DIARY OF A RAG AND BONE MAN

(The continuing Saga of a homeless man and his dog)
by Jack Rafter

Today's Episode: "A Letter From The Past"

This morning I woke up in my tent in the woods thinking about scrambled eggs, a stack of pancakes with melted butter, maple syrup and thick slab bacon. So I took Vincent and headed down to the freight yards to look for something I might give Johnny Blair in exchange for breakfast. Johnny runs the Bizzy Bee Cafe over on Mort Street. Bartering is our little arrangement.

You see, Johnny's kind of an artist. He not only cooks, but he builds shadowboxes in his spare time. He uses nice woods, like poplar and cherry, to make the small square pigeon holes, into which he puts little found treasures. Each shadowbox has a theme, so the objects he puts in are related to each other in some way.

A FOUND OBJECT

Well, we were walking along the edge of the woods on a little rise overlooking the yard, when Vincent stopped in his tracks and gave out a strange crying bark. I didn't see what he was looking at at first, but then, as I crept forward a few feet, I saw the object of his concern lying in the tall weeds—a dead body. I recognized him, too: a homeless guy named Steve. He'd been staying in the woods for a couple of weeks. Came in on a freight from somewhere out in the east. I think he was headed for Tucson or Yuma. He'd been sick the last few days. He drank too much and I doubt he ate enough to compensate. Probably didn't get enough water, either. I had a feeling he died of heat stroke.

He wasn't in his right mind. He would converse with people who weren't there, although I found that he would talk to me, if I could get his attention. He laughed quite a bit, a kind of manic laughter, as if he thought everything in his tragic life was funny. And maybe it was. He told me he was a veteran, but he couldn't remember which war he fought in. “I guess it doesn't matter which one,” he said, and he laughed and laughed, as if the joke were on him. Then, he said something kind of odd. He said, “I fought in all of them. I fought in all the wars.” The words of a crazy man, of course. But he wasn't laughing, now. In fact, he looked pretty sad lying there. He wasn't that old, maybe fifty or so. His ratty blue suit looked like it came from Goodwill. He was on his back, his head turned to the side, eyes open, so I guess the last things he saw were the trains going by in the yard, perhaps headed somewhere he would have much preferred to be than where he ended up.

One thing caught my eye--his hands, resting on his stomach, small, childlike, caked with grime. They were perfectly relaxed, as if he'd seen death coming and made no effort to fend it off.

Vincent circled around him, whimpering a little, crept up to him, smelled him, then backed off again and sat down, looking. I squatted beside Steve and went through his pockets. Luckily, he hadn't been dead too long or I couldn't have done it. Right off, I discovered he died rich—had a fiver on him and some loose change, a key to something, I don't know what. He carried no wallet, no identification. In one coat pocket, he had a collection of perfectly smooth, brightly colored little stones he might have found in a creek or riverbed somewhere. I thought about Johnny Blair's shadowboxes, so I took a few of the stones and put the rest back. I didn't think he'd mind—they amounted to a good handful. Johnny would appreciate the story.

THE LETTER

Then, from the inside coat pocket, the one over his breast, I retrieved a folded piece of paper. It was old, almost falling apart. Carefully, I opened it up and glanced at it. It was a letter—handwritten—signed “Millie” at the bottom, a wife or a girlfriend, I supposed. No envelope, so I had no idea where it came from or where it was mailed to. I looked around. I didn't want to sit there, exposed to the trains and everything, so I backed up a few feet in the the woods and read the letter. It was dated January—something; the year was smudged out. Parts of it were smudged or almost faded out, but I took my time and managed to piece it together.

When I finished, I thought it should stay with Steve. But I really wanted a copy of it, so I borrowed it, went back to my tent in the woods, found a pencil and paper, and copied it. As I wrote, I started thinking about how somebody would come along and haul Steve down to the morgue. They might do an autopsy. They would probably take his clothes, his handful of colored stones, and the letter, throw them away, then bury him in a pauper's grave. So I decided maybe I should bury him myself. I went and found a couple of guys, one named Charles, the other one calling himself Smitty, both living in the woods, to help me with him. They were sitting in their camps hot and bored, more than willing to go look at a dead body, and maybe even help me bury him.

But we got there too late. Through the trees, as we approached, we saw the Union Pacific men--four of them--standing around in their bright yellow hardhats. One was on a walkie-talkie. We could hear him telling someone what they'd found lying in the weeds by the yard. I knew an ambulance would be along any minute to haul him off somewhere.

Smitty wiped his mouth, then said, “Well, I don't want nothin' to do with no railroad people.” “Me neither,” said Charles. They turned and walked off.

I stood there, debating for a minute. The men were down on the roadbed a little below where Steve lay. I wondered which one of them found him, and how he was able to see him from down there. Maybe he just caught a glimpse of the pasty white of Steve's face. Or maybe it was the blue of his coat sifting through the sunburnt grass. Of course, an engineer could have spotted him from up in the cab, or a switchman, hanging from the side of a boxcar.

