Author: Ed Weathers

THE CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

While America sleeps, the creatures of the night are doing their work. The mice and roaches are spilling the garbage, nibbling away at our liberties and leaving behind the foul droppings of their policies. In the dim corners of the White House and in the crawl-spaces of the Pentagon, politicians and their appointees are eating at the foundations of democracy while the rest of America dreams vain dreams of an open society and a transparent political system.

The Bush Administration prefers to work under cover of darkness. They don’t want you to see what they are doing. American history is full of presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that hid their machinations behind the curtain of executive privilege and so-called national security. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon jump immediately to mind. But when it comes to concealing what it does, the administration of George W. Bush beats them all. Like insects and rodents, the Bushes and Cheneys, the Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds scuttle across their marble floors, squeaking the magic words “national security!” as they run, and then hide behind their office doors to do their business, away from the light of public attention. When, occasionally, someone does turn the light on them–a congressional committee, for example, or a member of the press, or a court–they quiver and quail and sputter until they can again find safety in their cellars and dens.

This past week gave us three examples of the Bush administration’s verminous fear of the light.

First, on Tuesday, July 8, the federal commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks–a bipartisan commission headed by a Republican, let it be noted–announced that the Pentagon and Justice Departments were 1) failing to provide necessary documents and testimony to allow the commission to do its job and 2) requiring that witnesses to the commission be accompanied by government “minders” who were monitoring and, in the commission’s words, “intimidating” those witness–in almost exactly the same way that Saddam Hussein used “minders” to intimidate his scientists being interviewed by U.N. weapons inspectors last winter. Bush had tried to quash the 9/11 commission altogether when it was first proposed. He doesn’t want anyone finding out about intelligence and policy failures in his administration that perhaps allowed 9/11 to happen. Now he and his minions are trying to neuter the commission by cutting off its sources of information.

Second, the Bush administration last week continued to fight in court to keep secret any information about the Cheney energy task force which, four months after Bush took office, created the nation’s energy plan. On July 8 a federal appeals court ruled against Bush and Cheney’s stonewalling; it supported a lower-court ruling that required disclosure of who was on the task force and what they advised the vice-president. (Let it be noted once again that the suit asking for disclosure was brought by a coalition of both liberal and conservative groups.) We already know that many members of the energy task force were old Bush/Cheney cronies and Republican donors from the oil industry, some of them since implicated in the scandals at Enron and elsewhere. We can suspect that the nation’s energy plan was thus weighted heavily in favor of big-time Republican contributors in the energy industry, and against environmental interests. But if it is up to the photophobic creatures in the Bush White House, the true nature of the task force will never come to light.

Third, and finally, the Bush administration once again asserted before the federal courts that the president has the right to declare anyone–anyone–an enemy combatant, without offering any evidence to support the claim, even to a judge in private session, and that the president can then incarcerate that person without allowing him access to a lawyer or the media. The suspect may not know the charges or the evidence against him. He may not have access to witnesses. The public may not know his name or the date of his trial. In other words, the Bush administration wants to create–has created–a separate-but-unequal judicial system that operates entirely in the dark under the unquestioned rule of one man. When Kafka wrote The Trial, he had no idea that what he was describing was America under George W. Bush.

The entire history of the Bush administration has been a tale of growing darkness in America. In 2001, in one of his first acts as president, George W. announced that he was unilaterally amending the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was supposed to make presidential papers available to the public 12 years after a president leaves office. Instead, Bush declared that former presidents must approve the publication of their papers. Thus he has kept hidden from the public all the records of the Reagan administration, during which his father, George the Elder, was vice-president. And thus he has, among other things, kept the light of public knowledge from shining on his father’s role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Later in 2001, Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, a man who hates the light, issued a memo that essentially gutted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA was passed in 1966. It said that all government records, except those directly dealing with current national security or industrial secrets, were to be made available to the public. Thanks to the act, journalists and private citizens over the decades had gained access to government information that had had a profound affect on our democracy, from Richard Nixon’s enemies list, to reports about U.S. soldiers’ exposure to radiation during nuclear testing in the 1950s, to the FBI’s investigations of Martin Luther King and other private citizens during the Cold War. The FOIA was a landmark in transparent government and open democracy.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration weakened the FOIA, allowing the government to withhold more and more information from its citizens. Under Reagan, FOIA requests were routinely stalled or outright refused under the flimsiest pretexts.

