Two very important politcal rallies are taking place this month. The first is ongoing in Lebannon as Liberty-minded Lebanese continue to push for an expansion of the power base. Like their political soulmates in Ukraine, the Lebanese people are prepared to storm the baricades.

The second (Thank you Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine) is planned for a church in Kentucky a week from Sunday by people who wish to accomplish the opposite. Led by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) this other group is intent upon errecting barricades.

Andew Sullivan links this morning in Blogging Hezbollah to: Blog: Help The People Of Lebanon Win Their Independence. Now this is political will:

The Syrian puppet regime in Beirut has been playing for time, changing the subject, and coming up with all manner of public distractions – the Pope’s funeral was only the latest. People here are sick nearly to death of it, especially those who are playing a waiting game in the tent-city. So yesterday, in response to all this, they unfurled a new public campaign. It is simple, unambiguous, and pressing.

[snip]

On the other side of the stage an electronic sign was erected with the number 16 emblazoned across it. That’s the number of days the government has left before they must call for elections or face the consequences and wrath of the people of Lebanon. Tomorrow the number on the sign will say 15. And the day after that it will say 14.

In contrast, here are some words from Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the Kentucky rally:

As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism. For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms.

Not only are people like Frist and Perkins opposed to the separation of Church and State, they oppose one of the most basic principles of American Liberty: the Separation Of Powers. First it was the liberal Congress that was frustrating their agenda; took care of that in 1994. Then it was the liberal President; took care of that in 2000. Now it’s the liberal Judiciary.

Can you say Theocracy?

[See also: The Filibuster War: Presidential Ambitions and Fealty to the Extreme Religious Right.]

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits, Volume 3 by Billy Joel.

In spring we Jews can get a little crazy on the subject of, “But is it kosher for Pesach?” During Pesach (Passover) we abstain from the eating of chametz (leavened bread in any form). From the outside this would seem to be the simplest of things: don’t eat bread. If only.

In addition to buying boxes and boxes of Matzah (Hebrew for the-box-tastes-better-than-the-contents), we also clean out our cupboards, closets and jacket pockets of anything even remotely associated with leavened bread and grain.

So out go the crackers and the cookies and the beans (don’t ask!) and the rice and the corn syrup and the bourbon (no, we don’t toss this, we sell it to a gentile who holds it for us until after the holiday when we buy it back), but, thanks to Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu, a former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, we don’t have to toss out our Viagra.

According to Viagra Cleared as Kosher for Passover in this morning’s New York Times:

Viagra could be taken if the pill was placed in special gelatin capsules before the weeklong observance begins April 23, The Jerusalem Post reported.

Rabbis have in the past several years ruled against taking the drug during Passover, citing the coating on the pill.

Can World peace be far away?

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits, Volumes 1 & 2 by Billy Joel.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Ragged Sonnet: When in a Deep Depression by Leonard Nathan; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… River Of Dreams by Billy Joel.

One of the ways I understand the World is through a taxonomy I’ve come to appreciate over the years that separates humanity into three broad categories: sheep, rams and wolves. The first is self explanatory. Rams are the leaders of sheep and wolves prey on both, and, in doing so, benefit the whole.

Yesterday, while listening to Jethro Tull’s Catfish Rising, I was struck once again by the words in the fifth song: Sparrow On The Schoolyard Wall. Here are the lines that pulled me up short:

So dress a little dangerous and modify your walk.
There’s nothing wrong with sparrows, but try
to be a sparrowhawk.
Hunting in the evening and floating in the heat in the day.
You might, might acquire some predatory instinct.
Do the wolf pack crawl.
Don’t stay forever in your limbo: fly before you fall
little sparrow on the schoolyard wall.

Ian Anderson informed a great deal of what I struggled to become when I was an adolescent (to the extent that I, for a time, chose brown corduroy over denim). Thick As A Brick was the first Album I ever bought and I still put it on and read the newspaper looking for more fun clues and tidbits.

There were nearly 20 years between Thick As A Brick and Catfish Rising. I wonder how many Sparrow Hawks Anderson launched?

When I put my list of female NEO bloggers together from George Nemeth’s blogroll I made some executive decisions. One was that I chose to not include some names on blogs that had been dormant or abandoned. Another was that I decided to not include any expatriates. Christine Borne of Really Bad Cleveland Accent was one such exclusion.

It wasn’t an easy decision because I like reading her blog. But, I had to make the cut somewhere.

Today I got a comment from Christine, prompted, I’m sure, by George’s Opening Space In The Blogosphere. My reply was that I was an inclusive kind of guy and that I would add her to the list this evening.

Then I found this in her latest post (10 Observations From A Drained Brain) and really felt like a heel:

I am utterly, utterly in love with Cleveland. I am struck with the love so deep it hurts, it hurts the way a freezing wind off the Great Lakes whips and burns clear through your ears on an otherwise sunny day. I love Cleveland like a friend who’s gone crazy, a friend who I’m eternally chasing through a revolving door, a friend who is just so painfully far away from me I want to get off at the next exit and turn around and drive as fast as I can back to the reality that I really want.

God, I just wanted to touch every brick in the park in front of the Old Stone Church, every violet growing weedily outside the abandoned Christian Science building at the corner of Lake and West 117th, every window of every empty storefront in the entire metro area. Cleveland needs someone to love it that much. It needs every grouchy nay-saying one of you to love it that much.

Who am I, the merest of upstarts, grouchy nay-sayer and reverse carpetbagger, to exclude someone who obviously loves this city more than I ever will understand?

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… Rural Route by Elise Partridge; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… 52nd Street by Billy Joel.

When I was an undergraduate at Ohio University I had the pleasure of very briefly meeting Abbie Hoffman. This was more than five years before his suicide (or abduction by aliens). Hoffman at the time was involved in environmental issues along the St. Lawrence Seaway. There was one thing that he said in response to a question that has always stuck with me. When asked about some conspiracy, Hoffman replied.

Never trust conspiracy theorists, they’re all in it together.

While doing a little reading last night, I found a black-and-white ad for MackWhite.com in the lower, left-hand corner of page 55 of the March issue of Arthur. What caught my eye was a cartoon of President John Kennedy examining a piece of paper and in the speech bubble above his head were the words:

I can’t approve this. Tell Lemnitzer the answer is no…

What President Kennedy is saying no to is a rather bizarre recommendation detailed above the cartoon which reads:

On March 13, 1962, The Joint Chiefs Of Staff recommended to President John Kennedy that a terror campaign should be developed to create a pretext for war with Cuba. Ships would be bombed, planes attacked and Americans killed. It would be blamed on Cuba…

Now, over the years, I thought I had heard most of the conspiracies associated with President Kennedy, but this one was brand new.

I surfed over to White’s website and found a link to an even more bizarre conspiracy: one tying the death of Hunter S. Thompson to a-I swear, I am not making this up-White House child sex ring.

And, it gets better. Not only does the story attempt to implicate Thompson in child snuff films, it drags in James Guckart/Jeff Gannon and asks the question: is he really Johnny Gosch, a Des Moines, Iowa, paperboy who disappeared in 1982.

Interestingly enough, if you want to read the full story of Gosch, you have to pay $19.95 plus $4.95 in shipping and handling. That REALLY sent my lemmings meter ticking.

Looking down the Google list on Gosch (8,140 hits) I found a counter theorist by the name of Joseph Cannon.

All of this convinces me of one thing: unemployment is not healthy.

My Soundtrack: Catfish Rising by Jethro Tull.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; On My Nightstand… The Last Hero by Terry Pratchett; On My Computer… The Old Pilot by Donald Hall; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… Gold by Jefferson Starship.

Are you in Business? Of course you are. Unless you’re a Ted Kaczynski wannabe, you’re either buying or selling something. Jeff Jarvis over at Buzz Machine this morning has a wakeup-call list of items everyone into the whole exchanging currency for goods and services thing needs to pay attention to.

If my customers can literally go anywhere in the world to buy what I’m selling, how do I stay in business? If I have a choice of buying what I want from a hundred competitors, what criteria do I use to make my decision?

Here’s the money quote from Jarvis:

The old days of big players in the economy collecting consumers, audience, distribution, manufacturing efficiency, buying power, or capital in the grip of centralized control are waning. That used to be the way to find efficiency and size. That used to be the way to scale.

Aggregation is the new scale.

Not Big Box… Big Connection.

(Hmmm, should I trademark that?)

My Soundtrack: The Roar Of by Jefferson Airplane

[Update: Our Bluegrass Poet points my attention to Videos Challenge Accounts Of Arrests in today’s New York Times. In addition, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered this evening has a piece on the same events in Robet Smith’s: GOP Convention Videos Call Protester Arrests into Question. The World really is watching.]

One of the subthemes that runs thought the stories of Robert Heinlein is that an armed society is a polite society. In his posthumously published 1939 novel For Us The Living: A Comedy Of Customs, Heinlein postulates a society where men go armed in public and granting satisfaction for insults is expected. When rudeness might cost you your life, you think twice before giving vent to your baser urges.

When my Webgoddess sent me the link to the above t-shirt last week, my first reaction was cool, I want one. But then I caught myself. Would wearing such a shirt turn me into Big (or should it be Little) Brother? One of the really simple rules for determining right from wrong is to stop and ask yourself: would I want my grandmother to read about me doing this on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper? This is no longer a hypothetical question.

Everyone likes to point to George Orwell’s 1984 whenever they think government is getting intrusive, but it was another George, George Holliday who really ushered in the era of Big Brother when at 12:45 a.m. on March 3 1991 he video taped the nine minutes and 22 seconds that changed everything.

How do you feel knowing that any blogger with a camera and microphone (or camera phone) can broadcast your every public action or utterance to a Worldwide audience in a matter of seconds? Public has always been, well, public. But most of us feel secure in the anonymity of the ordinary. Who could be interested in what we’re doing?

A lot of people.

I think this raises a lot of great societal questions. For instance, will women begin dressing and acting more modestly knowing that an inadvertent flash of lingerie may be captured and posted to the Internet? Will people stop holding loud conversations on their cell phones because their secret may be recorded and rebroadcast? Will store clerks remember to smile and say please and thank you because miffed customers just might playback their surliness for their boss?

