I'm So Privileged

Greg Nickels [our mayor] has me so royally peeved, I'm tempted to just write "Greg Nickels is an arrogant, narcissistic, fool" 75 times and turn that in. I've been told by the editor I could get away with that sort of thing. He's said no one would notice any difference in the quality of my writing, so "what the hell."

I won't though, because I wouldn't want to abuse my free speech privilege. Sarah Palin, who aspires to be Vice President of the United States, a job that requires upholding our Constitution, has reminded us lately that freedom of speech is a privilege that the press should not abuse. Indeed, I clearly recall how in 8th grade history we learned the first ten amendments to the Constitution (they formed what was called the Bill of Privileges), and that the first privilege listed after the Privilege of Religion was the Privilege of Freedom of Speech.

Another privilege we learned about was the Privilege of the People to Peaceably Assemble. I'm sure that if Sarah Palin ever gets to be president she'll keep us on the straight and narrow there, too.

[Right: Some women peaceably assembled to ask politely to be granted privilege to vote. "Please, sirs, with sugar on top!"]

Our activist Supreme Court, abusing its privilege to interpret the Constitution, declared decades ago that people retain privileges of association, asserting they could not otherwise exercise their speech and assembly privileges. Palin has clearly understood how wrong this is.

When Palin accused Barack Obama of associating "with terrorists who targeted our own country" she referred to the fact that Bill Ayers, who helped found the Weather Underground when Obama was 8, and Barack Obama have both worked on the same two non-profit boards. Palin would regard that as an abuse of the privilege of association.

She's absolutely right. Suppose I'm helping put out a fire, at, say, a kindergarten, and I know that the guy passing me buckets of water is none other than Bill Ayers, who blew up a critical Pentagon file-cabinet once. I should walk away from that fire because associating with known terrorists is always wrong, wrong, wrong. The kindergarteners would understand, when they got older, if they weren't burned to a crisp. If they were burned to a crisp, they'd have to ask themselves in the afterlife what the heck were they doing going to a kindergarten in the same neighborhood with a known terrorist?

[Above: President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the landmark Civil Privileges Act of 1964.]

As if just to show you don't have to be republican to have the same kind of grasp of law on privilege as Sarah Palin, this past weekend the administration of our Democratic Mayor Greg Nickels put out a Notice of Land Use Violation threatening to fine a long list of individuals and associations for their support of Nickelsville, at least one of whom was listed for the sole crime of having emailed his support to another of them.

The Notice of Violation notably lists SHARE/WHEEL, the homeless grassroots organization that was NOT responsible for Nickelsville, as a supporter, and includes mention of its Vancouver, Washington, office. But the Vancouver WA office is that of an entirely different organization that just happens to have the name Share.

Therefore Nickels carries Sarah Palin's thinking a step further. Not only should people not do good things if the wrong people join in, they should also pay for having the wrong name. Again, this is as it should be. Share House, Vancouver, started in 1977. SHARE/WHEEL started in 1990. Share House has had 18 of its 31 years in existence to change its name. They have totally abused their privilege of name-having.

But Nickels went too far listing John and Jane Doe as "Persons Responsible For The Violations".

We know what he's doing. He's getting ready to fine everybody who so much as wrote a letter to the editor in support of Nickelsville, $150 a day, every day it exists.

Now we need everyone who cares about Nickelsville and the RIGHT of homeless people to survive to declare themselves to be John or Jane Doe -- I am John Doe.

[Below: I already posted this on my other blog Run Off, but it's worth posting again.]

Spartacus [I now think the subtitles are in Turkish.]

The Public Interest

Let’s talk about something important! I have right here in front of me a 44-page decision by Judge Anna Diggs that says that Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping of Americans’ calls out of the country violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Separation of Powers Doctrine, the First Amendment to the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and “the statutory law.” I need to read this thing and do all the other important analysis that an analysizer guy like me needs to do in order to talk about this judge’s momentous decision to grant a permanent injunction against this violation of your and my civil rights.

But first, how about that John Mark Karr freak? Did you hear how he got prawns and champagne on his flight from Bangkok to the U.S., even though all he deserves is dog food? He is a reprehensible pedophile who may or may not have killed a 6-year-old beauty queen, but regardless, he is a sick reprehensible pedophile who only deserves dog food. Did I just write the words “6-year-old beauty queen”? Well, be that as it may, it could not possibly be that the public’s interest in this case has anything to do with the fact that JonBenet Ramsey is the only 6-year-old girl most of us have ever seen competently wearing bright red lipstick, eye makeup, earrings, rouge, and high-heels, while showing off her thighs. We’re not the pedophiles, John Mark Karr is. And he only deserves dog food until proven guilty, at which point we’ll think of something worse to feed him.