After Bill Clinton became president, however, his attorney general, Janet Reno, in October 1993 issued a memo ordering government agencies once again fully and quickly to comply with all FOIA requests from citizens and the media, with few exceptions. There should, she said, “be a presumption of disclosure.” In other words, the people’s right to know should come first.

Ashcroft’s October 12, 2001 memo, sent to the heads of all federal departments and agencies, says just the opposite. It says the government’s need for secrecy supersedes the people’s right to know. It encourages federal agencies to take as long as they can and to look for any “legal basis” for withholding information when faced with an FOIA request: “Any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information,” says the Ashcroft memo. It insists that agencies consult the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy before honoring a Freedom of Information request–in other words, let John Ashcroft decide what the people should know. Ashcroft’s memo specifically mentions Reno’s open-government memo of 1993 and says that it no longer applies.

This is America under George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. They don’t want you to know what your government–no, it is now their government–is doing. They don’t want to share what they know or how they make their decisions. They want to keep you in the dark. They want you to sleep deeply, deeply while at night they run their empire of rats and roaches in the dim kitchen of what was once our democracy.

THE CREATURES OF THE NIGHT

While America sleeps, the creatures of the night are doing their work. The mice and roaches are spilling the garbage, nibbling away at our liberties and leaving behind the foul droppings of their policies. In the dim corners of the White House and in the crawl-spaces of the Pentagon, politicians and their appointees are eating at the foundations of democracy while the rest of America dreams vain dreams of an open society and a transparent political system.

The Bush Administration prefers to work under cover of darkness. They don’t want you to see what they are doing. American history is full of presidential administrations, both Democratic and Republican, that hid their machinations behind the curtain of executive privilege and so-called national security. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon jump immediately to mind. But when it comes to concealing what it does, the administration of George W. Bush beats them all. Like insects and rodents, the Bushes and Cheneys, the Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds scuttle across their marble floors, squeaking the magic words “national security!” as they run, and then hide behind their office doors to do their business, away from the light of public attention. When, occasionally, someone does turn the light on them–a congressional committee, for example, or a member of the press, or a court–they quiver and quail and sputter until they can again find safety in their cellars and dens.

This past week gave us three examples of the Bush administration’s verminous fear of the light.

First, on Tuesday, July 8, the federal commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks–a bipartisan commission headed by a Republican, let it be noted–announced that the Pentagon and Justice Departments were 1) failing to provide necessary documents and testimony to allow the commission to do its job and 2) requiring that witnesses to the commission be accompanied by government “minders” who were monitoring and, in the commission’s words, “intimidating” those witness–in almost exactly the same way that Saddam Hussein used “minders” to intimidate his scientists being interviewed by U.N. weapons inspectors last winter. Bush had tried to quash the 9/11 commission altogether when it was first proposed. He doesn’t want anyone finding out about intelligence and policy failures in his administration that perhaps allowed 9/11 to happen. Now he and his minions are trying to neuter the commission by cutting off its sources of information.

Second, the Bush administration last week continued to fight in court to keep secret any information about the Cheney energy task force which, four months after Bush took office, created the nation’s energy plan. On July 8 a federal appeals court ruled against Bush and Cheney’s stonewalling; it supported a lower-court ruling that required disclosure of who was on the task force and what they advised the vice-president. (Let it be noted once again that the suit asking for disclosure was brought by a coalition of both liberal and conservative groups.) We already know that many members of the energy task force were old Bush/Cheney cronies and Republican donors from the oil industry, some of them since implicated in the scandals at Enron and elsewhere. We can suspect that the nation’s energy plan was thus weighted heavily in favor of big-time Republican contributors in the energy industry, and against environmental interests. But if it is up to the photophobic creatures in the Bush White House, the true nature of the task force will never come to light.

Third, and finally, the Bush administration once again asserted before the federal courts that the president has the right to declare anyone–anyone–an enemy combatant, without offering any evidence to support the claim, even to a judge in private session, and that the president can then incarcerate that person without allowing him access to a lawyer or the media. The suspect may not know the charges or the evidence against him. He may not have access to witnesses. The public may not know his name or the date of his trial. In other words, the Bush administration wants to create–has created–a separate-but-unequal judicial system that operates entirely in the dark under the unquestioned rule of one man. When Kafka wrote The Trial, he had no idea that what he was describing was America under George W. Bush.

The entire history of the Bush administration has been a tale of growing darkness in America. In 2001, in one of his first acts as president, George W. announced that he was unilaterally amending the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was supposed to make presidential papers available to the public 12 years after a president leaves office. Instead, Bush declared that former presidents must approve the publication of their papers. Thus he has kept hidden from the public all the records of the Reagan administration, during which his father, George the Elder, was vice-president. And thus he has, among other things, kept the light of public knowledge from shining on his father’s role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Later in 2001, Bush’s Attorney General, John Ashcroft, a man who hates the light, issued a memo that essentially gutted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA was passed in 1966. It said that all government records, except those directly dealing with current national security or industrial secrets, were to be made available to the public. Thanks to the act, journalists and private citizens over the decades had gained access to government information that had had a profound affect on our democracy, from Richard Nixon’s enemies list, to reports about U.S. soldiers’ exposure to radiation during nuclear testing in the 1950s, to the FBI’s investigations of Martin Luther King and other private citizens during the Cold War. The FOIA was a landmark in transparent government and open democracy.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration weakened the FOIA, allowing the government to withhold more and more information from its citizens. Under Reagan, FOIA requests were routinely stalled or outright refused under the flimsiest pretexts.

After Bill Clinton became president, however, his attorney general, Janet Reno, in October 1993 issued a memo ordering government agencies once again fully and quickly to comply with all FOIA requests from citizens and the media, with few exceptions. There should, she said, “be a presumption of disclosure.” In other words, the people’s right to know should come first.

Ashcroft’s October 12, 2001 memo, sent to the heads of all federal departments and agencies, says just the opposite. It says the government’s need for secrecy supersedes the people’s right to know. It encourages federal agencies to take as long as they can and to look for any “legal basis” for withholding information when faced with an FOIA request: “Any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure of the information,” says the Ashcroft memo. It insists that agencies consult the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy before honoring a Freedom of Information request–in other words, let John Ashcroft decide what the people should know. Ashcroft’s memo specifically mentions Reno’s open-government memo of 1993 and says that it no longer applies.

This is America under George W. Bush and John Ashcroft. They don’t want you to know what your government–no, it is now their government–is doing. They don’t want to share what they know or how they make their decisions. They want to keep you in the dark. They want you to sleep deeply, deeply while at night they run their empire of rats and roaches in the dim kitchen of what was once our democracy.

THE FROTH OF JULY

I’m sick of patriotism.

As I write this, it’s the Fourth of July. Down the block in the wonderful little community I live in, an Independence Day program is going on. Small children dressed as Uncle Sam or Betsy Ross or just wearing red, white and blue are marching up the street waving little American flags as their parents applaud. Teenagers are raising the national colors up the community flagpole. Grownups are delivering talks about the glories of American history. At the end, a minister will deliver a benediction no doubt telling us how we should thank God that we live in the wonderful U.S. of A. Periodically throughout it all, people will sing patriotic songs–”My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the amazingly vacuous “God Bless America.”

I’m boycotting it all. American patriotism is a terribly dangerous thing.

I look at those children and teenagers, and the first phrase that comes to mind is “youth indoctrination.” We’re telling those kids that the U.S.A. is the best country in the world, period, and the mindless flag-waving we encourage in them is a characteristic many of them will carry into adulthood, leading to political ignorance and a lack of that vigilance which, as the saying goes, is the necessary price of our liberties. The grownups will reinforce the idea of American superiority by telling tales that ignore the black moments of our history: the smallpox-laden blankets given to the Indians; the witch hunts of the 1600s and the 1950s and now the 2000s; the various anti-First Amendment laws our Congress and Presidents institute every time this land of the supposed brave gets a scare; the union-busting, boss-protecting, worker-exploiting national administrations from 1789 to 2003. The preacher and the songs will ask God to “bless” our country, as if America deserves God’s special attention. It’s all flummery–carbonated philosophy with the nutritional value of soda pop.

I call this “The Froth of July.”

Some year I’d like to see us break out of our self-congratulatory jingoism and sing “God Bless Liberia” or “God Bless Somalia” or “God Bless Arabia”–lands that deserve, and need, divine beneficence at least as much as we do. I’d like to see children carry the flags of many countries, having learned the histories of each one. I’d like to hear lecturers tell us of the glories of other nations: of France’s language and art; of Russia’s intellectual richness and depth of soul; of Sweden’s sympathy for the aged and the deprived; of England’s eloquence and sense of history; of The Netherlands’ sense of humor; of Greece’s passion and Italy’s romance; of China’s reverence for the aged; of Japan’s poetry; of Australia’s affability.

Just once, on the Fourth of July, I’d like to hear the preachers pray for Africa and South America, Northern Ireland and the Middle East.

Yes, yes, I know that the Fourth of July is set aside to celebrate America’s independence, not the rest of the world. But lately our country seems less something to celebrate than something to worry about. The liberties about which The Declaration of Independence speaks are now overshadowed by our fear of terrorism, and while they are in the shadows, some people in power are slowly taking them from us. We can no longer take a book from the library without the CIA knowing about it if they want to. American cells are holding foreign prisoners indefinitely, anonymously, without access to lawyers or the media, and threatening to try them without even permitting them to know the charges or the evidence against them, in violation of the most basic freedoms of the land. (The Declaration, you may recall, speaks of the rights of “all men,” not just American citizens.) Freedom of speech in the United States now means freedom either to praise the president or to lose your television show or album sales. There are Supreme Court justices who do not believe in the right of privacy, in your body or in your bedroom, and legislators who want to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage while refusing to pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. Soon, if things keep going like this, there will be even more such judges and legislators.

No, I’m in no mood to celebrate this Fourth of July.

The United States, it seems to me today, is an ignorant, superficial, bullying country in love with its own wealth and power and happy to give what little attention it can sustain to movies about high-octane cars. “2 Fast 2 Furious” captures us pretty well. Fireworks are the symbol of what goes on in our brains. We have, as a people, little education, less poetry, and almost no soul. Since the Civil War, we have learned almost nothing about suffering. If the United States is the best country in the world to live in, it is simply because it is the richest. Americans as a whole have the most stuff. We lay down the most concrete. We drink the most gasoline. We eat the most meat.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful I live in a country where I can earn enough to stay healthy today and not worry about going hungry tomorrow. I’m thankful I live in a country whose founding principles are a bulwark against tyranny. I’m immensely thankful to those who have died in the past to keep tyranny at bay–whatever country they were citizens of.

But the annual celebration of the Froth of July contributes nothing to my gratitude. We would do better to have one day each year when every citizen is required to ask twenty hard questions about our nation–questions such as “Are the nation’s elected officials doing everything they can to protect the Bill of Rights?” “Are we handling our military power responsibly?” “Have we earned the respect of other nations?” “Are we sharing our wealth to care for the poor and the hungry and the sick both here and abroad?”

I fear that the usual Fourth of July celebrations are designed precisely to avoid such questions. That’s why this year I’m staying home. Let’s hope that next year we have a holiday–and a country–more worth celebrating.

STEAL THIS SONG

Why did Homer write the Iliad and the Odyssey? Why did Chaucer write The Canterbury Tales and John Milton Paradise Lost? Why did Emily Dickinson write her poems? Why did the unknown composer of “The Londonderry Air” (better known as the tune of “Danny Boy”) go to the trouble of writing a song at all? Why did Mozart compose and compose in a frenzy of creativity even when he knew it wouldn’t solve his money problems? Why did Van Gogh continue to make paintings that would never make him a living?

I’ve been preoccupied with questions like these ever since Napster first came to light. Napster, of course, was the original music-sharing software, which allowed anyone with a computer to go online and make a perfect digital copy of a song, for nothing, by transferring the song-file data from the CD of someone who owned it. Let me repeat: Napster let you get the song for nothing.

Napster tried to make this a business, inviting people to subscribe to its service, but the music industry, terrified that music file-sharing would put an end to the sales of CDs and records, got a court order stopping it. While Napster was down, independent programmers devised music-sharing variations even slicker than Napster. They have names like Gnutella, Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster. They let anyone with Internet access share music with anyone else who has the same simple equipment. It’s called “peer-to-peer” or P2P sharing. (Ask your kids. They’ll explain it to you.)

Now the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in a pure panic, is going after the 13-year-old in his bedroom, the sophomore in his dorm room, and the grandmother in her den who are downloading all those songs for nothing. In a full-page ad in The New York Times last Thursday, June 26, the RIAA and other recording organizations announced that they will now sue anyone–got that? ANYONE!–who downloads files of copyrighted songs for nothing. They call such music file-sharing “stealing” and “piracy” and compare it to shoplifting. Expect the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), whose movie DVDs can likewise be shared for nothing, soon to follow suit.

