I suppose it's normal, in a perverse sort of way. Every election season you get a couple of candidates who seem to be, God help us all, speaking truth. It's a nice shock, of course.

In the case of me, and why not since it's my log, television is not a device I rely on for news of the world. It's bad enough watching a ball game and hearing pompous screw-offs talking about drugs and athletes, and now our sponsor would like to sell you Levitra. Hell, American culture left planet earth years ago, with television leading the way.

I avoid also watching any of our Presidents. Since Nixon, I've probably run up a total of half an hour on Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes, not counting the second Bush-Kerry debate which Julie made me watch, the one where George appeared to be dribbling from the corner of his mouth. It's a matter of sound mental health.

My news of the political trail arrives via electronica. YouTube, for example, where you can see things the totally corrupt mass media would prefer go unnoticed.

I'd heard of Ron Paul somewhere, a long-time right-wing Republican in the Congress, with some screwy ideas about the income tax. What I had not known, or maybe it'd slipped through the widening cracks in my mind, was that he voted against the Patriot Act as well as against invading Iraq. Hmmm... and the man's running for President.

YouTube is where you can find snippets of this guy. He, along with Democrat Mike Gravel of Alaska, a former Senator with the nerves of Thomas Paine, is into the deeper questions. I don't agree with everything the man says, and I think he may want to inquire what the corporate thugs would do when their private Blackwater armies grow beyond the ability of a disemboweled federal government to control, yet he has a point. And that's something most of the official front-runners, those jokes who have been annointed by Fox and Murdoch and the rest of the jackels as 'serious' candidates, do not have and never will.

Check out Mike Gravel and Ron Paul. Running for President. Cool.

See, here's the thing.

Almost every day I hear or read things said and written about George Bush, America's curse, and among these things are comparisons. I know people are only trying to make sense of it all, put George in some perspective which will enable them to better cope. But these constant comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, and other madmen in history? Unfair.

To start with, it's like comparing great ballplayers, say Ty Cobb and Luis Pujols. Each is or was regarded as a great player and unpleasant human being. But remember, Cobb played in the dead ball era. It was a different game. So, too, with George.

Hitler? Dead ball era. In Bush's league, everyone and everything is juiced.

Let's go back to the Roman Empire. Caligula, the guy Bush is often compared to. Insane? Sure, but Caligula did not have ready access to nuclear weapons. Caligula appointed his horse as a consul; Bush appointed Gonzalez as attorney general. Coincidence?

We need to take a broader view of these temporal matters. Empires fall. Never pretty, that's for sure. Plagues, tortures, vast stupidity and greed, the gamut, in other words, of the very worst in human beings. We've been here before. The only real question is whether the human race will survive. If so, freedom and sanity will rise again. In the meantime, we will do what we can to stop the madness, beginning, as always, with ourselves.

These are sunny days. My bet is that we will survive because, essentially, whatever the purpose of the human experiment it is unlikely that we will be permitted to get out of it so easily. We have clearly not graduated yet.

I spent about five hours walking and riding around at San Geronimo, just over White's Hill on the way to the California coast. There were frogs in the ponds. Red tail hawks. No George.

Warning to consumers:
This is going to be a rambling, semi-coherent post which appears to be commentary on news of the day but is actually a way for me to finally dump this small pile of recent newspaper clippings.
Some people save things unaccountably. I've known people who saved plastic forks and spoons, or tiny plastic containers. For years I actually hung onto those packets of soy sauce that come with Chinese takeout, which is mind-boggling in the light of day because I never use soy sauce and have no conceivable reason for retaining the stuff. Plus the packets began feeling sticky. I'm in no position to point fingers here.
What I seem to save up now are news items torn out of the Chronicle. There is a really decent-sized stack of them in a basket in my living room, and the basket's overflowing, and I would like to throw some of these items out. But on their way, each ought to be mentioned, fizzed into cyberspace to go wherever the fuck things go out here, and maybe somebody with more energy – or stomach – than I seem to have for the task will DO SOMETHING with it.
So. Some news, such as:

* The Ford Motor Company announced that its new commercial advertisements would be directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrite David Mamet. This is what critically-acclaimed artists seem to have come to. It's worse. The AP article said, "Ad agency copywriters drew up the dialogue in an effort tomimic the 'Glengarry Glen Ross" writer's work. Mamet didn't change any of the words and was in charge of camera angles, lighting, and the actors' facial expressions, a Ford marketing executive said."
Here's what I say: sell your Ford stock.
Let's ponder the reality in the mind of a "superstar" writer/director who would peddle his ass to the Ford Motor Company. Does Mamet need cash for some strange reason I'm not aware of? Is this just what the nation's become in the Time of Big Cash? We're way past the time of consequential human conduct in any direct, moral sense. What the fuck are principles? Do you know what a Maserati costs?
But I digress. Never mind. Mamet has always been a stunningly bad, ridiculously-praised writer. None of his characters talk like actual people, none of them. He's more pretentious than Andrew Lloyd Webber or even Donald Trump. Sell your Ford stock. Hell, sell your Ford.

* A federal appeals court upheld the sentencing of a mentally-ill man's three-strikes sentence of 25 years to life for shoplifting two bottles of liquor. He's a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who has been in and out of mental hospitals. Two bottles of liquor. Meanwhile our Hummer-driving governor with the masculinity problem offered up a state budget calling for more money for prisons and severely cutting funds for the poor and the elderly. We are not only consciously creating a permanent underclass in America (see California's business-inspired High School Exit Exam for an example of the process being used), we are criminalizing them far beyond the sanctions imposed on rich, white people. People who have the sixty-two bucks Cornel Ray Joshua didn't do not have to shoplift them.

* From the Washington Post: "A U.S. Army brigade commander in Afghanistan told the families of 69 civilians who were killed or wounded by members of a Marine Special Forces unit in March that he is 'deeply, deeply ashamed' about it, describing the series of shootings on a civilian thoroughfare as a 'terrible, terrible mistake.'" He then tendered the sum of $2,000.00 to each family victimized. He called the payments "a symbol of our sympathy to them."
Let's deconstruct this story. Take a bunch of people recruited for the Marines, put them through the toughest indoctrination there is, cull the most violent, the ones who you can count on to pull the trigger, and put them in a special unit. Then send them into a territory where they are not wanted, where the enemy is hard to recognize, and have them drive around where they'll be sitting ducks for a sniper. These guys snapped. It's no surprise. The only surprise is that we claim "sympathy" for murders we have committed as an inevitable result of who we have become. I'll bet Cheney paid a lot more than two grand to the lawyer he drunkenly shot in the face back whenever that was. I suppose lawyers are worth more.

* Angel Raich, a 41-year-old, terminally-ill Oakland woman dropped her challenge to federal anti-marijuana laws. Raich uses the drug every two hours due to the pain from scoliosis, endometriosis, a brain tumor, and a wasting syndrome. She said "I've lost all faith in the judicial system." She had argued that federal prosecution would violate her right to preserve her life and be free of severe pain. Evidently, this does not reflect the values of federal judges. The government always says about the issue that it doesn't want to "send the wrong message." But the government needn't worry. We understand the message. You don't give a damn about human beings. Just crack open another Bud Light and turn on the game.

* On a related note. The Motion Picture Association of America announced that smoking – the legal stuff – will be a factor in future film ratings.

* The Democrats have been up to their usual tricks. Pelosi backed down from her campaign promise of "draining the swamp" when it came to lobbyists buying congressmen and -women, for the simple reason that 43% of lawmakers registered as lobbyists left congress between 1998 and 2006. They're already hooking for a living, they're waiting for the payoffs to start kicking in. No wonder they don't have the votes for stopping the fucking war: too many of them live in districts heavily influenced by military contracts. By the way: great ads for Boeing on television, all the photos of people of color from around the world, the Red Cross symbol, "we know why we're here," but never showing military destruction from their weaponry. Reminds me also of the TV ad for Dow Chemical, that thing about how we see the real human beings behind our little chemical products, showing, again, people of color, but no mention of the military products, the chemicals which, even before napalm, destroyed.

Don't hope for very much from the Democrats. They're pols, they're corrupt to one degree or another – okay, not all; obviously not all. Only ENOUGH. Too many in this party and carrying too much influence to be overcome. Pelosi is probably doing all that she feels she can. It's the nature of the beast. If you don't understand the system sufficiently and agree to trade some pieces of yourself on occasion for what is either an actual or rationalized greater good later, if you can't manage that then you will never get near it.

* Did you know that there is a massive student protest now taking place against the University of California's ties with the American nuclear weapons system? One would expect this to be front-page news, scores of hunger strikers... think about it: SCORES OF HUNGER STRIKERS. They attempted to be heard at a Board of Regents meeting and were "forced out of the room by police as Regents fled into a back room. Some students left voluntarily but others refused, linking hands and arms and singing John Lennon's 'Give Peace A Chance.'
Guess it's not news. The mass media, now pretty much owned and operated by business people whose allegiance is to the bottom-line and not to informing the people, let alone "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable," which is their historic charge, have given this story a pass. Guess it's not even happening. Well, have faith. As Gil-Scot Heron said, "The Revolution will not be televised."

There's more, but you must be bored by this time. Now I can toss these clippings.

I live in a special place, on the Pacific coast, over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The climate is temperate. There's Point Reyes National Seashore, Mount Tamalpais, a half-dozen lakes, hiking trails. It's a great place to live, a point of view so widespread that the cost of real estate is beyond crazy. Not everyone who lives here is wealthy, but it certainly helps, and if you are a young, ambitious, rich family with small children you are onto the fact that the school districts, especially in central and southern Marin, routinely produce stratospheric results on standardized tests. Graduates of Tam High and Redwood, especially, are expected to head to Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, and, well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the architects of this system, along with complacent (or not terribly bright) school boards and their functionaries, superintendents and other ass-kissers, are not especially interested in dealing with the deep and ugly wounds inflicted by it on its supposed beneficiaries, the students and families. Test scores are trumpeted in the local media, a kind of orgy of self-congratulation in which the bozos running the machine sprain their wrists patting themselves on the back, and meanwhile there are dead and wounded piling up along the road as surely as in Baghdad, only nobody really notices. Nobody, that is, except the victims.

It's bad throughout California. The imposition of a state "exit exam," based on the premise that a student who successfully navigates the cultural and social and emotional currents of adolescence while passing four years' of classes, still should not graduate if he/she cannot pass a standardized state examination, is creating a growing, desperate underclass of the young.

In Marin, we brag about how well the local kids have done on the Exit Exam. After all, to those who are less curious about how high scores are attained than they are about how high real estate values can be goosed, it's another face-value story. We're just better, smarter, more gifted, more – oh, go ahead, say it, you members of the Tam High School Board – valuable than others. Fuck 'em. We've got ours.

What is not just being ignored but willfully swept beneath an increasingly lumpy carpet is this: there is damage everywhere, and it's not coincidental. Students are and have increasingly been doing physical harm to themselves. There are alarming rates of attempted suicide by students in these highly-regarded schools, at least there were before it became policy to ignore or not collect the numbers. There is widespread use of drugs and alcohol. School counselors describe "clinical depression" and "suicidal ideation."

I don't want to be thought impolite, but WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

What's going on is that the people who run California, hell, the people who run America, are making decisions and implementing a program in the public schools which is systematically damaging virtually every child who is subject to it.

The testing mania is a large part of it. Here's how we got there: public pressure on the politicians based on the perception that the schools were not adequately doing their job. The politicians, always quick to dodge tough decisions, figured out that instead of actually investing real money in the schools – which might mean raising taxes and shortly thereafter looking for another line of work not as much fun – it would be easier and cheaper to just buy the testing packages being peddled by special interest groups whose members, such as The Gap's Donald Fisher, would be materially aided by the creation of a permanent underclass.

