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[Note for Tomdispatch readers:With this post, I'm following so many of you offline for the year. I thank each of you who hung in there with TD through 2006. Have a recuperative holiday season. Let's hope for a distinctly better 2007. You can count on TD returning early in the New Year.]
2006 was a year just grim enough that a bit of perspective seemed a necessity. So Tomdispatch ordered up a little dose of the recent past from the distant future — a trick not normally easy to accomplish, but just about nothing is beyond Rebecca Solnit, this site's resident historian of hope and author of the remarkable book Hope in the Dark (now in a new, expanded edition) — not even a Tomgram from 2026. I look forward to the more modest future — the future of the small and innovative — that she promises. Enjoy. Tom
The Age of Mammals
Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
By Rebecca Solnit
[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]
The View from the Grass
I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century — but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.
The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning — that's what I told the kids — inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.
That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries — the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad — much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the former was be beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early twenty-first century version might have been called "localism" or maybe "anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.
First of all, congratulations on your raings victories over Bill O (your cute abbreviation of Fox News's Bill O'Reilly's name, which we all love.) You have gotten major press about this status just as your contract negotiations are coming up. You and your agent must be in Hog Heaven.
Also Keith, you have to admit that your news commentary essays directed at the Bush Administration and subsequently featured on YouTube and all over the blogosphere, have not hurt one bit. Which is why I'm writing to you today. You see, Keith, I admire the serious essays you've produced this year. But they are out of step with the rest of your show, "The Countdown."
For example, your daily Worst Person in the World, Oddball and Keeping Tabs features are probably big winners for your show, much as the faux news part of "Saturday Night Live" is now a perennial. But I have to admit they personally make me squirm. I feel like I'm watching the E! channel or some similar tripe. Sorry.
The Bush administration and its "justice department
keeps finding ways to block justice and circumvent the
rights the constitution grants.
For that reason this is an Urgent Request For Funds To
Buy Trial Transcripts in defense of a blessed man
wrongfully convicted by the Bush Justice Department
for his crime of compassion:
In direct response to the humanitarian catastrophe
created by the brutal and unjustifiable U.S. and U.K.
sponsored UN embargo on Iraq, Dr. Rafil Dhafir started
the charity Help the Needy (HTN). For 13 years he
worked tirelessly to help publicize the plight of the
Iraqi people and to raise funds to help them.
According to the US government, he donated $1.25
million of his own money. As an oncologist, he was
particularly concerned about the effects of depleted
uranium and skyrocketing Iraqi cancer rates. Because
of this humanitarian work he has been incarcerated
since February 26, 2003.
Bankrupting Dr.Dhafir was just one of the many tools
the Bush Justice Department employed to make it
impossible for him to defend himself. They also held
him without bail for 31 months and denied him access
to his counsel and his own records. He is now serving
22 years in jail for a crime he was never charged with
in a court of law.
Although convicted as a white-collar criminal, the US
government touts Dr. Dhafir's case as a success in its
war on terror. In the most recent obstruction of
justice in the case, the government is attempting to
reverse an appeal court decision to grant Dr. Dhafir
his transcripts at the court's expense; they are
almost certain to be successful.
Transcripts are the bedrock of an appeal process and
will cost about $22,000. It is 14 months since Dr.
Dhafir's sentencing and we have been unable to move
forward with the appeal because we don't have the
transcripts or the funds to get them.
The vigor of the government's denial of due process
from the outset of this case is appalling and a
deliberate act of vengeance against this man. One can
only wonder why despite the fact that the odds for a
successful appeal are abysmal - a mere 5 percent - the
government still feels it necessary to inhibit Dr.
Dhafir's quest for justice.
During the McCarthy era, Judge Irving Kaufman warned
once we embark on shortcuts by creating a category of
obviously guilty whose rights are denied, we run the
risk that the circle of the unprotected will grow. It
is incumbent upon each of us to defend civil liberties
for all, not least because injustice anywhere is a
threat to justice everywhere.
For more information about the case see my recent
Fellowship
(Fellowship of
Reconciliation) article:
http://www.forusa.org/fellowship/nov-dec06/KatherineHughes.html
If you would like to join the Dr. Dhafir Support
Committee contact:
MacGregor Eddy
P.O Box 5789
Salinas CA 93915
Email: mindful@redshift.com
"Standing next to me in this lonely crowd,
Is a man who swears he's not to blame."
- Bob Dylan
It has been reported that George W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation's people) have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating policy and law.
There's a well-know witticism from the 1980s about Ronald Reagan that played-off a ubiquitous television commercial of the time that went, "Ronald Reagan is not the president: He just plays one on TV." A similar trope can be said of the present day United States. We're no longer an empire: We just resemble one on TV.
How did it come to be that our ability to apprehend reality is in such short supply, at a time when the consequences of such dangerous folly will prove so tragic and lasting?
The motto of the United States of Consumption is “In More We Trust.” The contribution of American culture to humanity is consumption obsession. Our epidemic of obesity, our land gluttonous suburban sprawl, our monster-size environmental footprint, our ravenous automobile addiction, and our heartless greed are symptoms of a deep-seated, sick mental state that keeps the economy humming. And it keeps increasing economic inequality and apartheid.
Mass consumption is also a distraction from the self-inflicted defeat facing working- and middle-class Americans in the class war they are losing. Americans are enslaving themselves with their spending and delusional prosperity. The rich and super-rich in their McMansions, luxury cars, yachts, swank spas and private jets surely are laughing at how easy it is to manipulate the 80 percent of the population that keeps enriching them.
Many common folks are deluding themselves that they have a fair shot at joining America’s super-rich — those households worth at least $10 million. According to an Elite Traveler poll, they will be spending 25 percent more this year than last on holiday parties, travel, and shopping. Among the top holiday spending categories: spirits for entertaining (up 57 percent to $22,300) and yacht charters (up 12 percent to $410,600). The awesomely affluent will also be averaging $91,100 on holiday jewelry, $36,400 on designer fashions, $52,000 on luxury watches, and $25,700 on flat screen TVs and other electronics. Nearly 25 percent of them will travel by private jet just to shop for holiday gifts. Of course, there are many Americans who do have a good chance of joining the super-rich. They are the rich Americans.
Writings
[Note for Tomdispatch readers: With this post, I'm following so many of you offline for the year. I thank each of you who hung in there with TD through 2006. Have a recuperative holiday season. Let's hope for a distinctly better 2007. You can count on TD returning early in the New Year.] 
It has been reported that George W. Bush is counting on the judgment of history to redeem the perception that he has been at the helm of a failed presidency. This notion is as muttering-at-the-wallpaper crazy as had Jeffery Dahmer, before his murder, been expecting gourmet chefs to someday champion his culinary choices. In the present day United States, our insulated leaders (who merely reflect the insularity of the daily lives of the nation's people) have shunned reality to such a degree, one would think that they spend their time writing wishful letters to Santa Claus instead of creating policy and law. 
The motto of the United States of Consumption is “In More We Trust.” The contribution of American culture to humanity is consumption obsession. Our epidemic of obesity, our land gluttonous suburban sprawl, our monster-size environmental footprint, our ravenous automobile addiction, and our heartless greed are symptoms of a deep-seated, sick mental state that keeps the economy humming. And it keeps increasing economic inequality and apartheid. 
