During the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, a series of commissions proposed policy reforms for public lands, waterways, and conservation. These efforts laid the groundwork for the National Park System, National Forest System, national monuments and wildlife refuges.

A half-century later, one of the most important chapters in the history of conservation in America began in 1958, when Congress decided that an intensive nationwide study should be made of outdoor recreation. The bipartisan Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (ORRRC) involved all levels of government and the private sector. The final report of the ORRRC in 1962 led directly to the establishment of the National Wilderness Preservation System and an array of other government programs and policies that we take for granted today.

There have been a number of outdoor commissions since, on a smaller scale. The results of these commissions have been far less influential. Last April the Obama administration started the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative (AGO) “to develop a conservation agenda worthy of the 21st century and to reconnect Americans with our great outdoors.”

AGO is coming to Salt Lake City on Tuesday for a “listening session.” Will they listen? Will they renew the federal commitment to maintaining and improving wilderness, national parks and public lands? Or will they follow a corporatist agenda?

When: Tuesday, August 3rd 10:00 AM- 1:15 PM
Where: Salt Lake City, UT: Radisson Hotel Salt Lake City Downtown, 215 West South Temple, 84101. Map.
Details: Senior leadership from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies will be present to hear your thoughts and participate in a conversation about America’s Great Outdoors.

Note: The deadline for requesting a speaking slot at this meeting has passed, but everyone is invited to submit ideas on the America’s Great Outdoors website.

Ideological, economic, and social functions permeate contemporary American rodeo. The symbolic content of rodeo is embedded in an agrarian ideology rooted deeply in American culture. The dissemination and mobilization of the agrarian value system in America is credited to the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s articulation of the agrarian creed nourished a belief system advocating that there is a morally virtuous quality attached to agriculture, and that the rural life is the natural and good life (see Dalecki and Coughenour 1992). Although the United States has become increasingly urbanized throughout the twentieth century, the American public continues to identi@ with and endorse fundamental agrarian principles. Several studies (e.g., Butte1 and Flinn 1975; Dalecki and Coughenour 1992; Flinn and Johnson 1974; Molnar and Wu 1989) have found that an agrarian ideology continues to be widespread among the American public.

Find the whole article here.

Rodeo is fasinating.  Without a doubt, it is a subculture which plays enormous part in the American psyche.  My niece is a successful rodeo queen as a result I’ve had the opportunity to watch Rodeo from the edge, from the side but also to have at least a glimpse of its inner workings. 

I grew up hearing stories (which I tend to dismiss as apocryphal) of wild-eyed animal rights activists freeing all the rodeo stock and doing radical things to ”stop” rodeo.  Some groups (see one here) protest against the mistreatment of animals at the rodeo.  What’s the line by Molly Ivins?  “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta sing, hearts gotta bleed”?  Watching rodeo I always worry about the animals.  I just think its gotta hurt.  Watching one of the rodeo queens barrel down the arena toward a tethered and madly bleating goat, I said something like, “I think this goat knows this is gonna hurt.”

The woman sitting in front of me spun around and indignantly said, “It doesn’t hurt them a bit!  Hmph.” (I swear to god she actually said “hmph” – it was a brilliant moment.)  Within the rodeo subculture, worrying about the well being of the animals is treated as socially inappropriate; the high quality of care and feeding of the animals is much touted by rodeo enthusiasts but the actual care and feeding is displaced – the stock contractor, as for example, is tasked with these jobs for many of the animals and takes care to keep the work invisible – it happens off stage, on the sidelines where it is not seen.  Yet, a key part of rodeo includes regular assertions that the animals involved are well cared for and do not suffer.  To an outsider, however, watching the animals it is readily apparent that the animals are treated very roughly. 

A key principle of agrarian ideology as embraced rodeo is the idea that animals’ suffering is less than human suffering – the idea that something that would hurt a human being is brushed off as unimportant by an animal.  Thus, steer wrestling or team roping or regular roping doesn’t hurt the animal.  This is an obviously self-serving way of thinking.  If you believe that being roped is harmful, then you would only do it if absolutely necessary; doing it for sport is wrong.  OTOH, arguing that “it doesn’t hurt” the animals, allows rodeo participants to treat their activities as purely sport without addressing potential moral questions.

