Life in the Third Layer

Quoted from The other tsunami, Cover story in The New Statesman by John Pilger, Monday 10th January 2005.

The west’s crusaders, the United States and Britain, are giving less to help the tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber or a week’s bloody occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush’s coming inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka. Bush and Blair increased their first driblets of “aid” only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and that a public relations problem beckoned. The Blair government’s current “generous” contribution is one-sixteenth of the £800m it spent on bombing Iraq before the invasion and barely one-twentieth of a £1bn gift, known as a soft loan, to the Indonesian military so that it could acquire Hawk fighter-bombers.
On 24 November, one month before the tsunami struck, the Blair government gave its backing to an arms fair in Jakarta, “designed to meet an urgent need for the [Indonesian] armed forces to review its defence capabilities”, reported the Jakarta Post. The Indonesian military, responsible for genocide in East Timor, has killed more than 20,000 civilians and “insurgents” in Aceh. Among the exhibitors at the arms fair was Rolls-Royce, manufacturer of engines for the Hawks, which, along with British-supplied Scorpion armoured vehicles, machine-guns and ammunition, were terrorising and killing people in Aceh up to the day the tsunami devastated the province.
The Australian government, currently covering itself in glory for its modest response to the historic disaster befallen its Asian neighbours, has secretly trained Indonesia’s Kopassus special forces, whose atrocities in Aceh are well documented. This is in keeping with Australia’s 40-year support for oppression in Indonesia, notably its devotion to the dictator Suharto while his troops slaughtered a third of the population of East Timor. The government of John Howard – notorious for its imprisonment of child asylum-seekers – is at present defying international maritime law by denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some $8bn. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world’s poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads or provide work for its young people, 90 per cent of whom are unemployed.

From the New York Times:

Evangelical Leader Threatens to Use His Political Muscle Against Some Democrats, January 1, 2005, By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
COLORADO SPRINGS – James C. Dobson, the nation’s most influential evangelical leader, is threatening to put six potentially vulnerable Democratic senators “in the ‘bull’s-eye’ ” if they block conservative appointments to the Supreme Court.
In a letter his aides say is being sent to more than one million of his supporters, Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist and founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, promises “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if President Bush fails to appoint “strict constructionist” jurists or if Democrats filibuster to block conservative nominees.
Dr. Dobson recalled the conservative efforts that helped in the November defeat of Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader who led Democrats in using the filibuster to block 10 of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees.

Christianity developed from an oppressed people. The early Christians were hounded by Rome, which ruled that everyone had to accept that Caesar was divine. They were also oppressed by the Jews, who ruled that everyone had to subscribe to the ancient law and contribute to the ruling religious government. Both of these oppressors were empowered by divine right — the Word of God to Moses and the word of the gods to Caesar.
America was founded upon an idea of representative government, not divine right or divine law. It was not even founded upon majority rule. Inherent in the system of representative government is tolerance for people of diverse faith, creed, color, and national origin. Democratic (representative) government protects the rights of the few against the oppression of the many. It assumes that all people have the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” American Constitutional law protects the individual and the minority group — whether minority due to race, creed, or national origin. We have freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to vote. Two of the reasons for which the Constitution was established are to “promote the general welfare” and to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Christianity was not an oppressive creed at its origin, but it became so when married to the authority of Rome and the royal families of Europe. The American Constitution broke this bond with separation of church and state, a constitutional rule against establishing a church as the state church. Most people today believe that this separation idea was incorporated as a protection for religion, so that people could worship freely. In fact, it was a protection for democracy, which cannot co-exist with divine right.
Neither Christianity nor its founder believed in civil government by the law of God or in the attachment of gods to nations:

• In Matthew 22:15-22 the oppressive Jewish leaders of the day, the Pharisees, knowing that Jesus taught there was only one God, challenged him regarding giving tribute to Caesar. After all, if you support Caesar, are you not acting against your own God? Jesus explained that the money was Caesar’s money, and he answered “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” (KJV) The modern translation gives his response as “Give the Emperor what belongs to him and give God what belongs to God.” (CEV)
• In John 4:5-29 we have a story in which Jesus spoke with a woman of another nation and creed and explained to her that the true worship of God was not tied to a particular mountain or a particular city. He said: “…neither in this mountain nor at Jerusalem, worship the Father….God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (KJV) In modern translation: “…you won’t worship the Father in this mountain or in Jerusalem…. God is Spirit, and those who worship God must be led by the Spirit to worship him according to the truth.” (CEV)

Spirit and truth have no geography. God has no geography. The attachment of God to nations is a false claim and a power grab by human beings. Whether it is a claim of an Islamic fundamentalist or a claim of a Christian evangelical, it is false.

We may be on our way to a kinder gentler era when the smoke (no pun intended) clears and the only actual no-harmful-side-efects pain releiver we have is marijuana. After all, those heart-stopping drugs treated the pain and left you with the stress that causes or contributes to most disorders that kill people. You could cut the ache in your shoulder and still make your quota on the assembly line or the performance chart, damp the pain that is a caution sign and crank out the work until your heart stopped.
Who knows what may follow when the reality-based universe kicks in and tells us that pain means you should do your stretches, eat smaller portions of better food, smile once a day, and chill out a little? And who knows what may follow when the “drug” it takes to help you get started will grow in vacant lots unless you spray it with weedkiller and can be baked in brownies?
Look twice, we might not even need Ritalin.

From NY Times Kerik’s Position Was Untenable, Bush Aide Says, By ELISABETH BUMILLER and ERIC LIPTON:

Mr. Kerik’s withdrawal was the first major blunder in the administration’s process of assembling its second-term cabinet, but not a new experience for Mr. Bush’s team. Four years ago, when Mr. Bush nominated Linda Chavez as labor secretary, it was discovered after the initial vetting process that she had given shelter to, and employed, an illegal immigrant. At the time, Mr. Bush’s aides were outraged and promised to change their methods for reviewing potential nominees, but on Saturday several officials said that because Mr. Bush wanted to make his decisions speedily, their initial review had been quick.

But rest easy:

“I am confident that President Bush will move swiftly to find a replacement for Bernie Kerik,” Senator Collins said in a statement on Saturday.

We count on the President’s swift responses. Look where we might have been if he had taken time to assess the WMD question or the association of Osama Bin Laden to Saddam Hussein.
Anyway, for Kerik, according to Rudolph Giuliani, who recommended Kerik, it was just one little mistake, hiring the illegal nanny. Nothing serious at all:

“…Whenever this happens, there is always the idea that it must be something else, it must be something else,” Mr. Giuliani said. “But that is when there is not a good reason. This is a good reason. Who would actually think he could go forward with this issue?”

Well, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Kerik thought so. Mr. Kerrik told the press:

“I think when you’re in a position like this, the press, the media and all your enemies try to find things that a person has done wrong,” he said. “But I don’t think that there would have been a problem with the nomination.”

So according to Giuliani, we should not speculate upon any of the (many) other problems related to Mr. Kerik. If we did, do you suppose we might find some of them tied to Mr. Giuliani?
In a related New York Times story yesterday,

Mr. Kerik, who took over the Police Department without a college degree, had credibility with street cops and a rough-hewn charm he used to ingratiate himself with many New Yorkers. But critics contend he was prone to lapses of judgment, pointing to the use of an elite homicide task force to question several people who his book publisher, Judith Regan, believed had stolen her cellphone, and the use of other detectives to research his book, an action for which he was fined by the city’s Conflict of Interest Board.

I’m sure Giulani just found out about this fine for conflict of interest yesterday in the Times, otherwise he would not have recommended Kerik for such a responsible position. And of course the nanny is also beyond the scope of our inquiry, since:

The nanny Mr. Kerik had employed, who has not yet been identified, left the country about two weeks ago, just prior to the announcement of his [Kerik’s] nomination, a former New York City official said on Saturday, adding that her departure had been planned for at least two months.

Apparently somebody plans ahead and covers the possibilities for negative outcomes. Maybe we could get the nanny back and nominate her.