Why Laughter (and Forgetting) Wins

Pay attention to the wrong things, and this seemed to be a week when the great ship of state was seizing up, perhaps for good. Brown wins in Massachusetts. Edwards admits to his love child. Haiti aid distribution gets worse. Rumsfeld's name shows up in the client list of DC's leading madam. Obama expresses frustration that banks need more than spanks. Everyone lines up to oust Bernanke. The Supreme Court says that corporations matter more than you. There is nothing good, there is no "crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

And yet, and yet.... I went to Thursday night's Studio Bee sessions and saw a band of 17-year-olds from Cheyenne Mountain High School operating under the nom de guerre of Dance Over Anaheim, who played some of the most perfect pop music I ever heard. This never fails to happen, because of tiny miracles everywhere. Even in the depths of the early Medieval period, we got the Venerable Bede. As Pynchon said in some of his most graphic WW2 concentration camp writings, the sky can show us a star. It can, and does.

Indictments Are In Order

Final confirmation came in a one-two punch over 48 hours: On June 17, a Senate report confirmed that the executive branch had regularly transferred prisoners among various locations so that "illegal combatants" could not be seen by the Red Cross. The next day, Physicians for Human Rights released a lengthy report confirming extensive and systematic physical torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Kandahar. The report specifically said the torture was too routine and systematic to be the work of bad apples, and called for the appointment of a prosecutor to check on Defense Department and White House behavior. There is no room in this to even be glib or droll. We need to see war-crimes indictments of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld (and perhaps Robert Gates?)