Rodeo subculture is resolutely sexist.  Males and females do not compete directly against one another in almost any event (I believe team roping has both male and female contestants and often has teams of both males and females).  Bull and bronc riding are open to males only.  There is an inherent tension in the rodeo experience.  Most of the women who participate in rodeo are not tiny little delicate examples of American womanhood.  No, these are big strapping American women who can throw bales of hay and who can spend the whole day on horseback and the whole night whooping it up with the boys, who get bucked off their horses, brush the dirt off and climb right back on.  These are tough women who can ride, rope drink, swear and screw with the best of the boys.  They know it, the men know it, but somehow once they arrive at the event, the women simply head off their events, the men to theirs.  There’s no grumbling that any woman can ride a bull or bucking bronc and should be allowed to do so or that the men should compete in barrel and pole racing.  In an interesting twist, in 4-H equestrian events, boys do compete in barrel and pole racing and other speed events.  The divide between male and female is enforced both formally and informally. 

A key component of the world of rodeo is a profound sense of legacy - the legacy of the “Old West” and cowboy culture which must be preserved.  Rodeo embodies post-modernism in ways which defy easy comprehension.  The legacy preserved is constructed from myth rather than fact, constructed in such a way that contemporary preconceptions are confirmed rather than challenged.  The inhabitants of the rodeo world consciously and deliberately employ their self-produced mythology as a means of creating and sustaining identity; to use the language of post-modern scholarship, the have written their own meaning into the texts and then used those texts as a way of defining themselves and their subculture.  To put it much more simply, they believe their own stories. 

The result is a self-conscious and self-consciously created culture in which participants symbolically re-enact a constructed understanding of the past in an attempt to revivify the past.  Central to rodeo is the actual and metaphorical act of “breaking” the animal as an act of taming it.  I hve heard the term “rough stock” used for the bulls and bucking broncs – those are the men’s events; the meaning is unavoidable.  The men must “break” the animal, symbolically tame it by riding it.  To make the animals buck, a strap is placed around its flank placing pressure on a number of very sensitive regions.  Watch closely at almost any rodeo and you’ll see that the supposedly “wild” animals are in many ways quite well trained; the minute the cowboy is thrown many animals stop bucking, which allows the support riders to remove the strap on its flanks.  Watch carefully and as the cowboys mount the animals in the chutes, the animals are obviously preparing themselves – they know what’s coming and you can see them tense their muscles and prepare themselves.  The gate opens and they leap sideways into the arena and begin bucking.  Of course, of course, these are not “wild” animals.  They have to be handled by the stock companies, meaning loaded into vehicles, transported from place to place, receive regular exams by vets and treatment by handlers.  Yet the active mythology of rodeo asks us for the sake of the performance to accept these animals are “wild”. 

Even a well-trained horse is still an animal and if frightened or suddenly injured, can behave in untamed ways.  A horse that gets stung by a bee or bitten by a horsefly (which hurts!) might suddenly start bucking.  Even a spavined nag can get a wild hair once in a while and start bucking.  You see the same thing at the rodeo – every now and then one of the animals exceeds normal parameters and somebody gets hurt and hurt badly.  Such cases are the exception.  The mythos of the wild animal is central to the rodeo subculture.  The experience of the truly wild animal is not.

 The cowgirl of the rodeo is as far from the real women of the old west, a great many of whom were “soiled doves” (a euphemism for prostitute), as the cowboy of the rodeo is the from real cowboys of the 19th century.  A select group of girls and women compete in the queen contests; that these contestants consider themselves the top of the social hierarchy in rodeo is communicated in ways both subtle and obvious.  The queen contest typically involves a variety of events which would not be out of place in any other beauty pageant – modeling, appearance, speech, impromptu question -  with the addition of a horsemanship (and it is called horsemanship) and a written test of rodeo rules.  The queen contest rewards a rigidly stylized femininity; the level of necessary artifice to win is as high as in any other beauty pageant.  The speech portion is intended to evoke the “western” lifestyle – and usually deals with questions of horses and the natural beauty of the west.  Utah is considered a powerhouse in high school rodeo and particularly in high school rodeo queen contests; Utah has produced national champion queens at high schools events for a number of years running.  Utah’s queen contestants are accomplished at the artifice necessary to win.  (The last queen contest I attended I found myself cheering for a contestant who was clearly a fag hag in training – how can you not love a teenage fag hag?)

The queen and her attendants perform a number of highly visible symbolic duties, including leading grand entry for the performance. 

Grand entry opens the performance.  Everyone who can, mounts a horse and they make a wild, high speed ride around the arena behind an American flag (carried in most performances I’ve seen by the queen).  The contestants then line up with the queen and her attendants in the center of the arena facing the audience.  The audience rises, the national athem is sung and then the performance begins.  It’s easy to see this ritual in the same light as the national anthem at any sporting event.  My observation tells me that that would be a mistake.  The mythos of rodeo emphasizes the centrality of rodeo to the American experience.  Invocation of a patriotic identity is crucial to this symbolic relationship to the world.  Patriotic expression within rodeo speaks to a core component of the identity participants are trying to create.  When I speak here about participants, I’m not just referring to those who compete but also to their support networks of family and friends, the various people who work for and within the world of rodeo.  A panoply of flag-themed images aboud within the confines of the rodeo world; red white and blue are popular color themes.

I talked about the idea that rodeo employes a self-consciously created myth.  Like many sub-cultures, rodeo has a sharp sense of self-awareness.  The self-awareness is on display as rodeo enacts its symbolic recreation of the west.  That self-awareness extends in many areas and directions. 

Although it has been the subject of a great deal of humor in the broader culture, the gay rodeo is absent from the majority of rodeo experiences; to bring it up at the rodeo is regarded as an example of extreme bad taste; so uncomfortable is the “mainstream” rodeo world with glbt persons that the very existence of the gay rodeo is aggressively ignored.  In high school rodeo it’s impossible to miss the compulsory heterosexuality.  Within the world of rodeo, heterosexuality is assumed and the glbt existence both actively and passively edited.  The gay rodeo – if mentioned at all – is treated as an extremely bad joke.  The gay rodeo exists because there was no place within the world of rodeo for glbt persons to be honestly themselves.  Rodeo’s casual, resolute sexism makes accepting the notion of successful gay rodeo performers almost impossible.

A troubling aspect of rodeo which I which to mention is the reflexive anti-liberalism.  Rodeo invokes and re-enacts an agrarian ideology and mythology, one which is embodied in the perception of the rural as “real” America.  As it self-consciously writes and identifies with its mythology, the world of rodeo also rejects the symbols of liberalism – urban America in general and the East Coast in particular.  Rodeos hostility is liberals and liberalism is every bit as symbolic as its embrace of the Old West.  A rodeo queen saying she admired Nancy Pelosi would be regarded as downright odd and subversive, someone who could not be trusted.  Yet when pushed, most of the people could tell you little about her beyond her place of residence is San Francisco and she’s a liberal.  Liberalism is regarded as little more than an extension of urbanism, which is seen as a threat to the world of wide open wilderness of the American west.  As an interesting aside, I don’t recall hearing folksy, stylized language at rodeo that characterizes Sarah Palin speeches.  

The general sense within the rodeo world is that you don’t upset things, you don’t make demands or ask for changes.  Such actions would represent betrayal at mutliple levels – betrayal of the past as imagined by rodeo.  In the Old West, men were men, women were women, they had separate spheres and roles.  If men were to start competing in a rodeo king contests or goat tying, it would strike at the core mythology of the rodeo world; in the same way if women were to demand to ride bulls or broncs it would threaten to unravel the mythology of the rodeo world.  Again and again, the rodeo world invokes the life of the Old West – but an image of the west closer to Bonanza than reality.  The hardships of life in the Old West are glamorized – the cowboys sitting around the fire singing songs, telling tales replace the reality of physical exhaustion, emotional isolation and very real danger; the realities the lives of women in the cowtowns of the west are equally glamorized – rather than hardbitten whores selling their favors they become the elegant and stylized queens in their custom-fitted, brightly colored leather dresses, perfect makeup and ritualized speeches.  The West in the mythology of the rodeo is a place of beautiful sunsets, wide open spaces and contented cowboys, beautiful cowgirls.  It is a world in which nature is being actively tamed by men, decorated and accessorized by women, and smiled upon nature.  It is a powerful myth, but at the end of the day no matter how powerful it is a myth created to serve the purposes and needs of today and bears only passing resemblance to the reality of history.

