This is the sentiment that lies at the core of almost every love song . . . whether the singer is Rudy Vallee, or Ras. Of course, the veils have slipped some over the past 70 years. Thus, we have moved from the slickly sincere, buttery smooth seduction of “I Only Have Eyes For You,” to Liz Phair’s blunt, bare, matter-of-fact “HWC,” in which she cheerily chirps an ode to the outpouring of her lover’s semen.

Still, there remain those oddities, works wherein the words defy the probings of logic, intuition, or even sanity. I realized this anew recently, when, while driving, an Eric Clapton rendition of “Badge” poured forth from my radio, a song that, while still a joy to listen to, still, after all these years, makes no sense whatsoever.

Before I get to “Badge,” and other songs without sense, there will be a couple of detours.

For instance, my two current favorite “plain speaking” songs, songs in which the meaning is perfectly clear. First is Joan Osborne’s sly, biting, laceratingly funny “Let’s Just Get Naked,” in which the singer proposes as a possible cure for an ashy, aged, fucked-out relationship—”here comes that story again/all about that television show/here comes my typical response/won’t you tell me something I don’t know?“—some, well, fucking.

My other fave of this “plain speaking” genre is jazzman Eddie Harris’ “Eddie Who?” Harris, an utterly original, inventive, accomplished, uh, weirdsmobile, at some point decided that he just hadn’t received his due from this world, and so he sat down and wrote a song to tell that world all about his fine self. This was many years, mind you, before an entire sub-genre emerged in hip-hop in which singers churned out boastful chants detailing how many cops they had shot, crack vials they had sold, and women they had chained to the bumper and dragged down the street behind their fully armored Escalades. It also pre-dates Hank Williams Jr.’s many cornified reflected-glory ramblings about the Extreme Wonderment of his father and all his father’s famous friends.

A note about the call-and-response of “Eddie Harris” and “Eddie Who?” that closes out the number. Traditionally, Harris would say “Eddie Harris,” and the crowd would call back “Eddie Who?” . . . but the wily Harris would keep it up, sometimes for ten minutes or so, if that’s what it took, until he had successfully communicated to the crowd that they were supposed to respond with “Eddie Harris,” not “Eddie Who?” Indeed, the whole point of the song—”Eddie Harris is my name.” Not until the thickheads assembled had figured this out, would Harris end the song. In the version offered below—the only performance of this number I can find on the tubes—you can easily read from his face and his inflection that that is exactly what Harris is trying to get at. But he gives the number up before he can get there. I presume because he was performing in Germany, and he figured that, due to the language barrier, he would probably never succeed in getting across such a subtle point.

Sometimes a songwriter will set something down and send it out into the world, only to find that folks out in the world hear something completely different from what s/he had meant and intended. Probably the most notorious example of this is the Lennon/McCartney throwaway number “Helter Skelter,” a filler ditty referencing a British term for a children’s slide, but one that the brooding lunatic Charles Manson out there in California instantly interpreted as a vital coded message sent out to him personally, warning that wild-eyed KneeGrows were about to commence a race war, and that he, Charlie, needed to kick the thing off by bursting into people’s houses and sticking forks into their stomachs.

Something far more benign occurred with the Ace tune “How Long?” Vocalist Paul Carrack wrote the song in vexation and despair, having heard via rumor that Ace bassist Terry Comer was working out with other groups, preparing to skulk right out of the band. “How Long?” was intended as a shot across Comer’s bow. Everybody in the band knew it, and recording the thing was not exactly a festival of fellowship and joy. Carrack figured it would be the last song the band ever released. Instead, “How Long?” was heard by the world as a love song, an “I-know-now-that-you’re-cheating-on-me” song in the vein of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” and people rushed out in great herds to purchase it. “How Long?” shot like a rocket up the charts, peaking at #3 in both the US and the UK, thereby imparting an additional two years to the life of the band. Fittingly, the target of the song, Comer, plays an insinuating bass line that contributed significantly to the number’s success.

The opposite occurred with the Four Tops’ “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” This 1966 Holland-Dozier-Holland number was sent out as a Motown love song, in the “hey’ darlin’, why don’t you now try me?” genre—a promise of succor and support to a man-wary woman the singer would clearly like to come his way as a lover.

