Reflections  

What next — On Oct. 2, The Wall Street Journal ran a scathing editorial taking the Republicans to task for failing to deliver on their promises:

"The 109th Congress has gone home to fight for re-election, and the best testament to its accomplishments is that very few Republicans are running on them . . . too many Republicans now believe their purpose in Washington is keeping power for its own sake. The reform impulse that won the House in 1994 has given way to incumbent protection. This is the root of the earmarking epidemic, which now mars every spending bill and has become a vast new opportunity for Member corruption. . . . Even amid all of this scandal, many Republicans still refuse to acknowledge any problem . . . "

But nowhere in the entire editorial did the WSJ mention the absolutely worst thing about the 109th Congress: the utter certainty that it will be followed by the 110th. — Ross Levatter

Going about their business — Seattle progressives had long been concerned that bums had no place to go to the toilet, and were doing it in doorways and planting strips. By longstanding city ordinance, every business serving food for consumption on the premises must have a toilet, but it can be for patrons only, and this was deemed deeply inadequate and also privileging to the rich. In 2004, after much debate, the city council opted to provide the public streets with five enclosed commodes. These were no ordinary outhouses. After use, a machine would spray and dry the seat. The doors would stay closed for no more than 15 minutes, giving a warning at the 14th minute that one's time was almost up.

All this had worked well in Europe, the salesmen said. It was to cost the taxpayers nothing so long as the toilet company could put advertising on its wares, and on some bus stops. But ads were unacceptable to the Seattle City Council, which instead signed a contract to lease five toilets for nearly $700,000 a year.

There were some farsighted cynics. One council member, who was outvoted, said there had been problems in other cities. Seattle's "alternative" weekly, The Stranger, issued a spoof press release from the mayor's office, which began: "Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced today that Seattle has opened its first safe-injection site, located on Broadway Avenue. . . . The site, a free high-tech kiosk complete with sink and toilet, is designed to allow the avenue's large and previously underserved population of addicts to commit furtive sex acts for money and bang dope in much-needed comfort and privacy."

The Stranger got it right. In a front-page story in October, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said that the city's five commodes had been monopolized by crackheads, sometimes half a dozen at a time, and that derelicts were afraid to go in them. As for sanitation, the paper said, the seats were self-cleaning but some patrons used the floor.

The city's response was to announce that it would install a camera outside one of the toilets to deter criminals. Said the P-I: "It also plans to pass a rule barring more than one person from being inside a toilet at the same time, unless helping a child or a handicapped person."

Forgive me: I pay taxes to these people. — Bruce Ramsey

Union Newspeak — Organized labor is pulling out all stops to win back Congress for the Democrats. And it has a nasty little surprise for us if its preferred party wins: a piece of legislation with the Orwellian name of the "Employee Free Choice Act."

Under the Wagner Act of 1935, there are a number of steps a union must take to organize a company. It must first get 30% of the employees to petition to organize, and hold open debate on the issue. Then the workers must decide by secret ballot, administered by the NLRB. Union organizers are not winning many of these battles — I suspect because most workers view unions as anachronistic, corrupt, job-killing machines — and private-sector union membership is now less than 8%.

Faced with the fact that it is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of workers, organized labor could ask itself why it is so unappealing, and maybe correct its deficiencies. But no, it is so much easier to resort to state coercion. Enter the rabidly pro-union Democrats Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. George Miller to put forward the insidious "Free Choice Act," which would completely eliminate secret ballots. Union organizers would only need to convince workers to sign cards saying that they wanted a union, and if more than half signed, the company would be unionized.

Of course, the unions' goal is to enable organizers to use strongarm tactics to get their way. "Yeah, buddy, you're free not to sign this card, and our boys are free to do to your family what they did to Hoffa!" Let's hope they don't get their way. — Gary Jason

Gunpowder treason should ever be forgot — America has OSHA, Britain has the Health and Safety Executive. Different countries, same idiotic ideology. Except sometimes I wonder. For all its faults, America falls a long way short of Britain when it comes to the Nanny State.

Richard Littlejohn reported in Britain's Daily Mail (Oct. 3) that Watford council in London has concentrated its efforts on having a smoke-free town. Sounds like a reasonable goal, right? But Watford council has gone so far as to announce that it is banning the town's traditional bonfire on Guy Fawkes' Night, November 5. Dave Cobb, Watford council's "service manager," explains why: "It takes significant staff resources to build and steward the fire and reinstate the area afterwards. It is extremely difficult to put out, in the case of overcrowding or crowd surges."

Of course, the social climate in Britain makes Cobb's logic quite reasonable. It only makes sense — in a society that has accepted the premise that the state must govern, approve, and regulate all such behavior. Furthermore, with a state-run National Health Service, and the state authorizing the legal system by which lucrative compensation is paid for even the most idiotically self-induced injury, who could blame Cobb, or his superiors in Westminister? The people asked the state for a free ride from responsibility, and, boy, they're getting it! — John Lalor

Conspiracy of dunces — Despite an instinctive skepticism about all official explanations and reports, I don't believe a word of the extravagant 9/11 conspiracy theories currently breeding and mutating all over the Internet. The controlled demolitions. The missile instead of the plane hitting the Pentagon. The secret command center at 7 WTC that guided the planes into the towers and was later blown up with the whole building to destroy the evidence. The 19 Arab hijacker impersonators who are still alive someplace. And so forth. Refuting each conspiratorial point in detail is coals to Newcastle, since they are all being thrashed out on dozens of websites and they are all open to a general objection. They assume a mastery of elaborate planning and split-second timing, plus an ability to keep quiet about it, on the part of the Bush administration, which has otherwise been distinguished by its eminent incompetence, an almost uncanny ability to shoot itself in the foot.

In all such fantasies, including those of Noam Chomsky, high-level government officials, or at least the shadowy masterminds who are secretly calling the shots, are incapable of miscalculation, self-deception, and blundering. There's never a false step in the hegemonic master plan put together by our omniscient, omnipotent behind-the-scenes Svengalis. It's really a kind of inverted patriotic self-congratulation. Our American ruling class is, like, so totally awesome. All the other imperial juggernauts, in the whole of human history, suck by comparison. Nobody's as good at bad stuff as we are. We're number one! USA rules!

But American foreign policy is what it's always been, a mix of compulsive meddling, oblivious idealism, hallucination, hypocrisy, clumsy scheming and lurching, impatience and inertia. In the months before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. were warned repeatedly by France, Russia, Jordan, and other foreign intelligence services, along with alert agents in the CIA and FBI, that al Qaeda was up to something, something big was about to happen, and they did nothing. Were they distracted, dismissive, deluded, dumb? Probably. Were they secretly hoping that something might happen, thinking it wouldn't be nearly as bad as it turned out to be (but just as useful)? Possibly. (There's the arguable precedent of FDR and Pearl Harbor.) Once the attacks occurred, did a zealous pro-war faction in the Bush administration make cynical and conspiratorial use of them to accomplish its own pre-existing agenda? Definitely. Was the pre-existing agenda (invasion and occupation of Iraq) then carried out with characteristic self-sabotaging cluelessness? Absolutely. And has the Bush regime's whole Middle Eastern policy manifested a relentless simpleminded idiocy completely incompatible with the subtle, intricate conspiratorial genius attributed to it? Sure looks that way.

Conspiracy theories satisfy basic human cravings. Everyone likes to solve bafflingly complex puzzles and mysteries, picking up overlooked clues, noticing discrepancies, studying blurred photographs, outwitting the inept cops whose case is full of holes and who probably fingered the wrong suspect. That's why detective novels are popular, and on Planet of the Conspiracies everybody gets to be the hero of one. Everybody equipped with a magnifying glass, a collection of newspaper clippings, and an obsession. So just when it looks to all concerned like the butler (or the jihadist) did it, you announce the gasp-inducing solution.

And every time history takes another wrong turn, it's reassuring to think that some purely evil comic-book villain (or cabal of villains) is steering it. Conspiracy theories, labyrinthine in form, are simple in substance. Both the 9/11 conspiracy cranks and the Bush administration axis-of-evil neocon cranks illustrate the point. It's like the mad Emperor Caligula wishing that all his rivals and enemies had one head, so he could just chop it off. The cranks try to grab hold of history hoping to slice off its head, but like the Hydra it just grows a couple more. History isn't the movie that all the popcorn-eating conspiracy buffs want it to be. It isn't a conspiracy suitable for unraveling. But it does contain a lot of unraveling conspiracy theories. — Eric Kenning

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