The RIAA and MPAA probably have the law on their side. Yes, to get a copy of Eminem’s last album for nothing is to undermine the copyright laws and to take money out of Eminem’s pockets. Likewise, to download Norah Jones’s nice little album that won all those Grammys is to prevent nice little Norah from getting her full monetary due. And to pirate a song or film for nothing is certainly to snatch a buck from the giant recording and film-distribution companies.

To all of which, after giving it much thought, I can only say, “So what?” I don’t care if Eminem doesn’t get rich. I don’t care if nice little Norah makes nothing from her album. I don’t care if Paul and Ringo and the estate of Elvis never get another royalty check. I don’t care if EMI, Vivendi, Sony and AOL Time Warner never make another dime out of their recording subsidiaries.

The RIAA claims that if free music file-sharing is allowed to continue, musicians will stop writing music, since there won’t be anything in it for them, and we’ll all be the poorer for that.

That’s where I think the RIAA is wrong.

Which gets us back to Homer, Chaucer, Milton, Emily, Mozart, Van Gogh and “Danny Boy.”

My premise is this: True artists don’t care about money.

No, let me amend that: True artists may care about money, but money is not why they create art. Homer wasn’t in it for the money. Neither was Chaucer, and certainly not Milton. Emily Dickinson? Don’t make me laugh. Legend has it that Mozart was obsessed with money, but he was even more obsessed with making music and would have done it even if it meant starvation. Likewise Van Gogh. And the composer of the tune to “Danny Boy” probably came up with it while tending his sheep on an Irish hillside–he just couldn’t help himself. He certainly had no plans to buy a little villa in Beverly Hills with his royalties.

I like to think that Eminem and nice little Norah would likewise keep writing and singing songs, even if there were no money in it. I like to think they’re true artists.

This is what I hope will happen: Those who, like the RIAA and the MPAA, are trying to put roadblocks around the Internet will fail. The programmers and the kids (often one and the same) will stay a step ahead of them. Finally, the Internet police will give up. As a result, within ten, at most twenty years, every form of art that can be digitized–every song, every movie, every book–will be available for free to everyone who owns a computer. The recording, movie and book distribution industries as we know them will collapse, though there will continue to be a cottage industry for those who, driven by nostalgia, demand actual vinyl records and paper books, or want to watch movies in large groups at movie theaters instead of in their own, far superior, home entertainment centers. Art that cannot be digitized and passed through wires or the ether, such as sculpture and painting, will flourish, in part because of the very fact that it cannot be translated by Boolean algebra and is therefore extra-special. Art that depends on live performances–rock concerts, live theater, novel and poetry readings–will likewise flourish, and that’s how most singers, actors and writers will make their livings. Finally, art itself will be more malleable than ever, since every digitized novel can be re-edited instantly by anyone who receives it on his computer, and every song changed to suit the listener–much as those who recited the Iliad modified it with each retelling, often, I suspect, improving it. This audience-editing, of course, is already happening and can never be stopped.

What about the poor artists? They will continue to create art. Why? For the same reasons Homer and Emily Dickinson and Mozart did: because they want to be famous or because they need to be heard or because they have something they need to say or sing, or because, well, they just can’t help it. Maybe they’ll have full-time jobs doing something else, like selling insurance or folding pretzels, and will be artists on the side. Maybe the U.S. government will actually support artists seriously, for a change, as other governments do around the world. Or maybe artists will rely on patrons to support them, as Michelangelo relied on the Medicis in Renaissance Florence.

Speaking of the Renaissance, I also think this: In the end, the music we hear and the movies we see and the books we read will be all the better for their digital availability. No longer will music, movies and books be the products of greed. Now they’ll be the products of need–the need of the artist to make something special, so special that bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, cannot reduce it to anything less than art, and the money it makes is not part of its specialness. There is something in the act of artistic creation so satisfying, so far beyond the satisfaction of a full bank account, that we don’t need to worry that the rock bands or the novelists or the filmmakers will go away. Those who write potboilers just to make money (Tom Clancy? John Grisham?) and those who make bad music and bad movies with nothing but an eye to the bottom line (The Backstreet Boys? 2 Fast 2 Furious?) will probably go away forever. To which we can all say: Good riddance.

In ten years, maybe twenty at the most, the truer, purer artists will once again take center stage. And then we can all say:

Welcome home, Homer.