No Buddhist Silence: Terra Naomi, Sarah Gill, Edith's Paper Chain, and the Road to Shambhala

Appropriate, somehow, that I got my first glimpse of the Stupa honoring Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche this past week. Both the Tibetan Buddhists and my Methodist preacher made presentations in recent days on the value of silence, and the way that activity and experience intrudes on the Being There. Well, shit, flunked that bardo pond. There has been more bizarre and inexplicable experience in the last few days intruding on any potential meditation, the only answer is to just ride the flow until it stops, then absorb it.

Moving backwards from Sunday, the afternoon at Colorado Springs Pridefest was supposed to be a simple ACLU task of passing around Mardi Gras beads and cardboard fans. (Video of a rain-spattered parade is here.) My back was to the stage at Acacia Park, and it seemed odd that I heard a singer apparently covering Terra Naomi's "Vicodin." It didn't occur to me until the final half of "Say It's Possible" that the person in question really was Terra Naomi, who had been flown to the fest for a single Colorado gig - right here in our little duckburg. Shit again. Missed the direct experience, but Trungpa was whispering "be still, be still."



Besides, I was a wreck from too many margaritas the night before, celebrating and mourning the departure of the dynamo of Denver, Sarah Gill, organizer for AFSC, who was heading to Atlanta and the CDC. Had a wonderful chat with an organizer from Fort Collins. Here's Eric Wright singing a farewell song to the tune of "Streets of Laredo," and yes, that's Jamie/Jonny 5 on the porch, who assured everyone after the last verse that Flobots would inform the poor Sarah-less masses when something was going on.



The entire day on Friday was spent driving Patty (Carol's friend from high school), Deb, and Susie to the retreat at Shambhala Mountain Center at Red Feather Lakes - an astonishing drive west of Fort Collins. It's like the song says, "how does the light shine," etc. You can watch the thrilling walk around the Stupa here.

Oh, and the night before, Abby came home from Australia, surprise of surprises. Before going to DIA to pick her up, it was necessary to see the free studio show of Edith Makes a Paper Chain and Electric Illuminati, two truly illuminating Colorado Springs bands. There's a single Edith sample below, you can find more at the usual YouTube hangout, but I honestly have to stop experiencing and start the silence, or I'll be stuck on this wheel of karma forever. If so, I'll carry the Flip video along to this bardo stage so it's all on the record with a film at 11. But for now, the rest is silence.

A New Definition of "Police Riot"

Kudos to Colorado ACLU for uncovering the story behind a very strange event on Monday (Aug. 24) at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Though Monday was not supposed to be a big day for protesters, it ended up being the day with the most arrests, when police suddenly and inexplicably attacked a sunset march going from the Civic Center toward downtown. More than 100 were arrested, and of the 60 who decided to challenge their arrests, none have been convicted, due to lack of evidence or uncertain police testimony.

Turns out the police staged their own riot, when Denver undercover cops masquerading as anarchists pretended to resist arrest so that they could safely be removed from the area before the police did a sweep. A Jefferson County deputy, not understanding what was going on, pepper-sprayed the undercover cops along with the commander who was pretending to arrest them. From there, events deteriorated to the level of farce.

This isn't that surprising. When tear gas was widely used at the February 2003 protests in Colorado Springs, amateur videographers took pictures of police on side streets surrounding Academy Blvd., donning full riot gear before any civil disobedience had been done. When you can't find enough protest to justify your actions, make your own.

The core move of any bureaucracy is to self-perpetuate. If the budget can't be justified by its activity, a bureaucracy almost never calls for cutting its own budget. Instead, activity is generated. Everyone was chiding the Denver cops for the overwhelming presence on downtown streets during DNC. So they had to manufacture events to rationalize their budget.

When paranoids see all life and struggle as a stage-managed drama directed by shadowy puppet-masters, they are wrong 80 percent of the time. But every now and then, the curtain lifts on a second layer of game-behind-the-game, where we see that the paranoids have a point. What appears to be a political struggle is a scripted bread and circuses show presented for our edification and enjoyment. As the rallying cry goes, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Discernment and the Bullshit Detector

Two interesting stories today about freedom of speech and the use of propaganda. First, several Denver groups called for banning the free in-the-newspaper distribution of the DVD Obsession, a puff piece about radical Islam. Second, an 11-year-old is suspended from a Denver-area elementary school for wearing a home-made T-shirt saying "Obama is a terrorist's best friend."

OK, I'm on the board of the local and state ACLU, so my opinion is worth more than yours, mofo! Obsession is highly offensive but totally legal. It's an advertising insert. The energy on this one should not be wasted on getting its distribution banned, but in finding out whose money is behind the mysterious and despicable Clarion Fund who bankrolled this. And don't tell me this isn't partisan propaganda - Clarion drove around a semi truck at the Democratic National Convention, advertising Obsession with a huge portrait of Osama bin Laden, featured no doubt to draw some subconscious connection between Osama and Obama.

The Aurora school district was in their rights in suspending Daxx Dalton. The courts have continuously held that students do not have unlimited rights of free speech if the message is obscene or disruptive - in fact, one district's efforts to ban Oakland Raiders jackets as gang-related have been continuously upheld in court! An elementary-school student should have every right to wear a campaign button for Obama or McCain, or wear something that says "Nobama" or "Obama means higher taxes." If the student is of high school age, there might be a good civil suit as to whether that student could wear a shirt charging a candidate with being aligned with terrorists. With a younger student, it's just provocative and almost certainly a setup planned by the parent, Dann Dalton.

The point about such propaganda is that most Americans are too superficial to analyze propaganda and determine when they are the victims of vicious messages. My mother-in-law tells me she will vote on initiatives based on what the TV advertisements tell her. I say they are all paid garbage, and that she'd be better off studying voter guides from LWV, etc. She won't have any of that. If it's on TV, it must be true. We can't ban everything that tells a lie, we simply have to keep shouting louder.

OK, folks, I'm the civil liberties oracle around here, and if you begin to doubt what I am saying, you are probably hallucinating. You are certainly just plain wrong. Shut up and go back to work.

Foolish Fusion Blues

Hats off to the Center for Independent Media chain for launching a nationwide series on intelligence fusion centers, providing local centers of excellence to augment the notorious Joint Terrorism Task Force. At the end of July, articles appeared about centers in Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, and Michigan. The ACLU had conducted a fantastic national survey, distributed on CD-ROM and PDF files, "What's Wrong with Fusion Centers," but this is the first series to go local.

Those with long memories might notice the similarities to the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, turning police forces crooked since the 1960s, but ever since 9/11, the pseudo-private intelligence effort has gotten big federal bucks. If you have to ask what's wrong, you haven't checked your Constitution lately.

FISA: Trust but Verify

I had the distinct honor this past week of participating in a Colorado ACLU Fall Forum panel on electronic surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The panel featured such luninaries as Jean Dubofsky, the first woman justice on the Colorado Supreme Court (pictured), talking about the Denver Police Intelligence files; Bill Hochman, Colorado College history professor and FISA legislation expert; and Pat Huhn, Pikes Peak Community College English professor who keeps tabs on data mining.

One thing we all agreed on is that civil libertarians could reach reasonable compromises with the National Security Agency as to how domestically-located switches and routers could be used for monitoring legitimate terror networks -- provided a revamped version of the Protect America Act provided specificity. That same specificity should be applied to telecom carriers seeking indemnity from helping government agencies without obtaining warrants -- in fact, Sen. Patrick Leahy said this week he'd look at indemnity, provided no blank checks were offered. The people fighting such explicit and formal legislation are not necessarily the intelligence agencies. Instead, there is a clear majority among Republicans in Congress, a significant minority among Democrats, and far too many media pundits, who do not want the topic of signals intelligence discussed under any venue. They want us to simply trust leaders like Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, former head of NSA. Hats off to Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com, who blasted the entire editorial-page staff of The Washington Post, as well as Joe Klein from Time, for saying that we should simply amend FISA in open-ended ways and hope our leaders are honest. As Greenwald said, this kind of thinking is dangerous for democracy. As my old pal Ronald Reagan said about Soviet arms-control treaties, "Trust, but verify."

NEWS FLASH: In the October 20 edition of The New York Times, the editors gave us a long and very hard-hitting editorial blasting the Oct. 18 Senate compromise on FISA. The editorial was titled "With Democrats Like These..." and concluded by saying that the only thing worse than having a single party rule Washington prior to late 2006, was having the Democrats win both houses and still have a single party ruling Washington. You can say that again!