There was a fuss recently at the parenting site Babble over a series of lists.  The first, Top 50 Twitter Moms, inspired some left-out-feeling dad tweeters to start a tongue-in-cheek #occupybabble hashtag.  Then Babble came out with a list of the Top 50 Dad Bloggers, and that caused its own fuss, which led to CecilyK at MomCruch at Babble to write this:

I also find it fairly ironic (and somewhat irritating) that dad bloggers are insisting that they be awarded the same attention, accolades and respect that mom bloggers get – which, hilariously, is actually very little. You’ll forgive my cynicism; I was just reminded that women will make two million dollars LESS in their lifetimes than their male colleagues, so I’m having a lot of trouble with dads feeling left out of much of anything.

A few days later, she did the honorable thing and interviewed prominent dad blogger Jason Avant, who put her straight gently:

So much of what we see as men and dads is contradictory. Mothers want to be recognized that mothering is very challenging in this time in history, and so do dads. So when this very committed sector of men wants to be recognized – the face of fatherhood today – we’re writing about it and sharing about it, and we are trying to address some of the biggest complaints about men and fatherhood generally.

Which led CeciliyK to graciously apologize.

Nicely done all around.  But for all their candor, Avant and CecilyK danced around the underlying power struggle here, the massive shift we are seeing as the patriarchy crumbles and both moms and dads try to build sustainable families in a post-industrial age.

Mom bloggers need to realize something.  Dad bloggers are your allies.  These are the guys you should be nurturing, supporting, like sweet little fuzzy chicks tottering around the farm yard.  Like Avant says, these are the guys who are creating the new paradigms of fatherhood, the ones in which dads will not dump much of the child care and housework on women.

Yes, men still run the world.  Yes, there is a wage gap.  But it is more complicated than that (see this story from Atlantic Cities for more).  Many, if not most, guys are in some sort of trouble, with either their traditional jobs slipping away or their traditional family role disappearing. You may lack sympathy for this – the dominant gender finally falling – but it is confusing and hard for well-meaning, individual men.   See Hanna Rosin’s End of Men article in the Atlantic.  See the slew of new troubled guy sitcoms on TV.  See Joan C. Williams in her book or writings on why men and class matter.

As annoying as this may be, women need men for feminism to truly succeed.  It is something that Lisa Belkin wrote about just last year, and something people like Gloria Steinhem have been saying for ages:

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don’t know that men can do what women can do. That’s absolutely crucial. We can’t go on doing two jobs.

And as mom bloggers, you are likely in a good spot.  You have real leverage.  See this post from Parentlode today – mom bloggers are more politically aware, socially involved, better educated, than the average woman with children and wealthier than average too.

Believe me, dad-blog-level parenting is not the easy road for a dude.   It’s much easier to turn into a cubicle slave, play golf all weekend or hide nightly in a man cave.

Here in Sweden, where I live, they included men in the first comprehensive parental leave law way back in 1974.  It’s been a long slog, but now fathers take almost a quarter of all parental leave days here, with some people projecting that men will reach near 50 percent by the 2020s.  And that’s for infants and toddlers.  It’s slow.  It’s not perfect.  But it is progress, and it is happening because men are being welcomed – or shoved – into the parenting world.

Of course, in the US, since Americans apparently don’t do community or safety nets anymore, this kind of change happens more organically and painstakingly, one family at a time.  But it is happening, and the ever-so-mild rise of the dad bloggers is one sign of this.

This is why it is so galling for many dad bloggers to see corporate campaigns built on paternal incompetence, to see shows built around the father as boob, and to be marginalized in parenting magazines and websites.

In a post on the site Man of the House in August, Avant waxed poetic about the impact of mom-bloggers:

The fact of the matter is this: Women dominate the online creative writing space. They’ve defined and re-defined blogging in ways that men (especially dads) haven’t. I’d argue that one cannot be a successful blogger—in whatever way one chooses to measure that success—without reading and understanding women like Heather Armstrong, Ree Drummond and the myriad of strong Internet writers who happen to be female.

That is special.  Mom blogger communities are a digital marvel, a true sign of how the internet can foster connection, not alienation.  But maybe now it’s time to open the doors. This is not about stealing mom-blog ad revenue or pushing men to become more feminine or parent like moms. It is about re-imagining the masculine in a world of innovation, equal relationships and shared parenting.  That requires collaboration, and that would be good for everyone.

Where I learned to drive.  And where I broke in the face of the mega-highways of the Southland (meaning Los Angeles).  From the sample chapter of my book proposal:

I first cracked on the road over two college summers in Los Angeles when I faced twice daily the existential crisis of Interstate 405, what seemed like 16 lanes of total gridlock, up a huge hill and then down, leaving me, every day, trying to rip out the steering wheel and beside myself with rage and anxiety.

According to some sources, the term “road rage” was born in the mid to late 1980s in Los Angeles, and, on these commutes in the early 1990s, I could feel aggression bubble in my blood especially in the evening after eight hours of mind-numbing clerical work.

I tried alternate routes – the 10 and the 110 through downtown, for instance – but that was somehow worse. I tried running on the beach to kill time, often through the Baywatch filming set near Santa Monica, but that exhausted me and made me snap more easily in the only slightly faster moving traffic at 7 or 8 at night. I wasn’t even in a rush.

Then you’ve got Michael Lewis writing this wonderful Vanity Fair piece on how California is slipping into the new Third World:

Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. “The vicious cycle of contempt,” as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect.

But when you look below the surface, he adds, the system is actually very good at giving Californians what they want. “What all the polls show,” says Paul, “is that people want services and not to pay for them. And that’s exactly what they have now got.”

So where does this lead?  Was LA Story with Steve Martin prophetic back in 1991.  Back then, the state seemed out of control but because of its character traits, not because of a fundamental bankruptcy.  But who knows?  Maybe this is the future of the LA freeways?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoU39Rpp4FI

Hungary is in focus right now because it just took on the presidency of the European Union and because – in a moment of political stupidity – it passed a draconian media law at exactly the same time, part of the rightward swing of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his FIDESZ party.

For better or for worse, Orbán and FIDESZ are becoming known as the right-wing crazies of the EU, pushing Hungarian interests beyond the bounds of the polite EU and making blustery noises about everything from the Hungarian currency to Roma to that media law, even as the Hungarian economy struggles mightily. And now there is Jobbik, a far-right extremist party, that is growing in popularity and forcing Orbán to hew to the right-wing line.

But it was not always so with Orbán. He became a central player in Hungarian politics as an anti-communist demonstrator, a courageous activist for democracy, and FIDESZ, which means Alliance of Young Democrats, actually was, for a good while, a party of young democrats, with liberal policies and an age limit and everything.

Orbán’s shift to the right gets passed over in most press accounts these days. Kind of old news. But the how and why of that shift happened paint a telling portrait of the man and party “leading” the EU for the next six months.

For five months in the spring of 1994, I worked two days a week at the Budapest Week, the first independent English language newspaper in Budapest . The editor was grizzled and alternative, supposedly the brother of the lead singer of a big jam band of the time.

One day he challenged me to try some “gonzo” journalism, to go to a FIDESZ rally and cover it in the spirit of Hunter Thompson, who I had not read but understood perfectly.

At the time, FIDESZ was, as I said, still supposedly full of actual young democrats, and they were looking good in the polls, the only seemingly decent alternative to the conservative party that had ruled Hungary since 1990 and that was deeply unpopular.

So I suspect that my editor thought “gonzo” would mean a look at the coming of Hungary’s true democratic revolution, five years after the Iron Curtain came down.

Instead he got a story about an almost impossible to find rally in a decrepit courtyard filled with empty chairs and a handful of pensioners and a giant – really, giant – orange balloon. I was vicious on the lack of buzz, of any grassroots support, on the arrogance of the party spokespeople who refused to not only translate anything for me but refused to even tell me what the speeches were about.

I also fixated on the ridiculous orange balloon, floating around crushing small dogs and children, totally ignored by the crowd.

The story did not run.

This was partially because I couldn’t find a local press account on the rally so we had no idea what anyone said. But, really, Budapest Week was not above publishing pure mood pieces in 1994. I suspect my “gonzo” journalism just went too far against conventional wisdom, and the editor did not trust the college intern to be right about the coming failure of FIDESZ in particular and young democrats in general.

In the election, FIDESZ got crushed by the resurgent socialists, and everyone acted shocked and the return of reformed communists. Soon after, Orbán took the party far to the right, and you see where he’s ended up.

But at least he lost the balloon.

That headline above is a joke.  Well, maybe.  You never know.  I hear Stewart is one mean dude.  Well, not really.  But I like to think so.  Well, not really.

The Onion News Network debuts tonight on IFC, bringing its gold-standard brand of satire to cable, where Stewart and Cobert have long reigned supreme like the Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck of the liberal world.

Here is their preview clip, with a real former Fox News anchor:

It’s OK.

Many commentators are echoing James Podsenik in Time: There is room for two good news satire franchises:

But there’s more than one way to spoof a news medium. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are both personality-driven; Stewart is our exasperated guide through the excesses of hype and politics, while Colbert performs as a recognizably comic fake pundit. Both shows rely on a personal connection that is as assuring as it is acerbic: the world may be crazy, they say, but at least someone else sees it too.

ONN is darker and more deadpan, an immersive satire that, much like the Onion’s Web and print editions, skewers the medium’s form above all. It’s like a technically impeccable music-parody band: there’s almost no distinguishing it from the original until you listen to the lyrics — for instance, a story about a white teen girl accused of a stabbing who is ordered “to be tried as a black adult.” (“The court has directed the local media to assume she’s guilty.”)

But over at YPulse, they weren’t so sure back in March:

As much as I agree with that line of reasoning, I’m not so sure it should allay the concerns of Comedy Central losing their grasp on the 18-24 set, particularly the guys. To me, those differences in sensibilities reflect a more widespread generation gap between IFC audiences and the Comedy Central crowd. We’ve seen both Stewart and Colbert’s viewers show signs of gradually “graying” since the election: Forbes reports according to Nielsen, as of last May, the median age of “The Daily Show” viewers crept up five years to 41.4, and the median age of “The Colbert Report” viewers was up five years to 38.3. Along with what could be called the Conan effect (beloved in Gen Y hearts, if not in ratings), I suspect that trend is compounded by the fragmentation caused by challengers like the Independent Film Channel (more on that), Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim and Spike TV. I.e., networks willing to air the type of risky “in-your-face” programming that resonates with college students and young adults tuning in for late night television.

Well, we’ll find out starting tonight.  Let the cage match begin!

The suspects included minor associates, “soldiers,” “captains” and a host of high-ranking bosses, wiping out much of the leadership of the Colombo and Gambino families — two of the historic “Five Families” in New York.

Charges included murder, loansharking, arson, drugs, extortion, robbery, labor racketeering.\

Those arrested include members of the traditional Five Families plus two more – Surge Desk at AOL has the rundown on all of them.

And here I thought all federal agents were on the Wikileaks case …

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said today that the Italian-American mob had lost most of its national power but remained a serious regional threat.  And, let’s face it, the Italian mob is good for the publicity, done in by the Godfather and the Sopranos.

There just won’t be many characters like John “Sonny” Franzese, who was sentenced to jail last week for shaking down strip clubs and a pizzeria … at the age of 93.  I mean, the guy knew Sinatra!

You think taking down Russian or Mexican mobsters has the same cache?  Hah.

Which begs the question.  Who’s next in line for big screen stardom?  The Cosa Nostra – born in the shadows of Prohibition (it’s true, I did my 8th grade term paper on this) has captured our attention for going on 90 years now.

But let’s say they are more or less broken now.  New York City will always support crime.  Who steps up?  Who gets both the movie roles and becomes a serious legitimate danger to us all?

Probably no one group.  Like everything else, it’s a flat world now, the information age, free trade, all that.  A sampling of organized crime groups from the FBI, via the New York Times:

* Russian mobsters who fled to the U.S. in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse;
* Groups from African countries like Nigeria that engage in drug trafficking and financial scams;
* Chinese tongs, Japanese Boryokudan, and other Asian crime rings; and
* Enterprises based in Eastern European nations like Hungary and Romania.

On this day in 1995, the Bosnian war officially ended in Paris, weeks after a peace deal was hammered out in Dayton, Ohio.

Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the peace deal, just died yesterday.  His obits are filled with references to Dayton.  It is the highlight of a distinguished career.

But is it a highlight if you are Bosnian?