But it was heard by combat troops in Vietnam as something very different. Lost in a lost war, abandoned by everyone but each other, unable to rely on anyone but those suffering through the same hell, they heard “Reach Out” as a call from themselves, to themselves: “now if you feel that you can’t go on/because all of your hope is gone/and your life is filled with confusion/until happiness is just an illusion/and your world is crumbling down/reach out/come on reach out for me.” It was their promise to themselves. That, when the bullets started flying, and the bodies started falling, they would be there for each other: “Reach out—reach out for me!” The song even sounded of combat, with an introductory galloping, as of feet running; the abrupt shifts into minors; the vocalist urgently shouting at the top of his range; the tense alert pauses, sounding only a rapid beat, like a fluttery straining heartbeat.

Once having heard what this song meant, to those for whom it meant the most, I couldn’t really any longer hear it any other way.

And then sometimes you don’t even need to know the language, to know what the words mean. It is not necessary to understand a lick of Spanish to know what is going on in Jennifer Lopez’ “Por Arriesgarnos”: the Big Rush, of the Big Love. If “Let’s Just Get Naked” marks the end point, “Por Arriesgarnos” is the beginning.

And, finally, to the songs that make no sense.

Back in the day, Michael Stipe of REM was a shy lad. He did not think he sang particularly well, so he buried his voice in the mix. He did not think he had much of worth to say, so he larded his lyrics with obscurity and gibberish. International fame and fortune tends to boost one’s self-esteem in such things, and so these days Stipe with his words is much more forthcoming. And his voice no longer sounds from deep down in the maelstrom.

“Disturbance At The Heron House,” from the 1987 REM release Document, is an irresistible rocknroll song, but there is no way anyone would have divined that it was intended as Stipe’s “rewriting of the novel Animal Farm,” if he had not belatedly told us so, in a sort of spasm of confession about some of his more opaque works, delivered from the stage of Madison Square Garden last year. Though the lyrics are mostly impenetrable, they are awash in herons and monkeys, neither of whom feature in Animal Farm, and the song seems to be concerned with a squalling melee in a zoo, rather than on a farm. There are also disturbed references to “a gathering of grunts and greens,” “a stampede at the monument,” “the followers of chaos out of control,” and so forth. I mean, Mike, c’mon: I don’t think Orwell himself could have sussed it out. Then again, maybe Stipe did get across what he wanted: I, after all, am an Orwell addict, and I became deeply addicted to “Disturbance At The Heron House” from the moment I heard it.

Although there is more juice in the brash cascading electrified version on Document, I’m posting the acoustic rendition from MTV Unplugged, because I like the variations Stipe works in the end on “try to tell us something we don’t know.“

As a work of fist-pumping anthemic rocknroll, “Badge” is even more irresistible than “Disturbance At The Heron House.” But no one, particularly George Harrison and Eric Clapton, who wrote the thing, have ever tried to claim that the words mean anything. Some of the lyrics are admittedly transcribed from the inane ravings of a drunkard, and the title itself comes from Clapton’s inability to read Harrison’s writing, no doubt due to the lingering effects of a drug coma.

At the time of the song’s initial release, various people attempted to tease meaning from what they heard. There was even a theory, propounded by Normal People in the press—a theory several times since mercilessly mocked on stage by Clapton—that “Badge” referenced some nasty, dirty British political scandal, one that Harrison and Clapton somehow blundered onto and decided to address, obscurely, in song. If that makes absolutely no sense to you, that a couple of scruffy musicians lost in a dope haze would become privy to the innermost secrets of the British government, remember that these were the days when people were attempting to steam the covers off their Beatles album-jackets, while playing the albums themselves backwards, in order to unearth new clues about the tragic, concealed death of Paul McCartney . . . and Charlie Manson was roaming around out there in the California desert, basing on Deep Meanings he extruded from Beatles songs the identities of people who should be killed, when, where, why, and how.

The truth of it is that when “Badge” was written the “power trio” Cream had already decided to disband. I like to think from shame, the members aghast that they had unwittingly spawned that atrocity that would soon be known as “heavy metal.” But in fact it was more personal: drummer Ginger Baker wanted bassist Jack Bruce put to sleep, and Clapton wanted out of the glare of the “guitar god” spotlight. For the band’s final recorded effort, the three men were each tasked with writing a new song, which would fill (barely) one side of an LP otherwise devoted to live music. Harrison elected to help Clapton with his contribution. The two men had become friends, not least because of the incipient Pattie Boyd Problem. (That’s Boyd, on the left in the photo to the right, in the sort of get-up we were all forced to wear in the 1960s and ’70s.) Married to Harrison, Boyd nonetheless became Clapton’s grail, for whom he would plunge down the rabbit hole of heroin addiction, where he would produce for her, among other works, the Layla LP. While flailing at Layla, Clapton was living as lovers with Boyd’s younger sister, Paula: she left him when she heard the thing, as it confirmed for her that Clapton was using her as some sort of weird Vertigo substitute for her sister.

Men.

Anyway, back on “Badge” day, Clapton was down at the studio, desultorily trying his hand at some lyrics, and had got as far as “I told you not to wander ’round in the dark.” He was reading these to Harrison, when an extremely inebriated Ringo Starr fell into the room, picked up the cue, and burbled: “I told you about the swans that they lived in the park!” This made absolutely no sense at all, but Clapton wrote it down anyway, because they were words, and he wanted to get the damn song finished.

It was these “swans,” which dribbled from the lips of a man blind drunk, that the wizards of British journalism would later conclude referred to unknown, but soon-to-be-scandalized, British political figures.

The bibulous Starr was pumped by Clapton and Harrison for more wisdom, which resulted in such further “Badge” lyrical absurdities as “then I told you ’bout our kid/now he’s married to Mabel.” When Starr’s well ran dry, he was poured out of the room, and Harrison and Clapton grappled with finishing the song themselves.

As Harrison later explained it: “[w]hile writing the words we got to the middle part, which I call the ‘bridge,’ so I put that on the paper with the words. Eric was sitting opposite me, and he looked at the paper—upside down to him—and cracked up. He said, “what’s that—badge?” And I said, “it’s bridge.” So Eric called the song ‘Badge.’”

The word “Badge” was never actually heard in the song “Badge” as it appeared on the Cream Goodbye LP. Years later, when Clapton started stretching the song out to the rouser it is today, he began winding it up with refrains of, variously, “where is my badge?” and “love is my badge.” I prefer the latter myself, but then I’m that kind of guy. But by far the best version of the song available on the tubes is of the former sort, and that’s what’s offered here. One of the YouTube commentators insists: “1:39 has to be the greatest bridge in history!!! period, full stop, end of the chapter, the end!!!” And it’s kind of hard to argue with that. Fitting that it comes in a song named “Bridge” . . . er, “Badge.”

The Australian band The Church has never been particularly concerned with making lyrical sense. This was particularly so on its 1992 Priest=Aura release. There, lyricist Steve Kilbey’s admitted predilection for art pour l’art was overlaid with opium. The crypticism begins with the album title itself, which, like “Badge,” resulted from a misreading: Kilbey misapprehended a Spanish fan’s notes on translation, reading “priest=cura” as “priest=aura.” Though there is a lot of defiantly obscuro “sunless sea” wordplay on the disc, I am going to close with one of Priest=Aura’s more straightforward numbers: “Feel.” That is because it is lyrically concerned with the tantalizing boundaries of the forever-impenetrable mystery of existence. Something far more opaque than any “Badge.”

Selah.

US Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North is emerging now as the Charles Manson figure in this hideous scandal that crawls like a plague of maggots on the White House.

Oliver North apparently moved into the White House basement about five years ago and turned himself into something worse than the mad Dr. Frankenstein . . . He was given control of everything he could reach, from the president of Israel and secret US Army bank accounts in Switzerland to the CIA and George Bush and the home phone number of the Chinese defense minister.

Gordon Liddy was the Bad Boy in the Watergate crowd—the meanest of the mean—but all he did was commit a few burglaries, shred some papers and shoot out a street light in front of McGovern for President headquarters on Capitol Hill.

That was in the good old days, when real men were still running the White House and the president roamed the hallways at night with a beaker of gin in his fist, raving and jabbering at huge oil portraits of Abe Lincoln and John Philip Sousa while Henry Kissinger followed him around and made notes.

Gordon Liddy was cruel, but he never did anything even remotely like running a neo-Nazi shadow government out of the White House basement, skimming millions of dollars off the top of illegal arms sales to hostile foreign governments or selling weapons to a hate-crazed international terrorist like the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, who was paying North millions of dollars for TOW missiles with one hand while admittedly using the other to finance the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, which killed nearly 300 of North’s people.

Not even Tex Colson sold bombs and rockets to crazed Persian maniacs who used them to kill his own kind—and not even Kissinger would have put his arm around him and said, “Well done.”

This is a long way from “Semper Fi,” and there is a steel bed with D-rings already reserved at Bethesda for the eventual presence of Ollie North.

—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine