Is anyone else seeing what I'm seeing? In the new environmental crisis — wildfires in the hills around San Diego & Los Angeles — The Bush — um — team has been most helpful to their fellow Republican governor Aah-noldt, in helping to feed, water, and temporarily house middle class mostly white fire refugees.   CarpetBagger Steve Benen's look is a tad less cynical, if you want to check it out. No mercenaries barring access, way less despair, everyone but a handful of people got out, and many are now returning to their homes, although a couple thousand homes are ash and debris.

Except, somehow, the migrant workers who were left in the fields by their employers, and stayed there, worried they would lose their jobs if they evacuated as urged by migrant aid groups and authorities.

Some may say it's different — and better — because the Bushie FEMA folks actually “learned” something from the Katrina-levee disaster fiasco. I suspect that the party of the governor and the race and class of the victims have way too much to do with it.

My belief is partly fallout from the politicization of the Justice Department: if the Current Occupant's administration can pressure prosecutors to ignore Republican crime to animate dead cases against Democrats, what would stop them from shipping aid hand over fist to a Republican-led state versus a Democratic-led one?

In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the TRUTH is a Revolutionary Act. — George Orwell

Last year, Live Science published a nice little summary article (How the Brain Tunes Out Background Noise)) about our mental process and how our perceptual process will tend to phase out the aspects of our surroundings which are routine or predictable:

The “novelty detector neurons,” as researchers call them, quickly stop firing if a sound or sound pattern is repeated. They will briefly resume firing if some aspect of the sound changes. The neurons can detect changes in pitch, loudness or duration of a single sound and can also note shifts in the pattern of a complex series of sounds.

This applies to politics a lot more than we might think.  I’ve got some writing below about general concepts (driving and music).  At the end, I’ll apply this to fascism and where our country might be headed.

The piece continues:

“It is probably a good thing to have this ability because it allows us to tune out background noises like the humming of a car’s motor while we are driving or the regular tick-tock of a clock,” said study team member Ellen Covey, a psychology professor at the University of Washington. “But at the same time, these neurons would instantly draw a person’s attention if their car’s motor suddenly made a strange noise or if their cell phone rang.”

I’m interested in how this applies to driving– there’s a lot we need to attend to, as drivers, and a lot we don’t even notice on a conscious level.  How much of what we do when driving is necessary and how much of it is background?  Do some people tend to have more trouble with the distractions than others?  Do some of us have the ability to better distinguish background noise from necessary information?

As I am known to do from time to time, I will use birding as an example.  When I’m looking for birds, I pay a lot of attention to the sounds and calls of birds, but I suspect that, after a short while, I do not pay any attention at all to familiar birds.  Once I know that there are American Robins around, do my ears pay attention to them any longer, or do I just mentally dismiss them?

Or, on the other hand, we can think about music: when I am listening to a fairly common and unoriginal melody, I may not notice it at all on the surface, but I may notice unusual harmonies or arrangements of that same melody.  Or, alternatively, unless I specifically attend to it, I may not even notice the chord progression of a tune, once it’s gone through once or twice.  Unless the music does something interesting, it may fade entirely into the background– how often have you not even realized what song was playing on an intercom until someone pointed it out to you?

This may seem like a stretch, but let’s apply this to fascism:

One of the things the Bush administration is very smart about doing is to introduce concepts through slow bleed:

• don’t just start war in Iraq– spend months making it sound inevitable and then just do it;
 

• don’t just start spying on everyone.  Claim you’re spying on terrorists.  Then claim you’re spying on suspected terrorists.  Then claim you’re spying on suspected terrorists and those who talk to them.  Then claim you’re spying on those who talk to the people who talk to the suspects.  Pretty soon it’s everybody;
• don’t just announce that you’re torturing people.  Slowly get people used to the idea of torture by calling it someone else.  Then break down the definition.  We don’t torture, but we will use harsh interrogations.  Causing severe emotional distress?  Oh, that’s not torture.  It’s just extreme persuasion.