THE TRAIN MAN

I decided to risk it and came out of the woods and showed myself. They didn't notice me at first. Then, the guy with the walkie-talkie looked up and saw me. He was older than the other three, streaks of gray at his temples. He wore a tie and carried a clipboard. Already there were sweat stains on his clean, white shirt, even though it wasn't yet ten o'clock. I was a little surprised when he nodded and spoke to me. “Howdy,” he said. I said, “Hi” and came on up to where Steve lay. He looked the same as before, still lying on his back, staring vacantly at the yards, but with all the people hovering around him now, he seemed even more lost and out of place. And these strangers were about to decide where he should go next.

“You know anything about this fella?” said the white shirted man. The name tape on his hardhat said, “Grimes.”

“I know his name was Steve,” I replied. “I don't know his last name. I found him this morning.”

“You found him?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“How come you didn't report it?” said one of the others, much younger than Grimes.

“Who says I didn't?” I replied.

Grimes took a handkerchief from his back pocket, dabbed his brow. “Well, we didn't find any i.d. on him, so we don't even know for sure his name was Steve.”

“He told me that was his name. He's been around here for a couple of weeks. He also had this letter on him.” I held the folded letter up.

Grimes, looking squint-eyed at the letter, said, “Can I see that?”

“On one condition,” I said.

“What's that?”

“Promise me you'll make sure it gets buried with him. It's from his wife. You read it, you'll see his name was Steve. Her name was Millie.”

“Was there an envelope with that? Was there an address for Millie?”

“No,” I said. “No address for him, none for her. Just their names, that's all. He was a veteran. You'll see, it's in the letter. He deserves a decent burial somewhere, and this letter should be buried with him. It's all he had in the world. Promise me you'll do it.”

Grimes sighed deeply and said he would see to it. I handed him the letter. He opened it up. The other men moved in a little. Grimes frowned and bit his lower lip as he looked at it. Then, abruptly, he held it out to me. He spoke quietly, “You want to read it?”

“Okay,” I said. I raised the letter and started to read. Grimes removed his hardhat. The others did the same. This is what I read:

January. . .

My Darling Steve,

We had some rain last night and it was bitter cold. But this morning was bright and beautiful, and even though the air was still nippy, I got out and walked a little. And I thought about the last time you were here on leave, back in the summer. I went down to the sandbar below the house where we spent our last night together, and I remembered how warm it was, and how the moon was starting to come full and shown down on the sand and the water. You said it made the river look like diamonds. Remember?

I still have the shirt—that old army t-shirt—you wore that night. I haven't washed it. I put it up to my face last night to smell you and some sand fell out of it. I started laughing, and then, I was crying. I felt so stupid. But I didn't care.

My darling husband, I love you so. I love you more than life. I dream so often of you and me holding hands down on the sandbar in the moonlight. Isn't it funny? It's such a vivid dream. I want you to come home and put on that t-shirt and make love to me! I will never wash that shirt until you return, safe and sound.

Come back to me, my dearest dearest love. Let no harm come to you is my prayer every morning and night to the angels of mercy. Never forget how much I love you and what you mean to me.

Yours, forever,
Millie.

We stood around and waited till the ambulance showed up. Grimes called one of the railroad doctors out to officially pronounce the death so no autopsy would need to be done. When the doctor asked for a name to write on the form, the railroad man leaned forward and quietly replied, “Steve Grimes.”

After they left, Grimes assured me that Steve would get a proper burial. He said he intended to take up a collection from the railroad worker's union and buy Steve a plot in a nice cemetery and provide him with a headstone. And he would seal the letter in an envelope and put it back in Steve's coat.

THE BIZZY BEE

By the time I got to Johnny's cafe, the lunch crowd had come and gone. Johnny fired up the grill, cooked up half-a-dozen eggs, pancakes and bacon, then sat down and had breakfast with me. And as we ate, I told him about finding Steve, and about Millie's letter, and what Grimes had done, and then I dropped the smooth colored stones on the table by his plate. Johnny didn't say much, mostly just looked and listened. He started to read my copy of the letter to himself, but like the good trainman, he handed it back to me and said, “Why don't you read it, Jack?

After I finished, he just shook his head. “Lord, Lord,” he said. “How strange life is, huh, Jack? How strange.”

“Yeah, it is,” I nodded. “Sure is.”

SHALL EVEN A FETUS WATCH TV?

Maria Hampton, writing in the Sept/Oct 2006 issue of Adbusters, comments on a new invasive frontier of television. People are fleeing into whole new worlds of solitude within their I-pods, a kind of self-prescribed refuge from TV's inescapable advertising. Clear Channel, the radio playground for the right-wing in the US, is now pioneering one-second ads--not quite brief enough to be subliminal--but sufficient to enter the arc of consciousness and quickly disappear. These ads are all over you, before you can escape, or even decide to escape.