Then there’s the other side. Would coffee shops refuse me service if I was wearing such a shirt because it might drive off customers? How about busnesspeople creating electronic-free zones where people could feel that no one was watching or listening? And when will we see a case of justified assault when someone seanpenns a blogger for invading their privacy?

Play nice. Someone is watching.

My Soundtrack: Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane.

In My Backpack… The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror And The Future Of Reason by Sam Harris; On My Nightstand… Autumn Bridge by Takashyi Matsuoka; On My Computer… Shakespearean SonnetR. S. Gwynn; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly.

Growing up in Southeastern Ohio in and near Marietta, where the Muskingum flows into the Ohio, trains were a part of life. Richard Nixon made a real whistle stop in Marietta in 1960, and freight trains regularly rumbled down the center of Harmar Street on the West Side. The B&O Station was still there between 2nd and 3rd streets and we had a rotating railroad bridge across the Muskingum that connected the the West Side to Marietta proper.

My dad loves trains and every family vacation I remember included real trains, steam locomotives, at some point on the trip. We rode the Cass Railroad in West Virginia and saw the iron behemoths at the The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan. We stopped to climb over side-tracked engines in Colorado and once got filthy with some of my Cub Scout buddies climbing up into the cupola seats of a caboose in the rail yard of Parkersburg, West Virginia.

And then there was the first time I touched a moving train. I don’t know what made me do it. There was no one around to dare me. But I had ridden my bike down to the Ohio River, where a coal train was headed south towards Belpre and Parkersburg.

I watched as it picked up speed coming out of town and I walked closer until I could feel the vibrations of the loaded cars. The ground thrummed and I could see dust leaping from the sleepers beneath the rails.

The summer air was hot and filled with the immensity of the metal thing before me and I had to touch it. I reached up and eased my finger tips toward the passing cars. The first contact jolted me.

No brush of tree branch or even car’s fender could feel like that. This was immense. Powerful beyond my understanding. Yet I touched it again. And lived.

Standing there until it passed, I watched the caboose disappear around the bend. I’m sure there must have been somebody shouting for the crazy kid to get away from the tracks, but I didn’t hear them.

I walked my bike home that day. I didn’t want to ride after what I had done because I needed my feet to not leave the ground. Since then I have ridden great aircraft and ships, but never again did I feel that kind of power.

These memories came back this afternoon as I was driving home and listening to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered on WCPN, 90.3 here in Cleveland.

Melissa Block interviewed Tom Garver, assistant to O. Winston Link, for The Fading Giant: Bygone Train Sights and Sounds. In the late ’50s Link set out to capture the sounds and images of what was a disappearing piece of America: the steam locomotive.

Listening this afternoon to the sounds he recorded when I wasn’t much out of diapers renewed the wonderment and joy I once felt. And for a moment, I was 14 again and I touched a monster. And came back to tell of it.

Thanks Dad, I love you.

My Soundtrack: Her Best by Etta James.

We are a ghoulish bunch. Our sepulchrial interests range from watching pretty people suffer and humiliate themselves in Reality Shows to the websites that feature morgue photos (go find your own link). This morning I was struck by two references to this phenomenon. The first was the above cartoon from Julie Larson. The second was The Political Teen’s video posting of a Fox News story about a company in Canada selling audio tapes from 911 calls on 11 September 2001.

As I noted in a comment to TPT’s blog, I found the story by Fox to be hypocritical and its outrage shallow. Fox (and other news organizations) constantly profit from the loss and tragedy of others. How many times in the past four years have we all seen the video footage of the plane smashing into the tower? Does anyone think for a minute that such broadcasts are done for any other reason than to increase the number of viewers and thus profits? Of course not.

And, of course, there is nothing new here. Herb Morrison’s “Oh, the humanity!” (audio here) became so famous that it was possible to lampoon it in, what I think was, the best episode of WKRP in Cincinnati (audio here). Do you suppose Fox would be interested in how much money has been made from selling tapes of that 1937 tragedy?

One of the reasons that I went into magazine journalism as opposed to newspaper or broadcast journalism was because I naively thought that somehow I could avoid being the idiot forced to ask the grieving parent or spouse, “How do you feel?” One of the baser needs of humans is to feel superior to others as a way of deluding ourselves that no matter how bad we have it, there are always those who have it worse.

When organizations appeal to our baser natures we don’t have to read, we don’t have to listen, we don’t have to watch. We can choose to do something better.

My Soundtrack: Indigo Girls by the Indigo Girls.

In My Backpack… The End Of Faith: Religion, Terror And The Future Of Reason by Sam Harris; On My Nightstand… Autumn Bridge by Takashyi Matsuoka; On My Computer… What You Cannot Remember, What You Cannot Knowby Alicia Suskin Ostriker; On My Screen… Statement (*) directed by Norman Jewison, written by Ronald Harwood and Brian Moore.

My Soundtrack… Come On Now Social by The Indigo Girls.