In November 1995 I was half an hour away from the Bosnian border in equally devastated eastern Croatia living in a house with no windows in a grassroots peace project.  I was new and shell shocked, and I remember listening to the radio and a local volunteer translated that there was a possible peace deal in Bosnia.  And since this was a Serb radio station, she translated that the Serbs had vowed to fight to the last man, to the death.

After the news ended, the volunteer laughed bitterly and said the Serbs would never make peace.

I don’t mean to pick on the Serbs here, though they deserved plenty of picking on in those days, but that was what was on the Bosnian Serb radio and what a Croat peace volunteer thought.  They were wrong, of course.  The Serbs did make a deal, if they did not exactly make peace with that deal.

And I will only whisper this now, but back then, I did think that perhaps the war should not end.  The Bosnian Muslims and the Croats had the Serbs on the run.  The map would be a lot simpler if they kept rolling into Banja Luka and eliminated the crazy quilt of the Bosnian map, the one that makes the country impossible to govern or divide even today.

I take this back already, for I know that anything that prevents one extra death, one extra dose of violence echoing through generations, that is a good thing.  Peace has to be a good thing.

By December I was frozen and lonely and already had the pain of the war survivors burned into my soul, those empty looks, the stories of horror, the lost shuffle through the bombed out cottage.

I spent three more years in eastern Croatia, and to me, Bosnia always seemed more glamorous, more the center of all things.  I was in the backwater, the stagnant rural half of a nationalist-dominated country.  Bosnia had the international community, all that money – billions spent to rebuild infrastructure alone – all those fancy EU projects, all that potential.

The spirit of Sarajevo, all that.

Now what?  Eastern Croatia is likely still stagnant, and its war and pain very much forgotten.  But it is on track to be in the EU (which I cannot fathom).  The Croatian and Serbian leaders have made up.   The devastation is fading, in its own way. There is a future, at least.

Not so in Bosnia.  There is no future in Bosnia, just more ethnic posturing and corruption and bureaucracy and gaming of the weak EU-dominated system.  This is the fault of the Bosnians mostly, at this point.  It is very much the fault of NATO, the US and, at the top, the EU, which just does not know what to do if the promise of EU membership does not whip a country into shape.

But I also can’t help but whisper that Dayton was flawed, that Richard Holbrooke’s signature effort was doomed to failure.  He recognized that his peace deal did not leave stable political structures.  It was not supposed to, its defenders say.  And, of course, any number of people could have reshaped the region.

But they didn’t.  So we are left with the realities of Dayton exposed.  And what we see is a deal that is the essence of Holbrooke’s ethos that you negotiate with bad people in order to save good ones.  He negotiated with bad people – the Serbian leadership, the Croatian leadership and almost all the Bosnians – in order to bring a tense, bitter peace.

I have no arguments about what he should have done better.  Maybe there was nothing.  Maybe the Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks were doomed to play out their horrible nationalist farce.

But I cannot consider Dayton a success, even in the glow of remembering a powerfully skilled diplomat.

The obituaries themselves are an insult to Bosnia, putting the glory of an American diplomat over the very dark reality of this hole in the western Balkans.

It is Enemy of the State meets The Matrix meets Disclosure.  It is War Games meets The Bourne Identity meets The Social Network.  The story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks – and maybe the story of the first War of the Internet –  is, if nothing else, going to make a great movie.

Let’s sketch out the plot.  I am going to do it from memory and exaggerate because we are in Hollywood and it’s all about the story, people.

You have a poor boy from a corrupt provincial area of distant Australia.  He is a loner, an outsider.  He gets involved in a 10-year-long child custody case.  He loses all trust in the system but refuses to give up out of love for his boy.  He goes a little mad, something which gives him semi-magical hacker skills.  The case over, he drops out.  Disappears from recorded society.

Years later he reemerges mysteriously as the head of WikiLeaks.  How?  What happened?  Where did he get the money?  Where did he get his act together?  A secret monastery in Tibet?  A low level corporate job in the Silicon Valley?  Or did some tycoon rehab him, train him up in an underground camp?  Warren Buffet?  Steve Jobs?

WikiLeaks goes global.  Huge document dumps shake the U.S. military, exposing the futility and brutality of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Then, just as Assange plans his greatest act of rebellion, he gets charged with sexual assault in Sweden, of all places (and where I live).