These psychological gambits are increasingly being used to embed consumerist and manipulative structures into the human mind; and there are now indications that the minds being targeted are at ever more formative stages of development. One of the possible cultural repercussions that Hampton raises, as a red flag, is the rising trend of American doctors treating "psychosis" in children as young as eight years, with anti-psychotic drugs that were previously reserved for adults.

New frontiers of Pavlovian conditioning include the "ultimate electronic babysitter", invented by the Nestle company, which is scheduled for marketing this fall. As Hampton describes it: "a videogame that doles out candy". She quotes a marketing expert, James Belcher, as saying , "Games give a more intimate [brand] relationship and every time you play them, the candy's there”.

The battle for the mind is beginning long before the child has imprinted language, before parenting is thoroughly underway, and well before the literate process and critical thinking are introduced. Believe it or not, there is now such a thing as BabyFirstTV.

One of the sinister developments Hampton describes is this new baby TV. "Flouting warnings by pediatricians and psychiatrists, corporations are cashing in on TV programs targeted specifically for infants and toddlers"..."Childcare experts such as Dmitri A. Christakis from the University of Washington, however, caution that television for infants "rewires the brain" during a period of irreversible development."

So how long will it be before there's Uterine TV?--and tiny adjustable visors for the developing fetus? Perhaps it's possible to go back further for baby's first brainwashing. Surely the voice of consumer compulsion must have another antecedent, in those deep-frozen cryogenic vats that hold human embryos.

A SANER VOICE PREVAILED

"There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created in the Constitution."
--U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, writing in her 43-page decision yesterday, ruling that the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping surveillance program violates freedom of speech, protections against unreasonable searches, and a Constitutional check on the power of the President.

At this moment, there is legislation pending in Congress, which Arlen Specter has spearheaded, and which probably would have passed (with the help of spineless Democrats), that would remove many of the limits to the President's ability to do things the Constitution prohibits. In other words, the Congress of the United States is attempting to rewrite the laws of the land in order to make it okay for the President to break the laws of the land. Judge Taylor's ruling, at least for the time being, would render that legislation dead on arrival.

Three cheers for the ACLU! The only people who seem ready to fight tooth and claw for this crumbling democracy.

The Bushites are, of course, planning to appeal the case to the Federal Court of Appeals, and if they fail there, it could go on to the Supreme Court.

WHEN RELIGION DOESN'T JUST TALK

My friend, Ben, just received a little gift from Kathleen Rumpf. Ms. Rumpf is a member of the Catholic Worker's Movement. For the last couple of weeks, she's been sitting outside Carswell's Women's Prison protesting the corruption and cruelty which she experienced first-hand while in the custody of the hospital there. A peace activist all her life, she's been arrested more than a hundred times. Her latest arrest was for protesting at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Ben and I drove out there and talked to her. It was over a hundred degrees that day, as it had been just about every day she was there. At night, she slept on a mattress thrown on the ground. A picture of the Virgin Mary decorated a lone tree providing the only shade to her little encampment. She had nothing, but she seemed to be about the happiest person alive.

While we were there, she handed Ben a 4 x 6-inch card. Ben stood there looking at it, smiling. Then, he handed it to me. On the face of the card was a reproduction of an icon painting of Father Philip Berrigan, who died in 2002. Does anyone remember him, I wonder? He was a Josephite priest, and one of our country's most revered peace activists. He and his brother, Daniel, a Jesuit priest, kicked up a lot of trouble during the Vietnam era. Daniel's still alive and kicking.

Ms. Rumpf said she has patterned her life after Philip's example. She and the Berrigans, and others, like Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., are reminders that being religious can mean something altogether different from the right-wing Christian view that somehow God is on our side in Iraq and it's perfectly okay to bomb people into submission to our way of life.

At the same time, it can also mean far more than just sitting around making a lot of "spiritual" talk with like-minded people, yet never venturing beyond the cozy comfort of church walls, to do something as unsafe as standing with others to protest war or poverty or other injustices.

Philip Berrigan fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Later, he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. He marched for desegregation, took part in sit-ins and bus boycotts. He and his brother, Daniel, and the famed theologian, Thomas Merton, founded an interfaith coalition against the Vietnam War.

On October 27, 1967, the "Baltimore Four," consisting of Philip, the artist Tom Lewis, and poet, teacher and writer, David Eberhardt and United Church of Christ missionary and pastor, the Rev. James L. Mengel, poured blood (including Berrigan's) on selective service records in the Baltimore Customs House.

Waiting for police to arrest them, they passed out Bibles. Berrigan said:

"This sacrificial and constructive act is meant to protest the pitiful waste of American and Vietnamese blood in Indochina."