You can tell be the look on his face, he had no idea why I thought his t-shirt was so special.  His English sucked.  But eventually, he figured out I was a friendly, and he kindly posed for this picture.

Patrick Henry Caucus T-Shirt

I asked him why he was here.  He said, “I just want to work.”  I asked him if he knew Carl Wimmer. That’s when he gave me the Patrick Henry Caucus salute.

I asked him where he got the shirt.  It looks pretty new. Finally, he said he found it in a trash can.  I figure somebody’s wife isn’t totally in line with the hubby.

Randall Amster: From the Heart of Arizona, We Still Have a Dream

I don’t expect my elected representatives to be angels.  We all make mistakes and some mistakes are easily forgiveable.  In the case of Representative Rangel, I think he’s corrupt.  It looks to me as if he’s used his office to enrich himself.  That is not only an abuse of power, it is the most corrosive kind of corruption.

He should resign.  If he’s exonerated, I’ll be the first person to say he deserves his seat back.

Chaffetz was interviewed tonight by Chris Hayes on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

HAYES: There are 11 other Republicans who joined you, and that is more than in the past. Do you feel that position is gaining traction among your colleagues in the Republican caucus? What do you hear from them, and how do they respond to you when you make the argument to them?

CHAFFETZ: Well, I make the argument that this is a good conservative position, and I think a lot of them are very hesitant to be perceived as being anything but tough on the War On Terror and I’ve tried to argue, look, we have been very successful over the last nine years and it’s hardly a cut and run strategy to say, hey, it’s time to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. It’s the longest war in the history of the United States for goodness’ sake, so we’re making that argument and people like George Will and other notable conservatives are taking this viewpoint. I hope it gains traction. You can still be the tough guy but want to bring your troops home. I think they are still consistent and that is the right way to go.

The Washington Post reports:

On the eve of the vote, Chaffetz called families of the three men from his district who have died in Afghanistan since he was elected and told them he was considering opposing the funding.

“This was one of the toughest votes I’ve had in Congress,” Chaffetz said. “So I asked their opinion. And to a T, they all agreed with me.”

Utah Reps. Jim Matheson and Rob Bishop voted for the bill.

On Daily Kos, David Waldman opines:

The war continues. It gets more money than ever. And despite the promises made by everybody running everywhere for every seat in every branch of the federal government not to fund the wars through supplemental appropriations ever again, this is the second year in a row we’ve done just that. Last year perhaps didn’t “count,” since it was a supplemental for fiscal year 2009, for which the planning was done in 2008 (i.e., under the Bush administration), but there’s no doubting who’s responsible for fiscal year 2010. It is what it is.

Jobs funding in the supplemental was rejected by the Senate – with White House approval. Also, there was no timetable for military withdrawal in the legislation – not even the July 2011 beginning of a drawdown that President Obama promised last year.

UPDATE: Partisan politics at its finest: Karen Hyer, the Democrat who is challenging Rep. Chaffetz this November. tries to use the tired Karl Rove “support the troops by sending them into harm’s way for no good reason” meme.

Hyer believes the funding is necessary to continue and conclude ongoing missions.

“We should support our men in uniform who are currently in harm’s way,” she said.

