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What are the five things you think that humanity needs in order to survive and evolve into a peaceful civilization? "Things" could mean a philosophy, a technology, a spiritual perspective, a type of government... anything.
President George W. Bush is taking powerful anti-depressant drugs to control his erratic behavior, depression and paranoia, Capitol Hill Blue has learned.
The prescription drugs, administered by Col. Richard J. Tubb, the White House physician, can impair the President’s mental faculties and decrease both his physical capabilities and his ability to respond to a crisis, administration aides admit privately.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says one aide. “We can’t have him flying off the handle at the slightest provocation but we also need a President who is alert mentally.”
White House aides say Bush has retreated into a tightly-controlled environment where only top political advisors like Karl Rove and Karen Hughes are allowed. Even White House chief of staff Andrew Card complains he has less and less access to the President.
Among cabinet members, only Attorney General John Ashcroft, a fundamentalist who shares many of Bush’s strict religious convictions, remains part of the inner circle. White House aides call Bush and Ashcroft the “Blue Brothers” because, like the mythical movie characters, “both believe they are on a mission from God.”
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, the man most responsible for waging America’s war on terrorism, complains to staff that he gets very little time with the President and gets most of his marching orders lately from Ashcroft. Some on Ridge’s staff gripe privately that Ashcroft is “Bush’s Himmler,” a reference to Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS (the German Police) under Adolph Hitler.
“Too many make the mistake of thinking Dick Cheney is the real power in the Bush administration,” says one senior Homeland Security aide. “They’re wrong. It’s Ashcroft and that is reason enough for all of us to be very, very afraid.”
I have sadly come to the conclusion that President Bush is merely a frontman, an empty suit, who is manipulated by the people in his administration. Bush has the most dangerously simplistic view of the world of any president in my memory.
It's no wonder the president avoids press conferences like the plague. Take away his cue cards and he can barely talk. Americans should be embarrassed that an Arab king (Abdullah of Jordan) spoke more fluently and articulately in English than our own president at their joint press conference recently.
John Kerry is at least an educated man, well-read, who knows how to think and who knows that the world is a great deal more complex than Bush's comic-book world of American heroes and foreign evildoers. It's unfortunate that in our poorly educated country, Kerry's very intelligence and refusal to adopt simplistic slogans might doom his presidential election efforts.
But Thomas Jefferson said it well, as he did so often, when he observed that people who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be.
"The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans," McCain said. "It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."
McCain also said the amendment "will not be adopted by Congress this year, nor next year, nor any time soon until a substantial majority of Americans are persuaded that such a consequential action is as vitally important and necessary as the proponents feel it is today."
"The founders wisely made certain that the Constitution is difficult to amend and, as a practical political matter, can't be done without overwhelming public approval. And thank God for that," he said.
Jeanette is not just a politician making social commentary. She has personally suffered great tragedy and believes it may have been avoided if only there had been some sort of action to prevent what she refers to as "the domino effect."
In 1988, Jeanette's daughter was brutally raped and murdered. Two young men were convicted and sent to prison. Jeanette was asked if, as the mother of the victim, she wanted the state to seek the death penalty. She declined. Her decision put her own ideology to the test, and turned out to be quite intuitive. Twelve years later Jeanette would learn that both men were wrongfully convicted. One of them was coerced into confessing by being threatened that he would be put in a cell with other prisoners who knew "what to do with fresh young meat." While the two wrongfully convicted young men were in prison, one of them was beaten so severely that he is permanently severely mentally handicapped.
Jeanette first learned from television news that the convictions of the two young men accused of her daughter's murder were about to be overturned. She was stunned. No one contacted Jeanette to let her know that the men she had seen convicted and who had been imprisoned for twelve years were not her daughters killers or that her story was about to be broadcast on national news.
The true murderer began confessing and kept confessing for four years before any action was taken to release the innocent men. Notably, the true murderer confessed to just about everyone he could think of, including repeatedly sending his confession directly to then Governor George W. Bush. When questioned on this, Bush responded that he had no obligation to pass the information along.
From Harper's Magazine:
ROY COHN: Do you remember writing this: "Good-morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on"?
LANGSTON HUGHES: Yes, sir, I wrote that.
COHN: Did you write this, "Put one more 'S' in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA then"?
HUGHES: Yes, sir, I wrote that.
COHN: Were you kidding when you wrote those things? What did you mean by those?
HUGHES: Would you like me to give you an interpretation of that?
COHN: I would be most interested.
HUGHES: Very well. Will you permit me to give a full interpretation of it?
COHN: Surely.
HUGHES: All right, sir. To give a full interpretation of any piece of literary work one has to consider not only when and how it was written but what brought it into being, the emotional and physical background that brought it into being. I, sir, was born in Joplin, Missouri. I was born a Negro. From my very earliest childhood memories, I have encountered very serious and very hurtful problems. One of my earliest childhood memories was going to the movies in Lawrence, Kansas, where we lived, and there was one motion picture theater, and I went every afternoon. It was a nickelodeon, and I had a nickel to go. One afternoon I put my nickel down and the woman pushed it back and she pointed to a sign. I was about seven years old.
COHN: I do not want to interrupt you. I do want to say this. I want to save time here. I want to concede very fully that you encountered oppression and denial of civil rights. Let us assume that, because I assume that will be the substance of what you are about to say. To save us time, what we are interested in determining for our purpose is this: Was the solution to which you turned that of the Soviet form of government?
HUGHES: Sir, you said you would permit me to give a full explanation.
COHN: I was wondering if we could not save a little time, because I want to concede the background which you wrote it from was the background you wanted to describe.
HUGHES: I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than to save time.
COHN: Take as long as you want.
HUGHES: The woman pushed my nickel back and pointed to a sign beside the box office, and the sign said "Colored not admitted." It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens. My playmates who were white and lived next door to me could go to that motion picture and I could not. I could never see a film in Lawrence again.
When I went to school, in the first grade, my mother moved to Topeka for a time, and my mother worked for a lawyer, and she lived in the downtown area, and being a working woman naturally she wanted to send me to the nearest school. But they would not let me go to the school. There were no Negro children there. My mother had to take days off from her work, had to appeal to her employer, had to go to the school board, and finally after the school year had been open for some time, she got me into the school.
I had been there only a few days when the teacher made unpleasant and derogatory remarks about Negroes and specifically seemingly pointed at myself. Some of my schoolmates stoned me on the way home from school. One of my schoolmates (and there were no other Negro children in the school), a little white boy, protected me, and I have never in all my writing career or speech career as far as I know said anything to create a division among humans, or between whites or Negroes, because I have never forgotten this kid standing up for me against these other first graders who were throwing stones at me. I have always felt from that time on that there are white people in America who can be your friend, and will be your friend, and who do not believe in the kind of things that almost every Negro who has lived in our country has experienced.
I do not want to take forever to tell you these things, but I must tell you that they have very deep emotional roots in one's childhood and one's beginnings, as I am sure any psychologist or teacher of English or student of poetry will say about any creative work.
My father and my mother were not together. When I got old enough to learn why they were not together, again it was the same thing. My father as a young man, shortly after I was born, had studied law by correspondence. He applied for permission to take the bar examination in the state of Oklahoma, where he lived, and they would not permit him. A Negro evidently could not take the examination. You could not be a lawyer at that time in the state of Oklahoma. You know that has continued right up to recent years; we had to go all the way to the Supreme Court a few years ago to get Negroes into the law school.
Those things affected my childhood very much and very deeply. I missed my father. I learned he had gone away to another country because of prejudice here. When I finally met my father, at the age of seventeen, he said, "Never go back to the United States. Negroes are fools to live there." I didn't believe that. I loved the country I had grown up in. I was concerned with the problems, and I came back here. My father wanted me to live in Mexico or Europe. I did not. And my whole career has been built here.
When I grew older, I went to high school in Cleveland. I went to a high school in a very poor neighborhood, and we were very poor people. My friends and associates were very poor children, and many of them were of European parentage (some of them had been brought here in steerage themselves from Europe) and many of these students--and this story is told, sir, parts of it, not as fully as I want to tell you some things, in my autobiography, The Big Sea--many of these pupils began to tell me about Eugene Debs, and about the new nation and the new republic. I became interested in whatever I could read that Debs had written or spoken about. I never read the theoretical books of socialism or communism or the Democratic or Republican parties for that matter, and so my interest in whatever may be considered political has been non-theoretical, non-sectarian, and largely emotional and born out of my own need to find some way of thinking about this whole problem of myself, segregated, poor, colored, and how to adjust to this whole problem of helping to build America when sometimes I cannot even get into a school or a lecture or a concert or, in the South, go to the library and get a book out. So that has been a very large portion of the emotional background of my work, which I think is essential to one's understanding.
When I graduated from high school, I went to live with my father for a time in Mexico, and in my father I encountered the kind of bitterness, the kind of utter psychiatric frustration that has been expressed in some Negro novels--not in those I have written myself, I don't believe. A man who was rabidly anti-American, anti-United States. I did not sympathize with that viewpoint on the part of my own father. My feeling was: this is my country, I want to live here. I want to come back here. I want to make my country as beautiful as I can, as wonderful a country as I can, because I love it myself. So I went back after a year in Mexico, and I went to Columbia.
At Columbia University in New York City, where I had never been before, but where I heard there was practically no prejudice, by that time wanting to be a writer and having published some papers in Negro magazines, I applied for a position on the staff of the Spectator newspaper. I was the only Negro in the group. I cannot help but think that it was due to prejudice that of all the assignments--and there were various assignments: sports, theater, classroom activities, debating--of all the various assignments, they assigned me to cover society news. They very well knew that I could not go to dances and parties, being colored, and therefore I could bring no news, and after a short period, I was counted out of the Spectator group.
When I went into the dormitory my first day there, I had a reservation for a room. It had been paid for. I was not given the room. They could not find the reservation. I had to take all of that day and a large portion of the next one to get into the dormitory. I was told later I was the first to achieve that. In other words, to simple little things like getting a room in a university, one has to devote extraordinary methods even to this day in some parts of our country.
I am thinking of the early 1920s. I did not stay at Columbia longer than a year due in part to the various kinds of racial prejudices that I encountered.
SENATOR EVERETT DIRKSEN: I think, Mr. Hughes, that would be adequate emotional background.
HUGHES: No, sir, that would not explain it all, how I arrive at the point that Mr. Cohn, I believe, has asked me about.
COHN: Could you make it briefer, please?
SENATOR DIRKSEN: Do you think we need more background to tell what you meant by USSA?
HUGHES: I think you do, sir. Because a critical work has a very deep background; it does not come in a moment. I am perfectly willing to come back and give it to you later, if you are tired.
COHN: No, we will sit here as long as you want to go on. But you are missing the point completely. What we want to determine is whether or not you meant those words when you said them.
HUGHES: Sir, whether or not I meant them depends on what they came from and out of.
COHN: Did you desire to make the United States Soviet, put one more "S" in the USA to make it Soviet? "The USA, when we take control, will be the USSA."
HUGHES: When I left Columbia, I had no money. I had $13.
COHN: Did you mean those words when you spoke them? We know the background. I want to know now, did you mean the words when you spoke them? I am not saying you should not have meant them. I am asking you--
HUGHES: Yes, sir, and you gave me the permission to give the background.
SENATOR DIRKSEN: That answers the question.
HUGHES: I did not say "Yes" to your question. I said you gave me the chance to give you the background.
SENATOR DIRKSEN: We have had enough background.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain [George III] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
My goddamn rock solid ghetto shiznit name is Baam Ice.
What's yours?
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