He was sentenced to 6 years in prison, the first American priest to be arrested for an act of civil disobedience.

In 1969, following his release on bail, Phil Berrigan repeated the protest in a somewhat modified form. Using homemade napalm, nine activists, who later became known as the "Catonsville Nine," walked into the Catonsville, Maryland draft board and burned 378 draft files. On that day, Berrigan said:

"We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor."

At their trial, the "Catonsville Nine" offered no formal defense, other than to make statements to explain themselves and their actions. Philip's brother, Daniel, read this statement from his Catonsville meditations:

"Our apologies, dear friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of papers instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise."

"TIME FOR PRAYER"

On the reverse side of the card Kathleen Rumpf gave to Ben is this prayer--the final writing of Philip Berrigan.

"The following occur to me as worthwhile subjects of prayer:
*that we disarm our hearts and our society
*that the Holy Spirit subvert, stalemate, and expose preparation for the invasion of Iraq
*that God intervene in the ecological crisis as Lord of Creation, because we refuse to change our
abuse of the earth
*that Americans begin to understand and resist the three-pronged aims for the Bush Administration: the trashing of civil liberties, perpetual war, and world domination
*that the swindle of "foreknowledge" by the Bushites of 9/11 be fully disclosed
*that the "crime" of 57 years of nuclearism, and its consequent wasting of our lives, and planet be revealed
*that Americans grasp that war is our #1 business; that we are a violent, killer people, and that we know virtually little of the nonviolence of Jesus and the Gospel
*that the scourges of abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty be ended
*that the U.S. withdraw all economic and military aid to Israel
*that the global war against children be lifted
*that the rich West contribute medication and food to the global victims of HIV-AIDS
*that each of us become people of fidelity, nonviolence, and justice

Amen

LETTER TO THE PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL

Is there anything we can do to stop the madness of war? Or are we on the road to our own destruction? I feel I have to do something, even if it is to write a pathetic letter to someone who either will never lay eyes on it, or if he happens to glance at it, will, in all liklihood, shrug and go on with his program of death.

I have watched mortified as our own architects of war--Bush, Condoleeza Rice, John Bolton, and practically the entire U.S. Congress, continually discouraged a ceasefire and cheered on the complete destruction of Lebanon by Israel, which has featured the targeting of civilians, over a third of whom are children under the age of thirteen.

It seems once the lizard mind contracts into itself, there's not much room left for human concerns, only the worship of weapons and war; no time, no place for idle thoughts, of families driven from their homes by the thousands, of children lying in the rubble of this disease.

So, I begin to write letters. What for? Who knows? Perhaps simply to assuage my own impotence.

June 29, 2006

Ehud Olmert
Prime Minister
Israel

Dear Mr. Olmert,

Sir, I am heartsick at the war in your homeland. I write to you with no political agenda, other than the belief in my heart that wars will never cease until we begin to change our innermost feelings and minds about war—until it becomes unacceptable.

I am an artist in America. I don't care about your politics or theirs. I care about people. Human lives. Women, children, uncles, cousins, grandmothers. It is beyond me why we are so intent on destroying each other. Are we not better than this, Mr. Olmert? When children get into fisticuffs on the playground, what is the first thing we do as adults? Do we tell them to “just keep fighting” till one kid is the winner and the other left maimed or dead? No. We pull them apart, do we not? We separate them, make them sit down and talk. Yet, we are incapable of doing this thing for ourselves! What a lesson for our children!

Mr. Olmert, I know you are tired of talking. I know you feel it is pointless. Please, my friend, allow me to suggest that it is anything but pointless. Let me, in fact, suggest that even if it seems to lead nowhere, it is still a success. Why? Because at the end of it, everyone is still alive! Still looking each other in the eye, still able to shake hands, perhaps to forgive, to find some core of hope and humanity in the other. Still able to go home to our wives and children. And still able to come back the next day, to sit down, hold hands around the table and pray together for peace. And then. . .talk some more!

And because the alternative. . .well, we all know what that is, don't we?—bombing and killing—only leads to more death, to the end of all hope, and nothing ever resolved. Only more innocent children lying in the rubble of our adult lunacy, pettiness, and closed hearts.

This is what I know, Mr. Olmert. I know that we are none of us perfect. I know we are all broken. And so often I think, if only we could see this, maybe it would be easier to come together to heal our brokenness, in respect of our mutual humanity. We cannot fight for peace by fighting. I'm certain this is what we would tell our children. What do we tell ourselves?

I close with a prayer—a fervent prayer. . .for you, for your people, for theirs, for us. . .everywhere. Everywhere. God. Give. . .Us. . .Peace!

In friendship,

Grayson Harper.

ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR

We are no longer a country of laws. We have slipped the loop on what we are and what we supposedly believe in. Every day brings some new debasement. Yesterday, it was the news that the feds are moving to fire half the lawyers at the IRS who do auditing on the super-rich. That way Bush can get around the law, since he doesn't have the support in Congress to repeal the estate tax. Anything to serve the rich and spit on the rest of us.

Yes, we have quit the rule of law. The CEOs of Exxon, WalMart and Coca-Cola are our congressmen, now, and we operate by their rules--the law of the jungle. Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney have unleashed the queen and king bees of anarchy--Condoleeza Rice and John Bolton--to fan the flames in Israel and Lebanon, hoping, I suppose, to bring on a war with Iran and Syria. And it will probably come to pass. Then, when our military is stretched to the limit, I look for North Korea to take the opportune moment to launch an attack on the U.S. And voila! World War III.

But as far as I'm concerned, when our soldiers burst into that house in Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, and raped a fourteen year old girl, then turned their AK-47s on her, her mother, father and five-year-old sister, that was the last straw, the death blow for us as a country. Abeer Hamza, this child that blundered into the path of our barbarous war, the mistake of so many children. . .she is our fatal wound, from which we will not recover. She is the culmination of all our wrongdoing clear back to the massacre of Native American civilians at Wounded Knee. I see no coming back from this. No cure. I lost my last hope at that moment. From here on, whatever happens happens. I don't say we deserve it, but we sure as hell have it coming.

And be assured--it is the collective WE. Because we brought this on ourselves. Years of collective sleepwalking through elections, collective compromising on our candidates and our values. We--collectively--laid down and let this happen. We collectively handed this country over to these feckless thugs. And now--the crowning glory--our Congress is completely bought and sold out on Israel. They voted like a gleeful mob for that war, made even more gleeful--if that's possible--by the grinning face of Hillary Clinton, our own Democratic harpee for the use of white phosphorous and cluster bombs on innocent civilians.

As the mindless minions give cheer and wave their flags, we can no more than watch the ship go down.

I close with a prayer, a fervent prayer, which contains not a seed of hope, but only an ocean of sorrow and pity for us all, and for our world:

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

EVERYWHERE YOU GO THERE'S WAR

With the death of a beautiful Lebanese child the world comes to an end. Oh, it's understood that there is war going on elsewhere; but yesterday the US House of Representatives stood up, drowning out eight dissenting votes, and declared with a great hoorah that Israel's war of collective punishment, its war of callous retribution can continue to kill Lebanese children.

The world is ended utterly for loved ones who see the loss with their own eyes. US-made weapons from the workshops of Boeing and Lockeed-Martin are the instruments of choice that cover the skies of Sidon, Tyre, and Beirut. And yet, the call for a ceasefire from many nations and from UN Secretary Kofi Annan is being opposed by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. And because the bloodletting is promiscuous now, the sequence of events leading to this tragedy can be obscured, in order to allow the Olmert government of Israel a free hand.

This outbreak of war is a rising flow of violence, after the abduction of an Israeli soldier from his guard post just outside of Gaza. This came about after Israeli leader Sharon suffered a stroke and was permanently incapacitated. The trigger-happy Olmert, his successor, went to work with a major armed incursion into densely populated Gaza. Severe destruction of infrastructure interrupted water, sewage, electricity, and the hostility continued during Olmert's operation. But despite the draconian measures, there was no progress toward release of the captured soldier.

In an interview a week ago, Noam Chomsky pinpoints where this latest trouble started, which he describes as the determination of Israel and the United States "to punish the people of Palestine for voting the wrong way in a free election." Chomsky also provides an essential piece of the backstory:

"...the punishment has been severe"..."it's partly in Gaza, and sort of hidden in a way, but even more extreme in the West Bank, where Olmert announced his annexation program, what's euphemistically called "convergence" and described here often as "withdrawal," but in fact it's a formalization of the program of annexing the valuable lands, most of the resources, including water, of the West Bank and cantonizing the rest and imprisoning it, since he also announced that Israel would take over the Jordan Valley."

Chomsky goes on to say that the Israelis have abducted Palestinians, civilians too, and have not released information in some instances, regarding the prisoners' names or fates.

Hezbollah's ambush on Israeli territory, and its capture of two more Israeli soldiers, just opposite the Lebanese border, was a provocation. It was foolhardy because the hysterical over-reaction of the Olmert government in Gaza was more than likely to be repeated against Lebanon. One may at least suspect that Hezbollah anticipated the outcome. And altruism, the motive of solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, doesn't really stack up against Hezbollah's treason against their own country. Hezbollah has representatives in Lebanon's Parliament; and yet, its own militia drew Lebanon into war, a war which Parliament as a whole would never have desired or approved.

International law forbids collective punishment in war. That didn't stop Olmert. He looked at the border attack by Hezbollah militia, not as a terrorist attack, not as the act of outlaws, but rather decided that the State of Lebanon had made war on Israel.

