THE OTHER GEORGE … NO, THE OTHER OTHER GEORGE

George McGovern ran for president over thirty years ago. I’m very pleased to learn he’s not only still alive, he’s still thinking and still has something to say.

I remember the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon vs. George McGovern. I was eleven that year, in the sixth grade, and we had a mock election in school. I was for McGovern; I had a button and everything. I wonder what happened to it, and my Impeach Nixon button too.

I’ve read that mock elections in schools often presage the real ones to a degree that’s uncanny. Maybe that’s because the kids know who their parents are going to vote for, and simply vote the same. I don’t know, but it wasn’t that way at Canalino School in 1972. McGovern won by a landslide.

I guess the west coast counterculture was beginning to seep through the cracks at our school. Maybe through those high louvered windows that the teacher had to open with a long pole. Maybe the strange fears of the distant but disturbing war were seeping in too. For whatever reason, that Fall progressives dominated in the classrooms farthest from the sandbox and the swings.

I’ve often wondered how America might be different if Nixon hadn’t won. I like to think that we’d have a kinder society, a more vigilant focus and a firmer grip on individual rights, maybe fewer jobs gone overseas. A man can dream. And as Simone Weil said, “A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough…Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.”

In any case, it’s great that Mr. McGovern has contributed this column to The Nation. The wise voice of a man in his 80s, who took his best shot.

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SHAME ON THE OAKLAND POLICE

I’m one of those people who usually respects the police for their service and sacrifice. But I’m just sickened and angered by what Oakland police did today. I’m sick and tired of people who abuse the authority given to them by the people, by using that authority as a weapon against the people from whom it derives.

There is simply no excuse for attacking protestors. Political dissent is the very foundation of our democracy, one of the American rights and virtues for which so many have fought and died. This kind of abusive overreaction is a defilement, if not a repudiation, of the gifts of liberty our veterans have given us. When our men and women come home from Iraq, not one of the officers who was at the Port of Oakland today should dare to look them in the eye.

WHO TOLD YOU I’M PARANOID?

“As a new war raged in Iraq, the people in the room were acutely aware of the only slightly older war that has consumed their daily lives like nothing before — the way in which the war on terrorism has also turned into an assault on individual liberties.”

Why we may never regain the liberties that we’ve lost

By Dan Gillmor

Mercury News Technology Columnist

GONE TOO SOON, AND TOO FAR FROM HOME

I’ll admit it; I think the war with Iraq is sad. It leaves me despairing that we will ever overcome the impulse to shed blood as a means of “solving problems.” But the death of David Bloom of NBC is doubly sad. Is it because he’s more innocent, not being a soldier? No. Except for the few powerful megalomaniacs who started this thing, we’re all equally innocent and culpable.

I don’t know why I find Bloom’s death more troubling than the other troubling deaths. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching him report, riding around on that big whatever. Maybe it’s just the irony; the guys he was with didn’t let him take a bullet. They didn’t drive over a mine or get doused with sarin gas. He rode all the way up from Kuwait, only to go out under the ultimate friendly fire.

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GONE TOO SOON

Deepest sympathy to John for the loss of his Magic. There are no good words.

A NEW SUPERPOWER?

“The candles in windows did not stop the cruise missiles. The demonstrators did not block the tanks rolling north to Baghdad. Pope John Paul II did not stop President George W. Bush. Yet against all expectation, a global contest whose consequence far transcends the war in Iraq had arisen.”

Column by Jonathan Schell at TheNation.org

HAPPY BIRTHDAY VICKY !!!

Here’s a Mr. Rogers song for you, and don’t let any miscreant malamutes chew it up … but you can sing it for them, if you can think of a good tune.

Its You I Like

It’s you I like,

It’s not the things you wear,

It’s not the way you do your hair–

But it’s you I like

The way you are right now,

The way down deep inside you–

Not the things that hide you,

Not your toys–

They’re just beside you.

But it’s you I like–

Every part of you,

Your skin, your eyes, your feelings

Whether old or new.

I hope that you’ll remember

Even when you’re feeling blue

That it’s you I like,

It’s you yourself,

It’s you, it’s you I like.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

Coming out of the Village this evening, I let my blue truck take the onramp west into the setting sun, in time to hear the mission bell for vespers. Another day goes down. I can see fifteen miles, to where the coast turns and disappears at Shoreline. Beyond that, millas de las goletas, lost in the setting sun. But closer to home, in the cup of sea at Summerland, a puff of fog pretends to be mist thrown up by a crashing surf that really lies flat as a rug. Even the abstract vapors learn to live in a peace that eludes us.

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BUSTER THE BUNKER BUSTER

This dog is cool. But hey, my dog can sniff out a cookie in the pocket of my sweats, even if they haven’t been washed in … well, a while.

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TRUTH HURTS

She’s right, this could have waited until we moved on to the next crisis.

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A GOOD DAY TO DIE

On this day in history …

In 1964, Army General Douglas MacArthur died in Washington at age 84. …

In 1975, nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek died at age 87. …

In 1976, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes (news) died in Houston at age 72. …

In 1992, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton died in Little Rock, Ark., at age 74. …

In 1997, Allen Ginsberg, the counterculture poet who’d shattered conventions as poet laureate of the Beat Generation, died in New York City at age 70. …

In 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death following their conviction in New York on charges of conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union; co-defendant Morton Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison (he was released in 1969).

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. WASHINGTON

Saturday is the birthday of Booker T. Washington, a great man because in advancing educational opportunities and civil rights for Black people, he improved the world for everyone. A stong tide lifts all boats. A wise man who said, “I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”

(What does that say about me, in light of my “That’s Not Saddam” post?)