Now, here, it gets murky.  Maybe Assange did it.  He is crazy and under a lot of pressure and perhaps, beyond that, he’s a rapist, a bad guy.  But we don’t know.  Maybe he’s not.  And whether or not he did it, now the system has their hooks in him, ready to reel him in if need be.

But Assange dumps millions of secret U.S. diplomatic cables into the internet anyway.  This is cool – exposing the hypocrisy of international diplomacy (even if U.S. diplomats turn out to be good at it) and showing the U.S. empire in decline, unbecoming horse trading and pleading left and right.

But the system as a whole is not weak, certainly strong enough to crush little WikiLeaks.  Interpol puts Assange on its most wanted list, even though he is only wanted for questioning.  Companies left and right – PayPal, Visa, Mastercard – drop WikiLeaks.  The site is hacked, domain names are revoked.  Assange is arrested.

Then the war starts.  A group of hackers in an action called Operation Payback take down Mastercard’s website, among others, and vow to retaliate digitally for the alleged persecution of Assange:

“We cannot let this happen. This is why our intention is to find out who is responsible for this failed attempt at censorship.

“This is why we intend to utilise our resources to raise awareness, attack those against and support those who are helping lead our world to freedom and democracy.”

Is this the start of the First War of the Internet?  Of the battle between the corrupt corporate state and the defenders of the openness of the internet?  From the Independent:

You’ll have been following the Wikileaks saga, of course, because it is novel and interesting. Maybe you like it because it looks like a live action retelling of Enemy Of The State, or because history seems to be in the making. It feels big, doesn’t it? It is, but it’s bigger than that, too: what we’re witnessing right now is the opening of hostilities in the first big infowar. The war for the Internet is very big indeed.

If you’re not a digital native, or if you’re some kind of hearty outdoors type, this may not seem important, but you’re dead wrong. We could be spectators for the start of the cyber Great War – and they’ve just knocked over Franz Ferdinand.

Cool movie.  Producers leave your contact info in the comments section.  I can start writing tomorrow.

But the real question is this:  who plays the villain?  There are so many – bad Aussie judges, U.S. military guys, corporate hacks.  Who gets to be the face of the political establishment?  I think there is a clear choice – Hillary Clinton.

You notice that after WikiLeaks exposed huge problems – including murder! – in the U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, nothing happened.  But embarrass the diplomatic elite, the workers of the State Department?  Death to WikiLeaks.

Clinton is perfect – the old hand, the mover of levers sitting in her office barking orders to corporate CEOs and Swedish judges, calmly moving to crush WikiLeaks, a capacity for vengeance honed by the Clinton wars of the 1990s, by all those election campaigns.   She knows how power works.  And usually she uses this knowledge for seemingly good causes (for instance, it turns out she would have likely been a far more effective president than Obama – do you think she would be preaching conciliation with the Republicans now?  Hah.).

But when the power elite is threatened, watch out for Hillary.

At least in my screenplay …

I can’t wait for this next batch of WikiLeaks documents to come out.  Can.  Not.  Wait.

Just the diplomatic scurrying alone is worth the price of admission.

To sum up, the WikiLeaks says it is going to release U.S. diplomatic cables in a document drop seven times larger than its ones on the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Those were about the gritty, dismaying secrets and realities of modern warfare.  This will also be about that.  You got Turkey supporting Al-Qaeda, and the U.S. supporting Kurdish terrorists, among other things.

But it is the farcical tripping over themselves at the Pentagon and State Department that is the fun, popcorn popping stuff.  The embarrassing calls to Canada, Israel, Russia and the UK.  From Gawker:

“Girl,” U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (probably) said on the phone to Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd, “There is going to be trouble.” …

Canadian foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon, meanwhile, got a call from U.S. ambassador David Jacobson about the “compromising conversations” that could come up in the cables. Sounds sexy! Like a Cinemax movie!

I appreciate the serious discussions this will bring up about whether a government has the right to so much secret workings.  I would tend to say, yes, there should be some secrecy, but that, no, not this much.  Anyone drawing back the curtains on the greed and corruption of global political hypocrisy is good in my book.

I try to tell the truth in my own life.  I try to teach my kids to tell the truth.  I do not think it is naive to expect my government to tell the truth (most of the time).

And there is the chaos aspect.  Just throw the wrench in the works.  This is not a system meant to protect the average guy, the small business owner.  It is a system of power going back to the dawn of history.  It is double-faced and destructive and all about state or personal interest.

And they play it all with house money, namely ours.  So why don’t we get to peek in on the fun, see the nasty names, the double dealing.

I might go line up at my own computer right now.

Obama Could Use More Joe Hill, Less Facebook, To Fight The Tea Party

Ninety-five years ago last week, the government of Utah murdered Joe Hill, lining him up and shooting him for a murder he might or might not have committed.

Hill was a labor activist and song writer, an immigrant with a checkered past, a fighter willing to dedicate his life to a cause – the kind of man the American left does not produce anymore, or if it does, the kind of man the American left ignores.

This is important with the rise of the passionate Tea Party and with the lack of a counterweight to the organized American right, with a president who wants to get things done, but seems to need to be led by the people, not to lead them.

Hill was born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden, which happens to be my wife’s hometown.  His birthplace there is a museum, with a twisted tortured statue outside.  I visited the house years ago on a frigid February day, wracked with the flu on a failed travel book tryout.  The museum was closed, so I did not read then about the hard knock misery of 19th century Sweden, the kind of poverty that drove a quarter of the country to the United States.

But a Swedish February day was not a bad time to go – it helped me understand in a more visceral way why a man like Hill would wander into the American desert, fleeing all the darkness and illness that still drop like a veil over the country in the winter … with the world class safety net still decades away.

Hill did not fare much better in the states – a migrant laborer wandering from New York to Cleveland to San Francisco – finding his way into the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies), finding his voice as a songwriter, finding his place in the violent battles against corporate armies and government guns.

These labor battles are the Westerns that rarely get made, or even acknowledged (There was a 1971 film about Hill that won the Jury Prize at Cannes).  Big business won that battle for the soul of the West, crushing the working man and keeping the land and the mines open for exploitation, cementing a myth of self-reliance, not community, that echoes today in the odd alliance of the white working class with billionaire corporate titans.

Sure, labor won enough battles so that we have Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.  This is not a fight that finished in 1915, 1932 or 1964, though.  Americans do not have their basic needs covered, from health care to parental leave to education, and all the opportunity in the world cannot cover those gaping wounds.

And they will not be healed by Obama, certainly not Obama left alone, both without mainstream support or pressure, the votes that got him elected heartfelt but apparently not committed.

I think this is a function of the internet and YouTube – Obama’s was an election of moments – a few minutes of a video here, a click of a donation there.

On this I agree wholeheartedly with Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, who wrote recently that “the revolution will not be tweeted,” and examined the value of strong social ties versus weak (read internet) ones.

Now I’ve read a lot of rebuttals of his argument, but I don’t buy them.  A Tea Party meeting is going to produce more cohesion.  A good union local is going bond men and women like family.  There is simply no way that YouTube can match this.

Not that I’m pushing unions or lamenting their downfall.  We need something new with the same spirit, a movement energized and fresh.
Joe Hill was of a different era.  No is going to lead wildcat strikes in the desert or change the consumerist, corporate structure of American society with a folk song.  We’ve all invested too much in our shiny stuff for that to change (Though kudos to Jonathan Tasini for a call to the streets in the Huffington Post).

But his passion does call out through the decades – as do the echoes of the gunshots that felled him.  Those guns are still loaded and pointed at us.

At a subway stop in Stockholm, there is an inscription attributed to Hill – though it is almost a direct quote from a 1911 poem adopted by striking textile Massachusetts workers in 1912 – etched into the stone floor:  “Give me not only bread but also roses.”

The irony is that in Sweden Hill’s vision won the day – more or less.  The welfare state has, more or less, created a competitive capitalist country that also looks after its own.

In the U.S., we might still have bread and roses, but the bread is bitter, and the roses are wilting.

Death Penalty Disaster: Oklahoma Goes To Court To Use Veterinary Drug For Executions

The evil of the death penalty should be obvious.  After all, they just released an innocent man off death row in Texas.  Anthony Graves was saved by a fluke – he got a magazine story written about his case.  From a column on the release by Leonard Pitts Jr.:

One hopes people who love the death penalty are taking note. So often, their arguments in favor of that barbarous frontier relic seem to take place in some alternate universe where cops never fabricate evidence and judges never make mistakes, where lawyers are never inept and witnesses never commit perjury. So often, they behave as if in this one critical endeavor, unlike in every other endeavor they undertake, human beings somehow get it right every time.

But the public doesn’t seem to notice. A Gallup poll found that death penalty support remains steady at 64 percent and the U.S. just rejected calls at the UN to abolish the death penalty, defending its use under international law.

No, the real sticky horror of our institutionalized killing comes from the banal bureaucratic details – straight out of Hannah Arendt and her well-known take on efficient Nazi murderers/paper pushers.

Case in point – supply shortages.  Oh, what a logistics headache for the American death industry. There is a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental, the drug used to put  inmates to sleep before other drugs are injected into their system to actually kill them.

But Oklahoma has a solution – pentobarbital, a drug used by veterinarians to put down animals.  From the Wall Street Journal:

Oklahoma, which is scheduled to execute John David Duty on Dec. 16, has said that veterinarians regard pentobarbital, which it is proposing as a substitute anesthetic for death row inmates, “as an ideal anesthetic agent for humane euthanasia in animals,” that is “substantially” similar to thiopental, according to a court filing last month.

No testing, nothing.  Hey, it works on horses!

It turns out Oklahoma is the birthplace of lethal injections as we know it, though they apparently have used a severely flawed method.

The other option to this unacceptable execution bottleneck?  Borrowing and maybe even smuggling.

Yep, states have been borrowing sodium thiopental from each other, as they strain to reach their execution benchmarks.  Tennessee borrowed from Arkansas (which has executions on hold), or maybe Kentucky, then Arizona did the same.  But now it seems Arkansas is fresh out.  Texas has enough for the year but could be dry by 2011, so don’t go asking there.

There is some sodium thiopental floating around from a British company, which led to an outcry in the UK, after Arizona used the British stuff to kill a man.  California’s also got its hands on some of this good English drug, though no one is really sure how they did.

The whole thing has an air of high school marijuana dealing, doesn’t it?

One has to wonder about the conversations between prison officials in, say, Tennessee and Arkansas.  You almost want it to be pure evil, like this.

Tennessee guy:  Bob, our murder prevention efforts are being thwarted.  If we don’t have this execution, dastardly evildoers might get less scared!  The cities could explode!

Arkansas guy:  Don’t worry, I’ll help.  It is the will of the people, after all.  This is democracy as the founders wanted.  That and the Holy Book, of course.  Glenn Beck says so.

Arkansas guy:  Yes, it is the will of God.

Tennessee guy:  An eye for an eye.  So wise, the Old Testament.  That Jesus guy was a p—-y.

Arkansas guy:  I wish we could just get a posse together and hang this varmint instead of using this wimpy lethal injection.

But in fact, the conversation probably is something more like this:

Tennessee guy:  Dan, I got a scheduling problem.  We got this job up for November but we just don’t have the right materials.

Arkansas guy:  What a shame.  Hate to see you fall behind.  Your bosses giving you crap?

Tennessee guy:  You better believe it.  My review is going to suck.  No raise for me.  You wouldn’t have any sodium thiopental, would you?  I’ll buy a drink at the conference in Vegas next month.

Arkansas guy:  No problem.  Can’t wait to hit the slots!  But you know, in the future, we’ve heard that Oklahoma is “thinking outside the box” on a new product.  It’s been equine-based in the past but it has real growth potential.

Tennessee guy:  Great.  Can you send me a link about it?  I’m so tired of sucking up to those insufferable Brits.

But, seriously, why are we so enamored with the death penalty, with its symbolism of divine vengeance but taken out in the quietest “most humane” way possible?

It’s creepy and has nothing to do with the horror of the crimes committed and everything to do with us and the way we view the world.

This is from a Washington Post blog entry by Scott Christianson, author of “The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber”:

Americans do not see themselves as blood-thirsty, cruel or punitive people … Yet America’s enduring use of the death penalty — the United States is one of the few Western countries that still resort to executions — and the fact that it imprisons more of its citizens than any other, stands in stark contrast …

Did gas really remove the inner suffering and barbarity of executions? Or does gas or injected anesthesia mask something deep in our psyche, something dark in our body politic?