tng@neuralgourmet.com's blog

While Paul continues to have connectivity issues, here is a piece that varkam wrote at Neural Gourmet. I think we can all agree with the sentiments varkam expresses in this piece. Rumsfeld and the Bush administration construe loyalty much like I imagine a mob boss would demand loyalty from his thugs but when it comes to America loyalty is not commanded, it is earned out of a deep and abiding respect for this country and the ideas it was founded upon.

I didn't turn the television on when 9/11/06 came. Truth be told, it's still a bit of an open wound for me. Even five years later, if I sit and think about it for too long it still has the power to bring me to tears. That being said, seeing video clips of the towers coming down - still etched indelibly into my mind - have the power to drop the bottom out of my stomach. Such awesome horror was visited upon us that day. Countless of us around the country, glued to our television sets and clutching cell phones that couldn't get through to loved ones bore witness to an unspeakable tragedy; a tragedy which is still and will be forever burned into the psyche of our country.

What I tend to remember most about nine eleven, however, is not the pain that we all went through together. What is most clear in my memory is what came out of that pain. Keith Olbermann put it aptly when he said that we became "Americans first". It didn't seem to matter a great deal what one person looked like or what another person believed. One thing was clear to each and every one of us: we are Americans.

What does that mean, to be an American? Does it mean that we drive SUVs, or does it mean that we drive Priuses? Does it mean we take our kids to soccer games? Do we like NASCAR? Or is it something else entirely…are we American by virtue of where we live? If you live in Iowa, does that make you an American? How about Chicago? Los Angeles? Montana? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. All of those things and so much more that I neither have the ability nor the time to list.

There's something deeper, I think. There's something else that courses through our collective veins and makes us into more than the sum of our parts. It is the belief in the idea that this country was founded upon: freedom. I believe in it, and if a worthy cause presented itself, I would fight and die for it. There is not a doubt in my mind that, if such a cause came about, no one reading this would do any differently.

We believe in freedom, and we do so fervently. Freedom is our lifeblood; if it goes, so do we as Americans. We will still be Americans, but only by virtue of our geographic borders. We will become Americans in name only.

Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, and their colleagues speak of loyalty. They think that Americans should support their government, regardless of the circumstances. They say that to do otherwise is simply un-American. Repeatedly they have called into question my patriotism, and yours. They have done so because we, as Americans, have disagreed. We have thought their policies ill-executed at best, and murderous at worst.

I have something that I would like to say to Mr. Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, and their colleagues. Perhaps we define loyalty in different terms. I presume that the definition of loyalty that they were taught is that you should respect and obey those who hold power over you, as to do otherwise would be disloyal. To me, that sounds a great deal like obedience - the kind that your pet should have.

We are not your pets, Mr. Bush. We are not your property, Mr. Rumsfeld. We are Americans, and we are loyal. For me, loyalty is action compelled by love. My loyalty to this country supersedes that of any administration, Democratic or Republican. When I see that our country is imperiled by the reckless acts of simple-minded men, I feel it is my duty - as a patriotic American - to speak against them. To speak and to scream and to write until I am satisfied that I am heard. I have not felt such a satisfaction since they have taken office, so I will continue to speak, and to scream, and to write until I am.

They think they can make us afraid. They think they can marginalize us by calling us names. They think they can silence us. I can only speak for myself, and so I say the following: so long as there is breath in my lungs and blood in my heart, I will not be silenced.

I am a patriot, and I love our country.

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Look what the blog carnival fairy brought! I went to bed last night with a an old busted keyboard under my pillow and when I woke up this morning the keyboard was gone and there was a brand new edition of Carnival of the Liberals over at Archy! Well, slightly delayed but worth the wait we've got some blogging that's so good that Matt Drudge realizes the futility of his life and entertains thoughts of sepuku when he reads it.

Next up is Martin of Writings on the Wall on September 27th.

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While Paul continues to have connectivity issues, here is a brief piece I wrote for my own site to help spread the word about the latest attempt to eviscerate the 1st Amendment and to encourage people to take action.

The House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on a bill that makes a stealth attack on the First Amendment. The Public Expression of Religion Act [H.R. 2679], introduced by Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN) would prevent plaintiffs who sue over First Amendment Establishment Clause issues from recovering their litigation fees. This is brazenly designed to make it next to impossible for private citizens to sue to protect their First Amendment rights as federal court litigation and lawyers' fees are prohibitively expensive. Marci Hamilton at Findlaw writes:

"Obviously, the religion Hostettler and the other PERA supporters intend to establish is Christianity. Once again, a majority wants to water down disestablishment principles to squelch a minority. (As of 2001, about 80% of Americans identified as Christian, though that encompasses many denominations, while only a little more than 5% identified themselves as believers in other religions. About 15% identified themselves as atheist, agnostic, or having no religion.)