More info:
The Salt Lake Tribune: Chaffetz bucks GOP, opposes Afghan war funding
The Washington Post: Freshman lawmaker Jason Chaffetz goes against Republican grain on Afghan war
FDL: Some Democrats Breaking with President on War Supplemental, But Not Enough
Ryan Jaroncyk: President Obama breaks emergency war spending pledge

The “ownership society” was a right-wing article of faith, but the hard reality is most Americans got owned. By the politicians, by the banks, by the corporations. I’m actually one of the lucky ones, because I don’t owe more on my house than it’s worth– and I still have a job.

From Michael Snyder, Business Insider:

22 Statistics That Prove The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Wiped Out Of Existence In America

1. 83% of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1% of the people.
2. 61% of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49% in 2008 and 43% in 2007.
3. 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
4. 36% of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
5. A staggering 43% of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
6. 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
7. Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32% increase over 2008.
8. Only the top 5% of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
9. For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
10. In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to 1.
11. As of 2007, the bottom 80% of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
12. The bottom 50% of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
13. Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17% when compared with 2008.
14. In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
15. The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
16. In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
17. More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
18. For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
19. This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
20. Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16% to 7.8 million in 2009.
21. Approximately 21% of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
22. The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

What are the Republicans proposing now that the “ownership society” has been exposed as a fraud? They want to raise taxes on what’s left of the middle class to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, and more corporate tax cuts.

UPDATE: On Walking Away: Is Strategic Default All That’s Left to Stressed Homeowners?

In his book Love’s Body (1966), American scholar and classicist Norman O. Brown offers a fascinating insight on biblical literalism:

Literalism does not get rid of the magical element in scriptural or historical interpretation.  The Holy Spirit, instead of a living spirit in the present, becomes the Holy Ghost, a voice from the past enshrined in the book.  The restriction of meaning to conscious meaning makes historical understanding a personal relation between the personality of the reader and the personality of the author, now dead.  Spiritual understanding (geistiges Verstehen) becomes a ghostly operation, an operating with ghosts (Geisteswissenschaft).  The document starts speaking for itself; the reader starts hearing voices.  The subjective dimension in historical understanding is to animate the dead letter with the living reader’s blood, his “experience”; and simultaneously let the ghost of the dead author slide into, become one with, the reader’s soul.  It is necromancy, or shamanism; magical identification with ancestors; instead of living spirit, to be possessed by the dead. 

Literalism combines fetishism of the book with shamanism of the interpreter; science and subjectivity . . . . (page 199)

Brown points us in the direction that many critics of literalism have followed – assertions that one believes in a literal bible must include an element of interpretation.  Biblical literalism is a relatively modern invention – our ancestors lived in a world that one might think of as magical.  A magical world is a symbolic world – the idea that knowing something true name gives you power over it, magic is symbolism; it invokes essences to control things, it suggests that a token of a thing is the thing itself.  The shaman’s world is an uncertain place – surfaces are fluid, constantly shifting and changing; reality itself seems mutable. 

Fundamentalist protestantism lives within the shaman’s world of magic.  Watch and listen as fundamentalists invoke the name of Jesus Christ as totem, as magic words to ward off evil and danger.  Jesus the Christ becomes an idol behind which to hide and to whom offerings must be made.  The shaman, whether the lay person speaking in tongues or the preacher unveiling the mystery of the bible’s truth is the shaman, who channels the knowledge of the dead, who is inhabited by the spirit of the dead.  Certainty is achieved by asserting the single meaning of The Word; the argument that The Word does not change on the page, therefore its meaning cannot change it has always meant what it has always meant and it cannot ever mean anything other than what it has always meant.

The Enlightenment introduced – more accurately reintroduced – an idea to the western world: an evidence based understanding of the world.  Science explicitly tells us we can reject the wisdom of our ancestors as we acquire new information.  Therein lies the conflict.  As Brown wrote, the shaman’s world is one of “magical identification with ancestors” but the world of the Enlightenment asks us to make common cause with the present, to know that the future may reject what we accept as our descendents acquire new information.

And:

Oldness of letter, and newness of spirit.  Historical literalism takes the periodization out of history; in Protestantism, the loss of the sense of the difference between Old Testament and New.  Old and New Testament are made consistent, forced into conformity, to reveal the same literal truth.  And the Puritans in New England can embark on a literal reproduction of Israel in the wilderness.  Bondage to the letter is bondage to the past.  Roger Williams fight for symbolic understanding his his fight for freedom.