Little by little, break down peoples’ natural reaction of shock and surprise– keep it subtle enough that, eventually, Dick Cheney can shoot a guy in the face and get the victim to apologize.

If Bush and Cheney had just announced early on that they would be a lawless government accountable to no one, our novelty detector neurons would have been flashing like crazy.  But today, we’ve got basically that, and no one seems surprised by it at all.  This is because today, it’s background noise.  We can speak today of the evils of internment camps in WWII, but we can have people interned in Guantanamo Bay without it shocking anyone at all..  We can have a whole country being spied on and treat it as though it’s not something unexpected or totally out of the realm of possibility.

As I write this, I worry about crossing that line between useful and healthy paranoia and freakish conspiracy theory, but as much as I read about how there are people vehemently opposed to us invading or bombing or whatever to Iran, even people within the government, and I keep hoping that such a move would be enough of a “novelty” for us to be sufficiently shocked, but I don’t see anything actually stopping military action against Iran if/when this administration decides it’s time.  What I see, instead, is a bunch of rhetoric about it in advance so that we can get that novelty and outrage out of our system, and then, in the not too distant future, an attack and an after the fact explanation for it.

I don’t see us stopping it.  I don’t see the Senate stopping it.  I don’t see the House stopping it.  I don’t see the country stopping it.

Clearly, I’m not in an optimistic mood.

(Not in Vermont, but just across the border.)

On Monday, Senator Barack Obama officially filed to appear on the ballot in the first-in-the-nation primary in New Hampshire, writing on the traditional Notice to Voters “It is time for real change.” Immediately afterward, Obama was received by a crowd of 1,000 on the State House lawn in Concord, where he stressed that real change is going to take strong, principled leadership and the ability to bring people together.

Obama continues to show that kind of leadership at events when he visits New Hampshire, offering clear, direct answers on the issues that matter to voters.

Tim Foley
Proud to be a New Hampshire staff member for Barack Obama’s movement for change.

… in regards to the story that won't go away regarding the incredibly homophobic Donnie McClurkin, one of the performers at Obama's gospel concert rallies in South Carolina, an outreach to African-Americans of faith.

This thing keeps getting stranger and stranger. Some recent developments for those of you following this…

Obama still has McClurkin scheduled to perform. To somehow 'balance out' the homophobe, in some leap of illogic he's asked a gay preacher to come speak as well. A white one. And that has certain African-Americans in the LGBT community none too pleased, who are tired of comparisons of the gay cirvil rights battle to the African-American one.

Now, the latest, which has undoubtedly finally, unequivocally put Obama off of my list, is this latest, which, more than anything else, illustrates the perils of trying to be all things to all people. The HuffPo discusses a letter from the Obama campaign signed by 16 black and LGBT leaders which is trying to garner support for this in the guise of Obama bringing the black and gay communities together:

First, Pastor McClurkin believes and has stated things about sexual orientation that are deeply hurtful and offensive to many Americans, most especially to gay Americans. This cannot and should not be denied.

At the same time, a great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin's beliefs.  This also cannot be ignored.

Finally, we believe that the only way for these two sides to find common ground is to do so together. 

How's that sit with you? It's one thing to respectfully disagree with a bigoted viewpoint. A smart politician would find things that the larger religious community has in common, and focus on that. It's another to actually feature a performer who represents those views, and as I see it, is supposed to be an attraction to those who share those views? If he was trying to reach out to white religious voters by having a racist singer and an inclusive one, is that any different? I can understand Obama wanting to reach out to people of faith (although not entirely thrilled with it). But seriously, can he find no other way to appeal to those voters? Talk of Christian charity or something?

Now, in context, from things I've studied over the years, there is undoubtedly a homophobic slant to certain segments of the African-American religious community, as there is in those of white religious communities, as we know all too well. This was doomed from the get-go, and it seems like the campaign, in keeping with its 'all things to all people' philosophy, is struggling to find a solution, with each step pissing someone else off.  I could be wrong, but I still think this event isn't going to see the light of day, and it remains to be seen if Obama can recover from this.

Paul Wellstone, 1944-2002.