In other words, these Representatives want to cement the establishment of their own religion - already commanding the belief of a supermajority of Americans — as dominant via the force of the government, and the force of law. This is an old story, and it puts these representatives in a light that makes them look very much like the Puritans at the time of the Constitution's Framing who expelled dissenting religious believers (like Baptists and Quakers), because they did not believe what the established church required.

To be blunt, this is yet another bill pandering to the Christian religious right, who persistently but misguidedly insist that the separation of church and state is anti-Christian. That, of course, is historical revisionism at its worst. As I explained in a previous column, the disestablishment principles embodied in modern Establishment Clause cases were derived from the principles of a variety of Christian organizations. So to argue that the separation of church and state is hostile to Christianity is to say Christianity is hostile to itself - an argument ad absurdum, to say the least."

If you want your fellow Americans to be able to continue to vigorously defend their rights to practice the religion of their own choice, or to practice no religion at all, then write to your Congressional Representatives today. Our friends at the Council For Secular Humanism have made it easy to e-mail them, but I suggest you call as well. If you don't know who your Representative is, you can quickly find out by using this page at the U.S. House of Representatives website.

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While Paul continues to have connectivity issues, here is a brief piece I wrote for my own site in memory of the events of September 11, 2001.

5 years ago today I woke up and went about my morning routine. It was a beautiful sunny fall morning in upstate NY so I took my coffee and egg on toast sandwich along with a book out onto the porch for a relaxing breakfast. One of the neighborhood dogs had escaped the solitary confinement of his yard prison and wandered over sniveling and whining and nuzzling me with his cold nose until I agreed to share my breakfast with him. Satisfied he consented to being petted for a couple minutes before running off to see what trouble he could get into before his long-suffering owner could bring him back into custody and I set off to start my day.

Before I could fire up the computer though the phone rang. Now I have a friend who has a habit of calling way too early in the morning so this was not unexpected, but that day all my friend could say was to blurt out, "We're being attacked!"

Huh?

"We're being attacked. They got the World Trade Center. They're using the airplanes as missles! Turn on the television."

Well, at that time I had already given up television so that meant logging on to the internet and pulling up a tiny, pixelated video feed from one of the online news sites. And there was one of the World Trade Center towers belching smoke from a gaping maw in its' side. And then a tiny silver sliver dashed across the postage-stamp sized image and in a flash the other tower was just the same.

And there I sat. Listening to the confused news reports, both on my video feed that kept cutting out and needing restarting and on the radio. No one knew what was going on. Just as I thought it couldn't get any worse one of the towers fell. And then the other. And just like that, in less than an hour and a half, we were told that possibly 100,000 people had lost their lives. Later that number had dropped to 10,000. The final number was only (only!) 2,749 lives. Can you believe I felt relief?

And that was how I spent the morning of September 11, 2001. I suspect it's not very much different from the way the majority of Americans, at least the ones who weren't dying, spent that morning. Actually, I can't say the above is very accurate. The truth is I don't remember very much from that morning. It was all a blur. Just two days before, on September 9, I had been in lower Manhattan less than a block from the World Trade Center. I remember thinking at the time that it was a shame that it was so late in the day and the group I was with had to drive back upstate because, despite living in New York State my whole life, I had never been in the World Trade Center towers. And now, not even 48 hours later, they were gone along with so many of the people who worked there.

I'm afraid if you're expecting any great words of comfort or for me to somehow put it all into perspective then you're going to be disappointed. I can't do that. 5 years later and I still avert my eyes when videos of the attacks on that day come on screen. And I still cringe at the sound of the impacts of those two jets on the towers. What can I say? The events of that beautiful fall day were senseless acts of violence and should never have happened. There is no comfort, there is no perspective to be had. The nation was violently attacked on that day and still the wounds have not healed.

Neither am I going to get political on this day. It's bad enough that we've had five years of an administration that has exploited the memories of those unthinkable atrocities for political gain, or that a major television network should distort and mangle those memories via a vile propaganda piece and tell us they do it to honor the dead. I will not lower myself to their level.

What I will say though, and I know many of you will violently disagree (36% give or take to put a number to it), that of all the ghouls picking and gnawing at our still open wounds, some are worse than others.

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Hi everyone. Paul is having internet connectivity problems and he asked me to do a guest blogging stint until he has a reliable net connection again. My name is Leo Lincourt and I run the freethinkers' and skeptics' group blogsite Neural Gourmet where I post under the pseudonym tng. I also ride herd over the blogosphere's only liberal blog carnival Carnival of the Liberals. For long time Brainshrub readers I'm probably not at all what you're used to, but hopefully I won't totally scare off Paul's readership.