Just as religious fundamentalism imagines we cannot be more wise than our ancestors, that our goal is to uncover the true and original meaning of The Word that is the Bible, so our political fundamentalists imagine that we cannot be more wise than the men who wrote the constitution.  In asserting that one can discern the “original” meaning of the Constitution, these fundamentalists are telling us we cannot possibly know more or better than our ancestors.  They have attempted to place us in bondage to the word on the page, to limit understanding to the literal and to reject the symbolic understanding which in legal terms is the constitution as a living document. 

Religious fundamentalism embodies itself in assertions of interpretive fidelity to the primal meaning of the The Bible.  To make such an assertion, religious fundamentalists have created a series of myths of “perfect” translation – in which translators work separately but choose the exact same words, situations in which the dead Holy Ghost possesses and animates scholars and translates and uses them to reach the predetermined conclusion.  Fundamentalist faith demands of its believers that they reject the notion of change in belief and society.  We are to be held in bondage to the ancestors.

Constitutional fundamentalism embodies itself in assertions of interpretive fidelity to the primal meaning of the Constitution.  Amendments are seen not as expanding or altering the underlying document but as clarifying it to move it closer to the primal meaning.  Consider for instance proposed amendments to prohibit same sex marriage - defended in terms of “The Founding Fathers would never have accepted same sex marriage.”  Amendments are a process by which the underlying document is further purified to emphasize rather than alter its original primal meaning.

Protestant literalism: the crux is the reduction of meaning to a single meaning – univocation.  Luther’s word is Eindeutigkeit: the “single, simple, solid and stable meaning” of scripture. 

When constitutional fundamentalists object to the concept of privacy as a legal right they object not on the grounds that they disbelieve in privacy, but on the grounds that it is not found in the words of the document.  Brown’s univocation – a single meaning without other meanings – is the core of American political fundamentalism as it approaches the Constitution.

Washington Monthly’s Paul Glastris wrote an illuminating article about militias in 1995 which was described as “Our Roving Reporter goes in search of the militia movement’s amateur soldiers and finds something even scarier—amateur lawyers.”  From that article:

What all “patriots” do seem to share, beyond the well-publicized fear that the federal government is stealing their rights, is a passionate devotion to the precise language of the nation’s founding documents. Imagine Robert Bork and Nat Hentoff dropping acid in the woods and you begin to get the picture.

Better yet, imagine a fundamentalist revival meeting where the Bible is replaced by The Federalist Papers. As I chased the Nichols story around the prairie-flat eastern Michigan farm country on the wind-swept shores of Lake Huron, time and again friends and neighbors of James Nichols would bring up the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or The Federalist Papers, chide me for not having studied them, and quote from them as if from scripture. The religious parallels were unmistakable, even down to the millenarian belief, almost universally shared, that Washington’s attack on individual liberty is a prelude to the imposition of a “New World Order”: a totalitarian, one-world government controlled by the United Nations.

Suspicious, even dismissive, of the interpretations of scholarly priests (i.e. judges), patriots prefer an extreme version of Martin Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” in which each individual can clearly grasp the framers’ intent by reading the sacred texts for themselves. But like Christian fundamentalists, these patriots are guided by an idiosyncratic political agenda. They tend to quote selectively and read literally, “isolating the part from the whole and pretending that there can be only one reading,” notes University of Chicago theologian Martin Marty. They are Constitutional fundamentalists.

Today’s tea-baggers are the descendents – probably literally in many cases but also politically – of the militias of 20 years ago.  I suspect we’d find many people who were attracted to and supported the militia movement are tea-baggers today.  The common thread is an earnest desire for certainty.

