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A method acting school for Christians.  I've known actors who try to hone their skills by pretending to be something unusual, like a vegetable or an animal. So they practice acting by thinking like an asparagus, for example, or by thinking like a dog, or a cat, or a goldfish. I guess that's what drives school plays where the kids are on stage as fruits and trees and the like. As for me, I've tried but I just don't think I'm very good at thinking like something else. I've made the attempt to think like an animal, but I never got very far with it, and I'm not sure how I would ever know whether I was successful or not. Ditto for plants, vegetables, and inanimate objects like rocks and minerals, which I think actors have also tried to portray. Trying to get inside the head of a woman has always evaded me, too, but that's another matter entirely.

So what's my point? It's this. Just as I can't think like a vegetable or animal or stone, I also don't seem to be able to figure out what's going on in the minds of the key players of the Bush administration. I mean, they might as well be alien pod beings, for all I know. Trying to think like them is like trying to think like my dog Pepe—I don't get very far with the exercise. The problem, though, is that I should have some idea of what they are thinking: they're human (or at least I think they're human, that they're really not alien pod beings) and many of them profess a pious Christianity; they talk eagerly about spreading freedom and liberty throughout the world and about getting rid of tyranny on our planet. Wars have even been started in order to rid the world of evil. Why, in his inaugural address on Thursday the president was apparently so fond of the words that he said "tyranny" 5 times, "liberty" 15 times, and "freedom" 27 times.[1] At least I think that means he likes the words, or maybe just the sound of the words coming from his lips.

With so many sublime things to do and with such a heady regard for some stodgy American virtues, you would think they'd be people I could figure out. So why do I have such a problem in thinking like them? Because at the same time as they mouth the virtues of Americans and Christians, their deeds speak differently, and loudly, for their actions speak real anger, misanthropy, racism, and economic inequality. As Christians, they appear to bow their heads in prayer, but the two main players have committed "chargeable offenses of crime, immorality, disobedience to the order and discipline of the United Methodist Church (UMC), and dissemination of doctrine contrary to the established doctrinal standards of the UMC."[2] They appear unable to speak the truth and shade the rest of what they say in language that misleads. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians, a preponderant number of those being women and children, have been killed in a wide-reaching act of aggression and occupation which arose not from a love of one's neighbor, but rather from a dank hatred of a Muslim nation in the Middle East, or perhaps from greed, or an arrogant desire for the expansion of an American empire.[3]

Before the president took office the first time, as governor of Texas, he not only routinely denied clemency to death-row criminals who came to him for mercy but also ended up presiding over 152 executions, a heart-hardening goal not reached by any other governor in the recent history of the United States.[4] In these decisions, made with chilling alacrity, he was directly aided by his legal counsel Alberto Gonzales, now heading toward his cabinet as US Attorney General. Gonzales and Donald Rumsfeld, who both deny that they condone torture, certainly didn't mind okaying the abhorrent practice and so easily embedded it in White House and US defense policy. The decision to use torture in Abu Ghraib appears to have arisen straight from the White House, so it has been a misdirection to blame a mere "handful" of soldiers for what is really a top-down policy choice. On January 14 outgoing US Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge said that in extreme cases it is okay to use torture to extract information from terror suspects.[5] Condoleeza Rice said this at her confirmation hearing: "the Geneva Conventions should not be extended to those who don't live up to the obligations of the Geneva Convention."[6] One just doesn't know. Surely I don't, because I can't think like them, any more than I can think like a stone or an asparagus. Perhaps they really aren't human after all. I know at least that they aren't Christians, and I would like very much for them to stop acting as if they were.

1. AP, Friday, January 21, 2005.
2. See the formal Letter of Complaint underway against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney by a group of United Methodists. The text of the letter is located online at TheyMustRepent.com. The authors of the formal complaint say: "We are taking this action as Christians who are desperate to hold two of our own accountable. We, as United Methodists, understand that it is our duty to support and encourage our members and our leaders, and we have been doing so faithfully through prayers and petitions. But enough is enough. The guidance of our bishops and our church-members has been ignored by the respondents for too long. Too many people have died or suffered from the sins of these two men. Now it is time for them to answer for their actions with repentance, to turn back and follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, or to be judged for not doing so." They will submit the letter when the number of signatures reaches 1,000.
3. These numbers come from last year's public health survey[.pdf] undertaken by The Lancet in September 2004. The survey, "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq," is the first science-based survey using cluster sample methodology after the invasion of Iraq, and the results confirm our outstanding fears about the ongoing conflict. See also my blog of October 30, 2004. According to iraqbodycount.net, 600 civilians alone were killed in the wide-reaching destruction of Falluja in April 2004. An estimated 20,000 military personnel have now been killed or wounded in Iraq according to the running tally at antiwar.com.
4. On this see Sister Helen Prejean, "Death in Texas," New York Review of Books, 52:1 (January 13, 2005). Prejean's observation is eye opening. She writes: "As governor, Bush certainly did not stand apart in his routine refusal to deny clemency to death row petitioners, but what does set him apart is the sheer number of executions over which he has presided. Callous indifference to human suffering may also set Bush apart. He may be the only government official to mock a condemned person's plea for mercy, then lie about it afterward, claiming humane feelings he never felt. On the contrary, it seems that Bush is comfortable with using violent solutions to solve troublesome social and political realities." Indeed.
5. Reuters, Friday, January 14, 2005.
6. Irregular Times, January 19, 2005.

This is how Americans protest best.  Here is an important email protest plan now circulating the Internet:

NOT ONE DAMN DIME DAY

Since our leaders don't have the moral courage to speak out against the war in Iraq, Inauguration Day, Thursday, January 20th, 2005 is "Not One Damn Dime Day" in America. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.

During "Not One Damn Dime Day" please don't spend money, and don't use your credit card. Not one damn dime for gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases. Nor toll/cab/bus or train ride money exchanges. Not one damn dime for anything for 24 hours. On "Not One Damn Dime Day," please boycott Walmart, KMart and Target. Please don't go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don't buy any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter). For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down.

The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it. "Not One Damn Dime Day" is to remind them, too, that they work for the people of the United States of America, not for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations and funnel cash into American politics.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is about supporting the troops. The politicians put the troops in harm's way. Now 1,200 brave young Americans and (some estimate) 100,000 Iraqis have died. The politicians owe our troops a plan—a way to come home.

There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing agenda to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing nothing. You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed. For 24 hours, nothing gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious leaders and our politicians of their moral responsibility to end the war in Iraq and give America back to the people.

Please share this as an email with as many people as possible, and please express your opinion at www.notonedamndime.com.

After seeing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, I finally understand why I'm so uncomfortable with the Bush administration's giddy optimism over what elections in Iraq will do for the citizens there. Not long after I watched Bill Frist parrot the president on how the Iraqi elections will fix everything in the world, I just happened to see a promotional for the upcoming season of American Idol. Of course! The president and his henchmen are just like those people who sign up for American Idol and then get up in front of judges and audiences and sing so badly that everyone is just embarrassed, or at least shaking their heads in disbelief and squirming in their seats. And just as these American Idol hopefuls sincerely believe that they can sing well, so too does the Bush administration think that it's doing some good by colonizing Iraq, by calling it liberation, and by watching and cheering both the massacre of innocents and the immoral use of American troops in the region.

And there is no accountability. No one is responsible. Yesterday, when asked by the Washington Post about the tidal wave of mistakes in Iraq, the president responded with his usual disconnected arrogance. What the Post asked was:

THE POST: In Iraq, there's been a steady stream of surprises. We weren't welcomed as liberators, as Vice President Cheney had talked about. We haven't found the weapons of mass destruction as predicted. The postwar process hasn't gone as well as some had hoped. Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

Here's what the president said in response:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. And the American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me, for which I'm grateful.

So he thinks that "accountability moment" gave him a mandate for just about anything that was debated during the re-election campaign. That should worry us all.

While American Christians run around wagging fingers at the cultural decline of the US, our government (quite apparently with the blessings of these self-same American Christians) is totally destroying a civilization, including its archaeological heritage, its history, and its children. In the process, while the genocide in Iraq continues, we crawl closer to fascism.

I've been completing things that really should have been finished on or about the New Year, but at least now they're done. I started a project to move newquaker.com to XHTML and in the process discovered, one, just how unforgiving HTML standards can be and, two, how odd cross-browser coding can be in general. I just couldn't get Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and two flavors of Opera (6.01 and 7.54) to render the same page in the same way. Some of my design problems I attribute to the JavaScript code I use for several different purposes, but the larger issue is that there isn't a consistent adherence to the standards among the browser makers. So I compromised by moving to XHTML what I could and leaving the rest at the friendlier HTML 4.01. I did manage to get my navigation bar moved to a version that works in all major browsers, without behaving erratically when it appears in a off-brand browser. This has been a problem for me for at least a year. Cascading Style Sheets didn't help me, so I won't be relying on CSS exclusively for my webpage design: it's useful in some circumstances, but not all browsers are comfortable with that standard yet. And I think keeping a website up and running would be a more thankful task if we could ever be satisfied with what we've created.

I finally made the decision to discontinue my membership in AOL. For the past three years, I've kept it only for the email address I've had since around 1986, when America Online was little more than a bulletin board. That was before AOL swallowed Time-Warner and now doesn't know what to do with itself. That was when Q-Link (Quantum Computer Services) was getting underway, and when battle lines were being drawn for CompuServe, GEnie, AppleLink, and Prodigy. You have no idea how many AOL floppy discs I cannibalized at a time when storage was a reusable commodity, unlike today with its tsunami of free AOL CDs.

While raising my four children, AOL was for me a good ISP because of its layered filtering capability—although when they each reached the teen years, it was difficult to make them understand the real dangers of unescorted journeys into the WWW ( "why are you doing this to us?" "my friends don't have filters," "my favorite website keeps getting blocked," yada yada). I still worry about them, even though my youngest is 17, but AOL is now a bloated package that just plain gets in the way of the user. It's like its own world, or another planet, and you don't have a choice. And I never could stand how they kept adding to the software and then forced you to wait while they downloaded more of it as you tried to log off. If you didn't upgrade to the latest version, you got this all the time. In fact, you got it even after you upgraded, because they usually thought of something they left off the new program and wanted to make sure that you got everything, even if you didn't want it, or thought you didn't want it. And then there is the AOL help desk, populated by high-school kids straight from their first part-time job. I usually ended up solving my own problems just before reaching the temperature at which my hair burst into flames. For about 10 years, at least, I've kept AOL more for my loyalty to reliable email and have relied on another ISP for my Internet connection. Life needs to be simpler, and I have to do my part.