The medium, or rather the network in this case, was the message Wednesday when Air America Radio summarily fired firebrand talk show host Mike Malloy without explanation. Liberal and progressive sites went wild when the following terse message appeared on Malloy's site:

The decision was a curious one. Malloy was only one of two radio professionals (WJNO Florida powerhouse Randi Rhodes was the other) hired by the fledgling Air America Radio in its' first year of operation, and in my humble opinion, the most entertaining of AAR's assortment of hosts. Indeed, Malloy's ability to accurately reflect the anger of liberals and progressives at the Bush misadministration often gave the listener the impression that they were not so much listening to a political talk show as participating in group therapy. And for this Malloy's fans were both legion and rabid.

So it was no surprise that within minutes after learning of Malloy's dismissal his fans had flooded AAR phonelines with calls of outrage, organized petitions, threatened boycots, and spawned countless threads on liberal discussion forum Democratic Underground among others. To say that hyperbole was involved would be an understatement. Reading through some of the comments at DU, and Malloy's own forum puts one in mind of the hysteria accompanying the breakup of the Beatles. So why would AAR let one of their most popular hosts go?

You know, and this is where I part company with a broad swath of my fellow liberals and progressives, I don't think it matters. AAR is after all a radio network, and a business. In businesses all decisions are ultimately financial ones, even in a business like Air America that is famous for mishandling its' finances. The radio business is also a notoriously gossipy one and ultimately the truth will out.

In the meantime what does concern me are some of the reactions to Malloy's dismissal, which are as fraught with conspiracy theories as Malloy's shows were. While details vary the concensus narrative is that AAR was brought under pressure by the government to fire Malloy who had inconveniently gotten too close to the truth. Much of the controversy has centered around other popular, but low-ratings producing, hosts that AAR has let go with speculation that the Republicans are trying to kill AAR one host at a time.

Others have called for a campaign to raise money to help Malloy, and his producer/wife Kathy Bay, feed their young child until Malloy finds work elsewhere in the industry. This would be a noble sentiment if not for the fact that Malloy was hardly working for minimum wage, and could have been getting much more than that if one commenter on Air America Radio founder Sheldon Drobny's blog can be trusted.

And much of the anger has focused on Air America Radio itself where conspiracists theorize that it has been taken over by the pro-business, centrist Democratic Leadership Council which seeks to tame AAR so as to avoid embarrassment from far left talk show hosts heading into election season.

But above all else lefties are mourning what they see as the final nail being driven into the coffin of their beloved radio broadcasting network.

Amidst all of this I find myself disgusted. Disgusted at not just the vile and twisted conspiracy theories and their torturous logic but also at the defeatism being flaunted and paraded, nurtured even.

Might I suggest, and on this you may vehemently disagree, that while AAR's missteps are unfortunate it's just a business for crying out loud and not the freaking holy liberal saviour. Mike Malloy's firing doesn't trumpet liberal media armageddon. Likely it doesn't even sound the death knell of Mike Malloy's broadcasting career. Further still, left or center, love it or hate it, Air America Radio serves an important function as the most mature, and most recognized of all the alternative broadcast sources. To channel this much anger AAR's way while hoping for its' demise is to cut your progressive noses off.

You don't like AAR and the way it runs its' business? Fine! Good! Frankly, neither do I. Now stop your yammerin' and go do something about it -- and I don't mean sign another online petition. Be the media!

At no point in history have people had so much power to create and disseminate their own message. There's no need to just sit passively by when there are so many ways you can contribute your talents. Start a blog, or podcast. Get involved with local cable access, community run radio, or even your nearby college radio and television stations. Now, you can argue that you're never going to have the reach of the mass media giants. So what? You're never going to reach the yokels who prefer to be spoonfed their information from Fox News anyway. You're not missing anything.

There are millions of people out there you can reach though. They're the ones who are actively seeking out information and with the tools the web puts at both your and their disposal it's easier than ever for you to find each other. Still, you don't need to affect millions of people. All it takes is to change the mind of just one or two people who might in turn change the mind of one or two people more each. And if those one or two people happen to live in your community and that results in the simplest of changes that improves life in your community, even if that simple change is something as mundane as getting a stoplight at a busy, dangerous interesection where there was never one before then you've achieved something. If enough people take the media into their own hands it won't be long before the mainstream media is no longer the mainstream.

Finally, if you don't think you have the talent, time or energy it takes to do it yourself then financially support someone who does. A couple of dollars a month multiplied by just 1,000 readers, listeners or viewers can make a big difference in affording your favorite liberal/progressive independent media creator the ability to continue to do the work that the mainstream media isn't doing.

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