Fundamentalism is a fascinating phenomenon.  Religious fundamentalism offered biblical literalism as a response to science.  It’s not accidental that modern religious fundamentalism rejects much of the traditionally mystical – today’s religious fundamentalists may reject meditation and chant and even the mystical ecstasy that has marked Christian devotees practices for centuries.  (The line between evangelicals and fundamentalists is blurred; even blurrier is the line between pentecostals who do embrace some mystical practics such as speaking in tongues or snake handling and fundamentalists; pentecostalism embraces very specific types of mysticism which are grounded in literal readings of scripture.)  Fundamentalism in essence argues that the Bible and its “literal” meaning can and should stand in place of science.  This dynamic fuels creationism and its bastard step-child intelligent design, it fuels the belief that prayer is as powerful as medicine; at its most extreme one finds believers who refuse modern medicine, who embrace the notion that the earth is 6000 years old. 

Many of our political fundamentalists are also religious fundamentalists.  The interbreeding and inbreeding of the two sets of ideas inspires – as for example – the production of extensive DVD series which purport to document the orthodox and fundamentalist Christianity of the Founding Fathers or which purport to document the ways in which the Bill of Rights actually mimics the Ten Commandments (just a note, it doesn’t).  Our political fundamentalists appeared in response to rapid changes in society; they offered as certainty an absolute meaning of the Constitution.

Shared by fundamentalists of all stripes if Brown’s “bondage to the past.”  We are presumed to be less wise than our ancestors and therefore less trustworthy.  We are bound to and limited by the past.  I think it was Carl Sagan who argued that if you live in an era of minimal change then the wisdom of the past is sufficient and it is trustworthy; it is the collected wisdom of those who came before you, the hard-won knowledge about what plants are deadly, what animals dangerous and how to avoid them and if necessary how to kill them, it is the hard won wisdom about how to prepare food and how relationships work; it is a wisdom that embraces gender roles as fixed things in the world and which sees in the stranger a threat to the well being of the community.  In a world with little change, the wisdom of the past is more than sufficient.  We do not live in such a world. 

In our rapidly changing world, the wisdom of the past is not only insufficient it misleads us, it often moves us in the wrong direction.  We learn t0 our chagrin that the wisdom of past – hoarded and preserved unchanged and untainted by contemporary knowledge – cannot adequately answer the demands of today’s world.  Fundamentalists political and religious believe in a past that was better than our present and which must of necessity be resurrected to save the world.  You cannot remake was history has undone and you cannot unmake that which has been created. 

The shamans of our religious and political lives invoke the past as the solution to all our problems.  Liberation will not come until we reject the literal and embrace the symbolic, the new, the changing.  We have a choice between liberating or binding magics.  We must choose wisely.

The climate bill’s dead. Senate Democrats pulled the plug last Thursday on a bill that wasn’t even as good as the woefully inadequate House bill passed a over a year ago.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid trotted out the well-worn “60 votes” excuse. Funny how we never heard about the so-called “60-vote rule” during the Bush administration, when it could have helped the country avoid a series of catastrophes and record deficits. Democrats have a big problem, because it seems inevitable that any bill capable of crossing the 60-vote threshold could be worse than doing nothing.

So we lost, and the special interests won. NYT columnist and Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman wrote the epitaph for climate legislation:

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

What’s next? Well, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Several regulatory initiatives are underway, and the Obama administration has pledged to veto any legislation that attempts to suspend the EPA’s rulemaking authority.

It’s possible the United Nations could go ahead and do climate change mitigation without us.

As a way to salvage the 12-year-old Kyoto protocol, the United Nations has suggested amending its rules to require only four fifths of the countries to agree to a climate deal, effectively forcing the opposed nations to accept a cleaner earth. “It reflects a degree of desperation — and justifiable desperation — on the part of the UN,” says Mark Lynas, who advised the Maldives at the international climate summit in Copenhagen last winter.

If the amendment passes this August when countries meet in Bonn, Germany, it could prohibit rogue anti-climate-treaty states — such as the oil giant, Saudi Arabia, or major energy-using nations, such as the U.S. — from holding the treaty hostage. “We saw at Copenhagen how some countries blocked progress and we can’t allow that to happen again,” said Britain’s shadow secretary for energy and climate change Ed Miliband, according to The Guardian.

UPDATE: The Big Green Buy. The Nation’s Christian Parenti covers the need for government to step up and use its buying power to create economies of scale for energy conservation and renewable energy. The federal government is the world’s largest consumer of energy and vehicles, and the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. President Obama can make the switch by executive order, without congressional approval. For example, why isn’t the U.S. Postal Service relying on electric vehicles?

Gov. Jan Brewer has been drumming up the fear to the point that the tourism industry is getting very worried about tourist cancellations. According to CBS 5:

[Brewer] has made several statements to the national media, the validity of which CBS 5 Investigates could not confirm. The governor told one media outlet that almost all illegal immigrants are bringing drugs across the border. U.S. Border Patrol officials said that statement is false.

Brewer also said law enforcement officials have found decapitated bodies in the desert. Calls to all of Arizona’s border county medical examiners revealed no decapitated bodies have been reported to them.

It’s obvious from the video connected with this report that Gov. Brewer is not at all interested in answering questions about her statements.

Why?

There may be a very good reason to believe the law Gov. Brewer is pushing so hard for is designed to enrich a certain industry which operates in her state:

Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, holds the federal contract to house detainees in Arizona. The company bills $11 million per month. CBS 5 Investigates learned that two of Brewer’s top advisers have connections to CCA.

The prison industry has been one of the largest public works industries in the United States for decades now and as it grows, so does the prison population. A move to privatize the industry is encouraged to save money for the taxpayers, but what does it actually encourage?

Two judges in the south were recently found to have been making millions, flippantly sending young people to private corrections facilities without spending any time to review their cases and that’s just the tip of the iceberg in this insane trend which has given America the largest prison population in the world, even surpassing China.

What we are willing to do for the love of money is beyond disturbing. Do we make our society safer by creating criminals?

CBS 5 News report:

It is one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history, and certainly the most voluminous. The Afghanistan War’s equivalent of the Pentagon Papers has arrived, after months of anticipation. WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret military after-action reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. These are now available on WikiLeaks as “The Afghan War Diary.” Release of another 15,000 reports is pending.

According to WikiLeaks:

The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently described.

…This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.

WikiLeaks has also given the files to three news organizations: The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel. All three are in the midst of publishing their own analyses.

UPDATE: The Guardian has a spreadsheet and map of key incidents. The White House spin can be found here.

UPDATE: House to Vote on $33 Billion War Supplemental as World Reads WikiLeaks.

UPDATE: On Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman reports that the WikiLeaks after-action reports recount 144 incidents in which coalition forces killed civilians over six years.

Other reports, stretching back to 2004, offer chilling, granular detail about the Taliban’s return to potency after the U.S. and Afghan militias routed the religious-based movement in 2001. Some of them, as the Times notes, cast serious doubt on official U.S. and NATO accounts of how insurgents prosecute the war. Apparently, the insurgents have used “heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft,” eerily reminiscent of the famous Stinger missiles that the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan provided to the mujahedeen to down Soviet helicopters. One such missile downed a Chinook over Helmand in May 2007.

UPDATE: WikiLeaks Docs Show Pakistan-Taliban Cooperation Against U.S.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald:

Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world. Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret. But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively: it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing. WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall…

UPDATE: At least 45 civilians, many women and children, were killed in a rocket attack by the NATO-led foreign force in Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province last week, a spokesman for the Afghan government said on Monday.

UPDATE: Report Finds Link Between Civilian Deaths And Recruitment For Insurgency In Afghanistan

UPDATE: White House Attempts to Downplay Fallout from Wikileaks Afghan Logs. “Nothing to see here, it’s old news.” But it’s new news to most Americans, who’ve been kept in the dark about Afghanistan.

UPDATE: HuffPo headline: “WAKE THEM WHEN IT’S OVER: Major News Outlets Bored By Afghan War Leaks, ‘Not News’ That War Is Going Badly”

UPDATE: WikiLeaks Iraq Cache More Than Three Times As Big

Related One Utah posts:
‘We Were Fighting To Make It Home Alive’ (April 9, 2010)
Wikileaks Obtains Video of 2007 War Crime (April 5, 2010)
Leaked: US Rules of Engagement for Iraq (February 4, 2008)