So, where was I? Oh yeah, violation of civil rights, separation of powers, statutory something something.…

“This just in: Ernesto has been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm! More details at the top of the hour!” The downgrading of Ernesto Saturday threatened to destroy the entire hurricane reporting industry. Fortunately for the public interest, several experts were quickly found to remind us that the weakened hurricane could re-strengthen and become news again, if we get lucky.

By the way, I’ve been wondering what we should call the movie version of Ernesto’s potential devastation of one or more as-yet-undetermined Southern or East Coast U.S. cities. Ernesto Blows Again? Ernesto Goes to Cuba? Ernesto Saves Bush from Bad Press? Ernesto Scares Us Stupid?

Back to Judge Diggs. She’s a federal district judge, whatever that means. I guess I’ll have to do some work and look that up. She says that the public interest in compelling the Bush Administration’s unwarranted wiretapping to end is clear. She says the public interest is.…

Stop the presses! Tom Cruise and Paramount have ended their relationship! They won’t be making truckloads of money hand-in-hand any more! They’ll be blocks away from each other, making completely separate mountains of change!

Fortunately for the public interest, Tom Cruise is not retiring. It’s not that we care about his acting, but we need him, like I say, for the public interest. If it weren’t for Tom Cruise, what public figure would we have to criticize or condemn? I’m sure I couldn’t think of one.

So let’s see. Judge Diggs spends about 12 pages discussing and ruling upon the Attorney General’s claim of a state secrets privilege, then about nine pages discussing and ruling upon the standing of the plaintiffs that had sued the government. I’m sure those discussions are extremely important, for the public interest, so that’s why I should be reading them carefully and discussing those discussions here.

But first, I’ll talk about whether Pluto is a planet or not. It is of the utmost importance to find out whether scientists in some dumb conference somewhere want to call a big rock six billion kilometers away a planet or not. It’s even more important to find out that the scientists don’t all agree in the matter, so their “agreement” to agree to say Pluto is not a planet isn’t worth anything.

We have a public interest in knowing that!

Don't Flip me No U-235

Well, now I'm distracted again. Saturday I was trucking right along, doing what I usually do, namely contemplate the meaninglessness of existence. That is, I was thinking how I was OK with the meaninglessness of existence as long as it (the existence) continued unabated and without any serious dips in quality. And then CNN reports that 34.6 pounds of possibly weapons-grade uranium was found in a Turkish taxi.

34.6 pounds of U-235 here, 34.6 pounds of U-235 there, & pretty soon, holy crap, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

As many of you know I have a naturally distractible constitution. I take pills for it and nice doctors help me find ways to cope with irrational anxieties and fears BUT THIS ISN'T ONE OF THE IRRATIONAL ONES.

So I am coping away anyhow, ha, ha, thinking about taxi driving. There's nothing like a cab story to make me think of my own old cab driving days.

I drove for one of Seattle's big taxi companies back in the eighties when cab driving in Seattle sucked. I don't like to say the name of the cab company 'cause they still might have hard feelings about it all, but their cabs were green.

In those days I was even crazier than I am now and the dispatchers knew it so they didn't bother me too much. They let me sleep in my cab all I wanted and gave most of the good business to the one or two sane drivers. But sometimes the dispatchers would wake me up, if they had something that really seemed urgent, because they knew that I was kind of geeky and that on account of that they could trust me to find most any address.

So one day when I was up in North Seattle I was told over the radio to go to Stevens hospital in Edmonds and "get the package." Even though I'd never been to Stevens, the dispatcher was sure that I could find it. It was wonderful to inspire such confidence and I drove out there glowing with pride for being so useful.

I wondered what it would be this time. Once it had been a cornea. I had wondered what the recipient would say if he/she knew that the cab driver that brought it to the hospital was a homeless man who couldn't, himself, afford cab fare. Sometimes I carried blood samples for AIDS testing. Once it was a mystery organ in an ice chest. The most important package I ever hauled was a heart monitor that I drove 100 miles to where it was needed for a child's surgery.

I loved the hospital package runs. Not only was I performing a valuable and possibly life-saving service, but also vouchers paid for the trips in advance and the passengers never started an argument.

Well, the package at Stevens turned out to be a bag of excrement bound for the Swedish Hospital pharmacy.

Now, I had enough sense to ask the people sending it what the Swedish Hospital needed with a bag of excrement. I mean, couldn't they provide their own, etc. But I was firmly told that the Swedish Hospital pharmacy would know what to do with it, and not to worry myself about it. So I shut up and took the bag and my voucher and headed south.

I made good time, so I was fairly happy when I set the bag on the counter at Swedish and announced, "package from Stevens." Then the pharmacist opened the package, looked in, and shouted at me, "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SH*T??!!

Damn my hide. I told him, "That, the hell, is exactly what that is." Then I tried to settle him by telling him, not to worry, it was paid for.

Speaking of not worrying – of course any geek could tell you instantly that there was no way that could have been 34.6 pounds of U-235 in that Turkish cab, or the stuff would've been too hot to handle. Literally.

Now I wonder, why did they say it might have been bound for Iraq, when all the signs were it was going to Syria? It was found near the Syrian border. You don't have to go through Syria to get to Iraq from Turkey.

You'd think someone out there WANTS us to worry, wouldn't you?

Inspired by Super-Shakti Toothpaste (Really)

For this column I wanted to talk about the demise in court of the anti-postering law, but then a couple of things got in the way. First of all, I don't know anything about the demise in court of the anti-postering law. Except that it has something to do with the Washington State Constitution, a 70 or so page book that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Second of all, a book that was lying around the office distracted me.

You may all recall that last issue in this space I alluded to the fact that Henry D. Thoreau was deceased, but that certain of his concerns live on. When reading the blurbs on the back cover of this distracting book I was shakti-ed, simply shakti-ed, to learn that the book was one of Henry's concerns. No, I wasn't, but I couldn't resist saying that. Please forgive me.

Really, the Bhagavad-Gita (or the "Gita" as we aficionados like to call it) is just like the Washington State Constitution to me. It's a 70 or so page book that I believe is very important but that I can't begin to make heads or tails of. Yet, I am strangely attracted to it, in the same way that I am attracted to ducks. I keep coming back to it year after year, only to be bewildered as ever.

Part of the attraction of the Bhagavad-Gita is that it is a big poem, after all. It is a piece of the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic that has been called the world's longest poem. The Mahabharata is so long that I haven't even had the endurance to see the movie, much less read the book, but I know it goes on. So it was inevitable that we at Adventures in Poetry would have to mention the Mahabharata eventually, if only as an example of another way to write a poem to get noticed (write one really really long.)

Part of the attraction is that as far as its content goes, considered as a poem, the Gita is unbelievably audacious. Who starts out to write a poem about a big battle, and then has the main guy of one side of the battle say he can't go through with it, it's wrong, and then spend the remaining vast majority of their huge poem not on details of battle blood and gore but on laying out the main guy's conversation with his chariot driver about the nature of life-the universe-and-everything? And his chariot driver happens to be the Supreme Godhead, incarnated as the blue guy in those cool Hindu paintings, so He has all the answers? Can you say "cosmic"? I thought you could.

[Try it yourselves, you budding poesists! Write a poem like the Gita. Start out by talking about somebody planning to do something, I don't know, like writing a column. Have her/him stop and say, "Naw, I don't want to do it." Then spend 70 freaking pages of poetry describing a conversation between him/her and some form of God, in which the God explains everything in the world, so that the upshot of the conversation is that at the end, God says, "So, just do it. But hey, it's up to you." Then take it to an open mike. Your audience will tell you just how audacious your poem is.]

Part of the attraction, also, is that the Gita is an ancient classic, therefore written for a world that doesn't exist anymore (it has mostly gotten worse.) This makes for a lot of the difficulty in reading it, but that just adds to the charm.

OK, sure, the surface message, which seems to be that if you belong to the warrior caste, then you ought to do war, strikes many of us today as outrageously conservative and narrow-minded. But then we think, as justifications for war go, at least this one doesn't reek of hypocrisy. And we can escape the conclusion that war is justified by rejecting the premise that there is, any more, in the nuclear age, a warrior caste.

No, certainly nobody today is born with a duty to wage war. So, as an argument to preserve the status quo and keep the conquerees conquered and the conquerors conquering, the Gita would appear to have aged.

But the Gita does speak eloquently of duty. Now, the question still is, what's that?