Professor Juan Cole has posted an eloquent letter from a Lebanese woman named Rasha, who is living in Beirut. In part of it, an Israeli reporter, a woman, conducts an interview with Rasha by e-mail. The reporter says that the Israeli leadership believes that if they target Hezbollah it will convince the local population to turn against Hezbollah.

RASHA: "It is pure folly, but even if it were true it is a terrible strategy, an imploded Lebanon is a nightmare to all, not only the Lebanese but to everyone. Does Israel want an Iraq at its doorstep? There seems to be consensus now in Israel over the military campaign. It is because Israelis are not yet pressing their leadership and military with smart questions. Do you actually believe it would be possible to eliminate the Shi'i sect from Lebanon, and that it would go down easy in the region? If the Americans are advising you, duck for cover or move. Need I list their record of wisdom and foresight recently? Vietnam, Central America, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq? If you need to listen to imperialists, find less idiotic ones, at least who have a sense of history.

America's elected leaders are not informed by the tragedies of their own country. History is casually deconstructed and repackaged. They have already forgotten events like the Little Bighorn, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, Mai Lai, and Haditha.

It's like Rasha said in her interview,

"But this is the stage of your destiny that you have reached: you build walls around yourselves"..."and you chase barefoot, toothless, illiterate, hungry people with a state of the art military arsenal. And you insist that you are victims, and you insist that you are on the right side of history. All this bullshit will catch up with you."

BIG SURPRISE

In a report published recently, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, detailed its findings of a four-month study of the intelligence quotient of President George W. Bush. Since 1973, the Lovenstein Institute has published its research to the educational community on each new president, which includes the famous "IQ" report among others.

There have been twelve presidents over the past 50 years, from F.D. Roosevelt to G.W. Bush, who were rated based on scholarly achievements: 1. Writings that they produced without aid of staff and 2. Their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological factors, which were then scored using the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence ranking.

The study determined the following IQs of each president as accurate to within five percentage points. In order by presidential term:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt [D] 142,
Harry S Truman [D] 132,
Dwight David Eisenhower [R] 122
John Fitzgerald Kennedy [D] 174,
Lyndon Baines Johnson [D] 126,
Richard Milhous Nixon [R] 155,
Gerald R. Ford [R] 121,
James Earle Carter [D] 175,
Ronald Wilson Reagan [R] 105
George Herbert Walker Bush [R] 98,
William Jefferson Clinton [D] 182,
George Walker Bush [R] 91

In order of IQ rating:

182. . William Jefferson Clinton [D]
175. . James Earle Carter [D]
174. . John Fitzgerald Kennedy [D]
155. . Richard Milhous Nixon [R]
147. Roosevelt [D]
132. Harry S Truman [D]
126. . Lyndon Baines Johnson [D]
122. . Dwight David Eisenhower [R]
121. . Gerald R. Ford [R]
105. . Ronald Wilson Reagan [R]
98. . George Herbert Walker Bush [R]
91. . George Walker Bush [R]

The six Republican presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of 115.5, with President Nixon having the highest at 155. President George W. Bush rated the lowest of all the Republicans with an IQ of 91. The six Democratic presidents of the past 50 years had an average IQ of 156, with President Clinton having the highest IQ, at 182. President Lyndon B. Johnson was rated the lowest of all the Democrats with an IQ of 126. No president other than Carter [D] has released his actual IQ (176). Among comments made concerning the specific testing of President G.W. Bush, his low ratings are due to his apparently difficult command of the English language in public statements, his limited use of vocabulary [6,500 words for Bush versus an average of 11,000 words for other presidents], his lack of scholarly achievements other than a basic MBA, and an absence of any body of work which could be studied on an intellectual basis.

The complete report documents the methods and procedures used to arrive at these ratings, including depth of sentence structure and voice stress confidence analysis.

"All the Presidents prior to George W. Bush had a least one book under their belt, and most had written several white papers during their education or early careers. Not so with President Bush," Dr. Lovenstein said. "He has no published works or writings, which made it more difficult to arrive at an assessment. We relied more heavily on transcripts of his unscripted public speaking."

The Lovenstein Institute of Scranton, think tank includes high caliber historians, psychiatrists, sociologists, scientists in human behavior, and psychologists. Among their ranks are Dr. Werner R. Lovenstein, world-renowned sociologist, and Professor Patricia F.Dilliams, a world-respected psychiatrist.

UPDATE:CORRECTION: It turns out that The Lovenstein Institute doesn't exist and its report is an internet hoax which has been floating out there for a couple of years. A reader sends us a link that details the origin of this hoax. The joke's on me.

However, authoritative sources still insist that George W. Bush is stupid.

DIARY OF A RAG AND BONE MAN

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF A HOMELESS MAN AND HIS DOG
by Jack Rafter

Today's story: "Jack Meets The Avenging Angel"

Vincent and I spent a few winter nights in the basement of the YMCA. Then the janitor walked in on me one night, and threatened to run us off. He's a huge black man, bigger than Mohammed Ali, if you remember him. Liked to scared me to death. But then we got to talking and he decided I was okay. He was okay, too. His name is Clob Boatman. He's a retired boxer. Said he was almost the heavyweight champion of the world. But then he met Annabel, his wife, and she made him quit boxing. She was afraid he was going to be brain injured, which he thought was pretty funny because up until he met her, no one had ever lasted long enough with him in the ring to get off a shot at his head. But he quit anyway just because he was in love with Annabel.

Anyway, he showed me where there was a shower down there that Vincent and I could use whenever we needed it--a welcome relief. I'll tell you something: a person gets pretty gamey sleeping out all the time. And a dog especially needs a good soaping off now and then to keep the ticks away.

With summer here we are back over in the woods by the freight yards. There's quite a few homeless camped out here. We call it Sherwood Forest, just for fun, and just to create a little romance out here. Of course, it doesn't look anything like Robin Hood's forest. Just a strip of woods and thickets between Vickery Road and the Centennial Yards.

THE AVENGER

Yesterday, just before nightfall, a man walked up to my tent. He was a stranger to the woods. He looked about forty years old. I guessed he had just gotten off a freight train. He was weary and dirty and beat up. I had some canned butter beans and cornbread, so we sat there and ate some dinner.

His name was Ben Breen, and he was from New Orleans. He said he went through the hurricane. He was one of the people that lost his home. His wife and two children cleared out before the storm hit. They've been staying with her parents in West Virginia. Ben said his wife suffered a mental collapse over losing everything and things haven't been going too well ever since. He stayed in New Orleans hoping the government would rebuild his house or give him some money to rebuild. But they never did. Meanwhile, he lost his job as a warehouseman in the shipping district.

He said he was in Jackson Square the night the President was there and made his big speech to the nation promising to rebuild the city. Ben Breen said he knew even then it was all a pack of lies. "They're not gonna rebuild anything except for the rich people," he said.

THE PLAGUE

Ben Breen said he was on a mission, now. He was hopping freight trains across the country looking for WalMarts because he was going to blow them up, he said, one after another. His Uncle Charles had a sporting goods store for twenty years in Plaquemine, Louisiana. Breen's Sporting Goods. He had four employees working for him. Uncle Charles paid them better than minimum wage, provided health insurance, and gave them two week's paid vacation every year. Then the WalMart came along and within less than a year, Uncle Charles had to close his store. Now, his employees are working at WalMart for minimum wage, with no health insurance, and certainly no vacation. "WalMart is a blight on this country," said Ben Breen. "And I'm going to rid us of this plague." I told him I thought blowing them up was a pretty grandiose scheme, and that it was going to take an awful lot of dynamite. "Don't worry," he said, "I can get my hands on dynamite." His father was a Korean War veteran and had been an explosives expert. Ben learned a lot about explosives from his father, as well as how to handle guns.

"This is the beginning of the revolution," Ben said. "It's time this country had another revolution, don't you think?" He was smiling and had a wild look in his eye, the kind of excited look a horse gets when you flash a light in its face. I shrugged. I wasn't sure if it was time for the revolution or not, but that may only be because I'm basically a coward. Still smiling, Ben Breen looked down at his plate of beans. "Thomas Jefferson would agree with me. He said the tree of liberty needs to be watered now and then with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

"We have tyrants in the White House, now," he went on. "They've broken all our treaties and laws. They're raiding and plundering countries for oil and other resources. They're torturing people! They're making everything more dangerous than it already is. Somebody has to stop them. Congress won't do it, so it's up to the people. The people have to rise up."

THE REVOLUTION

Ben Breen said that after he gets finished blowing up some WalMarts, he's going to start hunting down CEO's. "What CEO's?" I said. "I'm not going to tell you," he said. "But you just think about who's got all the power in this country, and you'll know who I'm talking about. They're the ones who have bought off our Congress and hijacked the whole political system. That's all it exists for now is for their personal benefit. The rest of us are screwed. That Jack Abramoff character and those other goons like Tom Delay and Grover Norquist--you see how they operate? To get an audience with the President, you gotta pony up. Twenty-five grand to see Bush for fifteen minutes. This is our democracy. While we've been fiddling, they've been stealing everything they could get their hands on.

So he said he was going to start picking off CEO's with a deer rifle. "Do you have a deer rifle?" I said. "Yes, I do," he said. "Where is it?" I said. "It's down there in some weeds by the tracks. It's wrapped up in a sheet of plastic."

He said after he picked off one or two CEO's, he was going to send letters to the New York Times and the Washington Post, explaining what he was doing. He was going to demand that the corporations get their lobbyists with their bags and suitcases full of money out of Washington, D.C. "This is the revolution," said Ben Breen. "We start by taking back the Congress." "What about just electing more Democrats?" I said. "That won't do any good," he replied. "They just pay them off, too, and pretty soon, they're acting and behaving like Republicans. No, first you have to get the money out. That's the only way. And picking them off is the only thing that will get their attention." "Yes, that should do it," I agreed.

Compared to most revolutions, Ben Breen said he thought this one would be relatively bloodless. "It's all a matter of picking the right targets," he said. "Once these guys realize they can't go anywhere without worrying where the next bullet is coming from, then I think they'll start to come around."

Ben Breen spent the night in my camp. The next morning, Vincent and I walked with him down to the train yards. He said he wanted to show me his deer rifle. We shuffled along the edge of the yard, looking in the weeds, but we couldn't find the rifle. Ben looked around, confused. "Everything looks different," he mumbled. I said, "Yes, everything's different because all the trains that were here yesterday have moved."

"Oh. That's right," he said. Then he turned and walked up the track.

A LETTER FROM WOODY GUTHRIE

(WRITTEN IN LONG-HAND TO PRESIDENT TRUMAN, 1949.)

Reproduced in the current issue of The Paris Review.

July 31st, 1949

My dear Mr. Truman
If you so much as lay a small claim to be a human with a brain, a soul, a heart, a mind, a feeling you could call the warmth of the blood of man, please, good sir, take a good look at these bills you are signing to make more high explosives to blow us all off of the map. Your face will look a whole lot blanker if the little atoms blow our world away and all of your pals and kinfolks along with the rest of us.

I'm not ready to blow just yet.

Your old buddy,
Woody Guthrie

BUSH MUST OBEY THE LAW, THE HIGH COURT SAYS

"Whether or not the President has independent power, absent congressional authorization, to convene military commissions, he may not disregard limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers".
--Hamdan vs Rumsfeld, US Supreme Court, Footnote 23

There are limitations on the President's authority to be a law unto himself, as he pursues the prosecution of prisoners at the Guantanamo camp. His disposition toward prisoners in military custody must conform to laws that were passed by Congress. And military commissions, where they may be established under law, require as a minimum, the standards of fairness set out in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not unlike legal rules that would govern a court martial proceeding.

Hamdan vs Rumsfeld is a real Supreme Court milestone which reminds the President that he must recognize the war powers that belong to Congress. Even in wartime, he must acknowledge who it is who makes the laws. And since the President is sworn to uphold our laws, he should pay special attention to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which is integrated into the UCMJ statute, besides being one of America's treaty obligations. And US laws and treaties forbid inhumane treatment of persons held in military custody. Beatings, torture, psychological assaults, degrading treatment, and abuses against dignity are all strictly prohibited.

In the majority opinion, Justice Stevens mentions methods of torture such as waterboarding, by name, and violations of these legal standards are also named as war crimes. The High Court has for the first time laid down a marker, raising the specter of punishment as a reply to lawlessness.

Miami School of Law professor, Steve Vladeck, has described the ruling in the Hamdan case as "an immensely significant reassertion of checks and balances in the war on terrorism, and an unmitigated victory for those who have worried about the erosion of the separation of powers after September 11."

In the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision in favor of Salim Hamdan, Justice Stevens writes that the charge of "conspiracy" alleged against Hamdan is not appropriate for the kind of military commission that has been set up at Guantanamo.

"The Government has not charged Hamdan with an "offense...that by the law of war may be tried by military commission."

The preconditions upon which such a trial rests, requires the offense to have been committed in the convening commander's "theatre of war" . In other words, this kind of commission is developed as a battlefield measure, where the accused is brought to trial.

Remember that the case against Hamdan is "conspiracy", and he is only alleged to be a minor functionary, as bin Laden's chauffeur in Afghanistan. Moreover, the legal precedents cited by Justice Stevens suggest that "a particular offense must be plain and unambiguous".

"Hamdan is not alleged to have committed any overt act in a theatre of war or on any specified date after September 11, 2001."

"The crime of "conspiracy" has rarely if ever been tried as such in this country by any law-of-war military commission not exercising some other form of jurisdiction, and does not appear in either the Geneva Conventions or the Hague Conventions--the major treaties on the law of war."

It is helpful to recall Professor Vladeck's observations about the High Court's historic decision. It is indeed "an immensely significant reassertion of checks and balances"...and an unmitigated victory for those who have worried about the erosion of the separation of powers".

Justice Breyer said there would be no "blank check" for the executive, even in time of war. And Justice Stevens added, "The executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law that prevails in this jurisdiction".

The President must obey the law.


SOURCES: Billmon, Marty Lederman