War Powers Act

The War Powers Act was passed in 1973, in response to the Vietnam War debacle. Our country got into the Vietnam war slowly, gradually, at the direction of presidents without the input of the Congress (other than their budgetary capacity of course—they could always have denied funding!).

In 1973 Congress said, “Never again. This country will only go to war after the people have discussed it and approved it, through their representatives in Congress.” When you look at the Constitution it seems obvious to me that the Founders wanted it to be this way. They had just fought a revolution against a King who could make war on a whim. The last thing they wanted was a President with the same unilateral warmongering power. They gave Congress the power to declare war, and made the President the commander-in-chief; the President only executes military actions after the Congress has decided action is needed (see pertinent passages from the Constitution below).

I think Congress was correct in the assertion of their power in 1973, and I think we need to reassert the correctness here in 2011. Every president since 1973 has pushed back against this law (except for maybe Jimmy Carter, and also Gerald Ford but he’s a special case anyway). Presidents like the power of their office and are always looking to expand it.

George W. Bush used 9/11 to greatly expand the presidential/federal powers, from ramming wars through Congress and torturing prisoners to illegally wiretapping Americans. Many people are surprised that Obama is not only not pulling back from these outrages but pushing them forward. But we shouldn’t be surprised. This is not an issue of ideology; it’s an issue of power. Every president chooses to increase the power of the office because it makes him more powerful now, and who cares what the next guy might do with it.

Pertinent passages from the US Constitution:
Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to… declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Article II, Section 2:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;

This is all it says about the President’s duty in terms of war. Obviously the Congress was vested with the power to decide when the military is used.

14 Elements of Every Religious Worldview

Huston Smith ends his autobiography, "Tales of Wonder," with 14 points that comprise a “universal language” of religious worldview. (analogous to Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar of languages).

1. Reality is infinite.
2. “The Infinite includes the finite or we would be left with infinitude-plus-finitude and the Infinite would not be what it claims to be.”
3. The contents of finitude are hierarchically ordered—the Great Chain of Being, from the “meagerest kind of existence through every possible grade up to the boundless Infinite.”
4. Causation is from the top down, from the Infinite down through the descending degrees of reality.
5. Singularity becomes multiplicity. “In descending to the finite, the singularity of the Infinite splays out into multiplicity. The One becomes the many…The foundational virtue is existence.” India says primary virtues are “sat, chit, ananda—being, consciousness, bliss. The West’s ternary is the good, the true, and the beautiful, and these beginnings open out into creativity, compassion, and love until we arrive at Islam’s Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of God.”
6. As ascend Great Chain of Being distinctions fade between virtues. “Teilhard de Chardin said that ‘Everything that rises must converge.’”
7. At the top of the Chain, where all becomes One, absolute perfection reigns.
8. Te Hermetic Principle, “As above, so below.” “Everything that is outside us is also inside us—‘the Kingdom of God is within you.’”
9. Human beings cannot fully know the Infinite.
10. Religious people write texts and these need to be interpreted.
11. Fundamentalism makes the error of thinking these texts can be taken literally.
12. Two distinct ways of knowing: rational and intuitive. “In Hinduism, the knowledge that effects union with God is not discursive; it has the immediacy of direct vision, or sight.”
13. Religions have two parts: an outer, exoteric, concrete, and representational form, and an inner, esoteric, abstract core.
14. Our knowledge is extremely limited. “We are born in ignorance, we live in ignorance, and we die in ignorance.”

These are just my summaries of course. Interestingly, as the points progressed Huston needed more and more words to explain them. The first point is made with just a few words, and point 2 uses only a few more than what I quoted above. But by the time you get to points 13 and 14 the explanation took a page or more.

Power is the Best Aphrodisiac

Today Rep. Anthony Weiner joined the long list of philandering male politicians who have been caught (the list of the ones who haven't been caught is probably even longer).

Last week I saw a documentary about ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer. I remember thinking after his ritual press conference with suffering wife at his side, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know they were after him, those Wall Street financiers whom he had investigated?" Just like I had thought about Bill Clinton, "What was he thinking? Didn't he know the Republicans were after him with everything they had?"

What occurred to me while watching the Spitzer film was that I was expecting rational behavior from these men. I was acting as if they had free will, as if they were sane creatures capable of choosing the best option for their life.

I have written a manuscript, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity," which argues not only that we do not have free will, but that our "choices" are made in a part of our mind which is not conscious. Our rational minds come along after decisions and actions have been made, spinning stories that explain why we think the things we think and do the things we do.

What is true about men, I think, is that power acts upon them as a strong aphrodisiac, which then stimulates some kind of reaction, most likely chemical, that greatly boosts their sex drive. They are not rational agents choosing to engage in risky sex, they are victims of a physiological response that naturally occurs when men gain power.

Of course, women are attracted to powerful men from an aphrodisiac reaction of their own, so the two reinforce each other.

Perhaps by recognizing this as a real, organic, and physical process that men are prone to, we could envision some way to prevent these politicians from self-destruction.

Or we could change our societal attitudes toward sex and say "So what?" when we hear of another politician engaging in sex outside his marriage.

As an aside, one of the things I found creepy about George W. Bush was that it was impossible to imagine him ever being embroiled in a sex scandal. What was wrong with him that he was so sexless?

Birth of a Nation Undone

This weekend I watched “Birth of a Nation,” and I was saddened by the director D.W. Griffith’s confidence that the Civil War had resolved the issue of state’s rights, After all, that’s what he meant by his title: the War Between the States had birthed a united nation and ended the belief that states were not bound by federal law. But today we live in an era where the issue of state’s rights has taken on a new power and threatens the future of this country. The refusal of many states to take federal stimulus funds, and more seriously the threat not to participate in health care reform measures are two recent examples. In today’s New York Times the lead editorial, “Inching Closer to State’s Rights,” warns that we are one Supreme Court vote away from allowing states to violate federal law.

Chief Justice John Roberts is one vote short of moving the Supreme Court to a position so conservative on states’ rights that it would be to the right of the Tea Party’s idea of limited government. That chilling possibility was evident in the court’s recent ruling in the case of Virginia v. Stewart. The principle at stake dates back to a 1908 case, Ex parte Young, in which the Supreme Court held that federal courts have a paramount role in stopping a state from violating federal law. Despite the 11th Amendment’s protection of a state from being sued in federal court, all state officials must comply with federal law, which the Constitution calls “the supreme Law of the Land.”

Our federal system is useful for allowing states to try out governing ideas on smaller scales, like universal health care in Massachusetts and death with dignity laws in Oregon. But it is vitally important that there be laws that cover the entire United States that cannot be flouted by an individual state.

How to Die in Oregon

I just watched a stunning documentary on HBO called “How to Die in Oregon.” The film made a powerful argument for “Death with Dignity” laws, by showing intimate portraits of people who were terminally ill and had chosen to die on their own terms. As one volunteer put it, our culture has this mistaken belief that courage means suffering; that to cherish life means a person has to endure excruciating agony and intrusive medical procedures to forestall death at any cost. The people in this film show that courage also means choosing to say “no, I’ve had enough. I cherish life too much to spend my last weeks in the hospital hooked up to machines or throwing up from chemotherapy. I want to die with dignity.” What becomes clear is the ability to choose their death is their final gift to their families.

Two people even shared their deaths with the filmmaker, and with us, and both deaths were incredibly graceful and moving. The second half of the film mostly tracks the last year of a remarkable woman named Cody. She was a 54-year-old mother of two, married 36 years, and she had aggressive liver cancer. Cody, in particular, through her eloquence and honesty, was persuasive that the right to choose one’s own death is a necessary component of a compassionate society.

Another powerful story was that of a woman in Washington state whose husband had died a horrible death from brain cancer. Before he died he asked his wife to promise to change the law so no one else would have to suffer as he did. The film shows her activism after his death, leading to Washington State passing a death with dignity law in November 2008.

I honor the individuals and the families who were willing to share such a difficult and intimate part of their lives, because they have given an enormous gift to all of us.

I highly recommend this film. It will make you cry, it will move you, and it will probably make you a believer in death with dignity laws.

Endless War Part Two

When I wrote the previous post, "Endless War," I had no idea about the latest outrage that Republicans are cooking up in Congress.

A provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, approved last week by the House Armed Services Committee, would allow the president to use military force anywhere in the world where terrorism suspects are reported to be present, even if no U.S. citizen has been harmed or the United States has not been attacked. It allows the president to detain “belligerents” until the “termination of hostilities.”

The New York Times editorialized yesterday,

"That deliberately vague phrase could include anyone who doesn’t like America, even if they are not connected in any way with the 2001 attacks. It could even apply to domestic threats...Since it does not give a plausible scenario of how those hostilities could be considered over, it raises the possibility of endless detention for anyone who gets on the wrong side of a future administration...As more than 30 House Democrats protested to Mr. McKeon, a declaration of “global war against nameless individuals, organizations, and nations” could “grant the president near unfettered authority to initiate military action around the world without further Congressional approval.” If a future administration wanted to attack Iran unilaterally, it could do so without having to consult with Congress."

Endless War

I watched Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" again recently. During the first few minutes of the film a narrator describes how during the Cold War, U.S. bombers flew at "fail-safe" points, ready to strike at targets in the Soviet Union. These planes flew 24/7/365 for decades. As my mind was reeling with the calculation of the dollar cost of this madness, it occurred to me that the United States has been continually at war for 70 years, with only the slightest break during the 1990s.

As soon as World War II was over the Cold War with the Soviet Union began (actually you could probably date the start of the Cold War to some time before the end of the Pacific campaign). There were hot wars during the next fifty years, notably Korea and Vietnam, which lulled people into believing there were years of peace, but that was a delusion.

In 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union the Cold War came to an end. Silly Americans dreamed of a "peace dividend": the defense budget could be slashed and all that money devoted to education and health and building a more prosperous world. How naive.

The military-industrial complex spent the next decade figuring out how to keep the peace dividend disaster at bay. The breaking apart of Yugoslavia provided a handy justification for military action, and the Iraq no-fly zone kept American jets in the air, but these weren't good enough.

On 9/11 Osama bin Laden provided the perfect excuse to begin another war without end. This one will be better than the Cold War, because the Soviet Union was an opponent that could disappear. Terrorism is a tactic and there is no worries about that disappearing anytime soon.

We naive Americans dream that with the death of bin Laden the war in Afghanistan will end and that peace dividend will finally show up. Fat chance.