What a deal for everyone! The pols looked like they were actually doing something, which mollified a gullible public and somnolent media, and they were doing it on the cheap. Big business, whose profits are never actually enough to satisfy their multi-millionaire CEOs, got a large group of 18-year-olds who had no viable future except the army or working at Toys R Us for next-to-nothing. That would make the army happy, too, of course. Can't get a high school diploma? No sweat: we'll fix that. Sign here.

The headline in the San Francisco Chronicle last autumn read "54,000 AT RISK OF FAILING EXIT EXAM". It's news like this that sends the stock of fast-food corporations through the roof, triggers excessive saliva in army recruiters, and puts a smile on the face of every beer distributor in the greater northwest. That the final numbers may fall slightly short of that is not much of a victory.

You see, it's inherently an artifice. There is no such thing as a determinable body of information or knowledge which may be tested; there can't be. There can only be a limited number of 'facts' which someone says are important, which excludes all other 'facts', which by definition are now considered pointless or even non-existent. What this has already done to the educational process is well-known among teachers, who have yet to get their asses in gear to do anything about it. Students must spend at least 15% of the academic year taking standardized tests and preparing for them. School employees spend time administering and grading them. Academic work, the real kind which real teachers want to do with their students, is crammed into fewer hours; the amount of homework grows – in the Tamalpais District it is about four hours per night; along with the pressure to take special classes to boost grade points to better than 4.0, now considered essential to gain entry to a better university, and the companion necessity to engage in sports and 'volunteer' activities to make a resume look good, there ain't much time remaining for actually living a life.

There is very little time to be with their own families, never mind develop themselves socially and emotionally. How surprising is it that so many are constantly under great pressure, that they drug themselves or drink themselves out of reality, that they have eating or weight issues, that they attempt suicide?

By the way, it shouldn't need to be mentioned, obvious as it is, but:

There will always be however many Exit Exam failures as the corporate and military thugs feel they need... all they have to do is make the testing harder or easier, depending on the quota for the year. Why not? What's stopping them? An alert citizenry? A school board?

It is obvious that at least a majority of those entrusted with educational policies, from the federal to the state to – in Marin at least – the local level, will not face, let alone fix, the crisis. For anything to change, students and teachers will have to make it happen. They've got to. The damage this system is doing to young people is nothing short of child abuse. Somebody's going to have to say no.

There's a book just released by a fellow named Philip Zimbardo through Random House. Called "The Lucifer Effect." You may want to check it out.

Zimbardo was a Stanford professor in the summer of 1971, operating with a small grant and a good-sized question, namely, to what degree, if any, does one's social, cultural, and ethical environment influence one's behavior.

Shorthand for this would be: The Nazi question.

This question arises a great deal lately, for reasons which I don't suppose I need trouble you with right now. When you're looking at what seems to be the personification – even the glorification – of pure evil, does this mean what some rightwingers and pseudo-religious zealots say it does, that human beings, at least some of us, are just bad seeds? Or does it mean something else.
Zimbardo's experiment, known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, proved, probably beyond all doubt, that it means something else.

His project recruited 20 students and paid them $15.00 per day for what was supposed to be two weeks living in a 'prison' environment created in the basement of a campus building. They were assigned roles at random, either prisoner or guard. Within a few days, he and his 'subjects' found themselves in a living hell.

The 'guards' quickly devolved into sadists, the 'prisoners' into cowering victims, and Zimbardo himself into a real warden who, by his admission, was worried more that the prison would be "liberated" by an attack from the outside than he was about the health and well-being of the 'prisoners'.

The experiment was terminated only when one of Zimbardo's colleagues intervened. 'Prisoners' experienced mental breakdowns and exhibited signs of post-traumatic stress disorder yet, despite the fact that they could themselves choose to leave the program any time, nobody left.

If that does not scare the hell out of you, being a citizen of the United States of America in 2007, then you are officially comatose.

(material for this entry liberally cribbed from a review of "The Lucifer Effect" by Michael Roth in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle)