When hate hits home

[Seattle Times photo by Ellen M. Banner]

Horrifying moments like Friday's shooting rampage at the Jewish Federation in downtown Seattle always leave communities stunned and shaken, and ours is no different right now.

But these moments also present special opportunities -- particularly the opportunity to transcend the virulent hatred that motivates killers like Naveed Afzal Haq. Consider what took place at the scene:

Haq, he said, had hidden behind plants in the foyer of the Jewish Federation. When a young teenager, aged 13 or 14, came into the building he said, Haq took her hostage and forced her to go inside.

There, Haq opened fire with two semi-automatic handguns, one a .40-caliber and the other a .45-caliber weapon.

"He said, 'I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel,' before opening fire on everyone," Marla Meislin-Dietrich, a database coordinator for the center, told reporters on Friday. "He was randomly shooting at everyone."

Kerlikowske said today that Haq ordered the employees not to call 911 while he continued shooting, wounding Dayna Klein, a pregnant woman, in the arm. He said Klein had protected her womb with her arm. She fell to the floor after she was shot, but managed to crawl back to her office and call police.

The Seattle police chief called her one of the heroes of the day.

Klein was still on the phone with the 911 operator when Haq came into her office, again demanding she stop calling police. Instead, she convinced Haq to talk to the 911 operator.

Dayna Klein, as Robert Jamieson adroitly points out, was a hero twice: first for shielding her unborn child from the bullet that shattered her arm, and next for ignoring the warnings from the gunman and calling 911.

Even more remarkably, her doing so managed to help defuse the situation, because it put the gunman in contact with dispatchers who talked him out of shooting any other people:

Their professionalism helped ease the gunman's rage after he told them he was holding a pregnant woman, and had a gun pointed at her head.

"I shot her once. I shot her in the arm," he tells the operators, according to a police statement in a court document.

An operator says Klein might need an ambulance. The gunman replies: "I don't care."

Eventually he says: "I'll give myself up ... I'll put my gun down."

He set down his weapon. He walked out of the building. Seattle police officers were waiting for him.

It was a remarkable moment, partly because it illustrated both the universal dynamic at play in scenes like this, as well as how we might best confront them. Enraged killers like Haq, as they're stalking their victims, are people who have managed to completely objectify and dehumanize their targets, so that they are no longer people but mere things -- and in the process, they become insanely inhuman themselves. What Dayna Klein and the two dispatchers managed, almost miraculously, was to touch some small remaining part of Haq that was still human.

Scenes like these always create long, abiding waves of sorrow that ripple through the community. The first is for the immediate victims:

Six women were shot, including 58-year-old Seattle resident Pamela Waechter, who died from her injuries. Other victims were:

• Klein, 37, of Seattle, who was in satisfactory condition early Saturday at Harborview Medical Center with a gunshot wound to her arm.

• Cheryl Stumbo, 43, of Seattle, who was in serious condition at Harborview.

• Carol Goldman, 35, of Seattle, who was shot in the knee. She was in satisfactory condition.

• Layla Bush, 23, of Seattle, who was in serious condition.

• Christina Rexroad, 29, of Everett, who was wounded in the abdomen. She was in serious condition.

The larger target of Haq's attack -- the Jewish community -- is the next focus of concern, especially because this is nothing new for them. Sadly, there is a long history of lethal maniacs making scapegoats out of Jewish people, globally, nationally, and locally.

Haq selected his victims specifically because they were Jews, and that makes this act clearly a hate crime. As I explained in Death on the Fourth of July:

Hate crimes attack not only the immediate victim, but the target community -- Jews, blacks, gays—to which the victim belongs. Their purpose today, just as it was in the lynching era, is to terrorize and politically oppress the target community.

In this sense, questions about whether this was an act of "terror" seem beside the point: as I've explained in more detail, hate crimes indeed are a kind of terrorism. Specifically, this terrorism is the kind inflicted by our fellow citizens in an attempt to intimidate and deprive others of their fundamental civil rights. (For more on hate crimes and the laws against them, see here and here.)

However, there are some special considerations that complicate the picture in this case. It was not a "reactive" hate crime (the most common kind) in which a member of the majority community lashes out violently -- rather, it was the rarest kind, a "mission" crime in which an unstable, usually psychopathic personality carries out a personal program to rid the world of a perceived evil.

This becomes clearer as details about Haq's past emerge -- especially the fact that he appears to have swung between Christianity and Islam in recent years:

Yet Haq was frustrated at his lack of friends and female companionship. He told friends he felt alienated from his own family, in part because his career had disappointed his father and also because he had disavowed Islam last year, converting to Christianity.

Haq had begun studying the Bible, attending weekly men's spiritual group meetings, only to stop coming a few months after his baptism.

He had told the group's leader that he seen too much anger in Islam and that he wanted to find a new beginning in Christianity.

Yet in the midst of his shooting spree in Seattle Friday, he declared himself an angry Muslim.

It seems that Haq has had a variety of mental-health issues in the past decade:

Montelongo said Haq seemed depressed by the tension that had grown between he and his family. And he said Haq talked about suffering from bi-polar disorder. But that he seemed to improve in how he coped with what Montelongo described as his own anger.

And then there was this:

In March, Haq was arrested for lewd conduct at a Tri-Cities mall. It was Ullah he called to bail him out of jail, because he was too embarrassed to call his own family, Ullah said.

Haq, it appears, had been receiving mental-health counseling afterwards, but then dropped out -- and then reappeared in Seattle.

Seattle has a history of dealing with tragedies like these -- especially in which the Jewish community is targeted by a mentally unstable person who has bought into the dogma of anti-Semitic hatemongers. The most notorious of these was the 1985 murders of the David Goldmark family by David Lewis Rice, who had decided he was going to singlehandedly eliminate the "top communist" and "top Jew" in Washington -- even though Goldmark was neither. (The Goldmark family had long been politically active progressives; Goldmark's brother Peter, incidentally, is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in eastern Washington's 2nd District.)

The Friday shootings also echoed the 2000 rampage of Buford Furrow at a Los Angeles Jewish day-care center. Furrow, you'll recall, was a white supremacist from Washington state who'd been undergoing mental-health treatment in the Seattle area for several years.

The city, in fact, is still reeling from the more recent killing rampage by a young man from Montana named Kyle Huff, who gunned down six ravers in the early-morning hours after a rave because he hated ravers and "this world of sex that they are striving to make," telling his brother in a letter that he wanted to "kill this hippie shit."

The Huff massacre was not a classic hate crime, because these typically involve prejudice against race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, while Huff's hostility was almost purely cultural. But if we see more of this trend, it may be time to rethink that.

What all of these incidents have in common is the mental instability of the actors; and I've explored previously how that affects the way society and the law must deal with the perpetrators. In the case of Buford Furrow, for instance, his mental illness became a mitigating factor in his eventual sentence, as prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty in large part because of it.

Marking off rampages like Furrow's, Huff's, and Haq's as "isolated events" caused by mental illness is a cop-out, however. Because, as the case of David Lewis Rice made all too clear, these mentally unstable types are almost always stirred up and driven to their insane acts by haters of various stripes, the kind whose voices seem each day to be growing louder in our public discourse. These cultural vampires have developed a real knack for inspiring mentally unstable people into horrific acts of violence.

Who did this in the case of Naveed Afzal Haq is still unknown. Certainly there is no shortage of anti-Semitism lurking among certain factions of Islam, and this may have been his inspiration. But it also lurks among certain corners of Christianity as well, and if these were among the "Christians" to whom Haq was exposed, then the source of his motivation may well have been some of the same far-right influences that were responsible for these previous cases.

Regardless of the source of the hate, there remains, in the face of it, only one appropriate response: the community must stand up and, contrary to the desires of the rampaging madmen and haters, build bridges where they hoped to burn them down.

As with all hate crimes, this kind of effort is absolutely essential for the healing process to begin:

Well, it's true that community responses against emanations of racial hate -- particularly hate crimes -- often take on the trappings of Liberal Chic and its attendant self-righteousness. But it's important to understand that in the case of hate crimes, these kinds of demonstrations play an essential role in curbing the crimes. They have real practical value, which is why you'll see them attract support not merely from civil-rights groups and liberal churches, but also from law enforcement and city officials.

The vast majority of hate-crime perpetrators, as I explain in Death on the Fourth of July, believe fully that they are committing these crimes with the unspoken approval of their respective community -- that they are merely acting on its real desires. This (combined with a high incidence of narcissistic/antisocial personality disorders) lends itself to another common trait of hate criminals: they rarely believe they've done anything wrong. And it's important to note that these perps consistently held these views well before they ever acted upon them.

Thus, high-profile and widely sanctioned expressions of community disapproval of these crimes play an essential role in discouraging further such acts. They inform any would-be hate criminals that, contrary to their preconceived notions, the community at large clearly does not approve of these kinds of acts, and rather than being community heroes, they will be pariahs.

In the case of Naveed Afzal Haq, it's clear that he believed he was acting particularly on the "unstated wishes" of the Muslim American community. And this weekend, the Seattle Muslim community stood up en masse and repudiated his horrific act. Muslim leaders were all over local television, mourning the victims and condemning the violence; local Muslims paid visits to Jewish centers to pay their condolences to reach out to them as human beings. The Muslim community also issued a statement:

We categorically condemn this and any similar acts of violence. We pray for the safety and health of those injured and offer our heartfelt condolences to the family of the victims of this attack. We also hope that the perpetrator of this crime is brought to justice.

There is no room for such acts of violence in our city and community. When one of us is attacked, none of us are safe. We refuse to see the violence in the Middle East spill over to our cities and neighborhoods.

We reject and categorically condemn any attacks against the Jewish community and stand in solidarity with the Jewish Federation in this tragedy.

This is an admirable start, and precisely the kind of bridge-building that incidents like this can inspire, amid the sorrow and pain. What's needed, as well, is for the entire community to stand up and repudiate this act, and all hate crimes, for exactly the same reason: The louder that voices of hate speak and inspire acts of hate, the more we will stand up and repudiate them, because they poison and destroy our human community.

When we do this, we not only blunt their hate, but there is also the chance that we can defuse it, as Dayna Klein managed to do last Friday. Because when we stand up for what is human in all of us, there is a chance, however small, that we can even touch the vestiges of humanity that lie buried beneath the layers of hate in people like Naveed Afzal Haq, before they ever act.

'Strawberry Days' at Firedoglake

UPDATE: Here's a link to the opening discussion. Please feel free to join in.

I'm terribly honored to announce that my most recent book, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, has been selected for the next book salon discussion at Firedoglake. There will be a hosted discussion this Sunday, July 30, and another the following Sunday, Aug. 6, in which I'll participate. (It will probably be hard for me to stay away from the first discussion, truth be told.)

Coming as it does on the heels of their smashingly successful discussions of Glenn Greenwald's How Would a Patriot Act?, Eric Boehlert's Lapdogs, Sam Seder's FUBAR, and George Soros' The Age of Fallibility, I can't help being just a wee tad ecstatic over the decision by Jane, Redd, and the gang to host my year-old book.

(Not only that, but they made a copy of Strawberry Days the prize in their recent Michelle Malkin rap contest, a bit of subtle and wicked humor. Hope you enjoy, Punaise!)

Despite its being a year old now, I think Strawberry Days has, if anything become even more current. Among the subjects it explores are:

-- The hole in the Constitution that the internment episode opened up -- namely, the potentially illimitable powers accorded to the executive branch during wartime, including the power of the military to indefinitely incarcerate civilians, based solely upon their race, in a non-battlefield situation, without review by the courts. It also discusses how the Bush administration has made use of these precedents en route to its own expansion of powers.

-- The crude racism that drove the anti-Japanese-immigrant campaigns for much of the first half of the twentieth century, and the indispensable role it played in eventually bringing about the mass incarceration of 120,000 people. While the text was published before immigration became a national debate, readers will readily recognize the astonishing similarities between that earlier nativist campaign and the current one playing out on our southern border and elsewhere.

Somewhat secondarily, it remains the only text that specifically addresses -- and repudiates -- Michelle Malkin's apologia for the internment. Fortunately, Malkin's thesis has shown no real longevity and is now largely ignored. Nonetheless, the revisionism that it represents lives on in a multitude of similar "conservative movement" enterprises, and its exposure is if nothing else helpful in seeing how one might go about dealing with the latest permutations of right-wing psychosis.

One of the real reasons I'm so tickled is that, truth be told, Strawberry Days hasn't done terribly well so far.

When it's been reviewed, it's gotten excellent reviews, including a glowing piece in the Seattle Times. But the problem has been getting it reviewed; I think that book editors (like many book consumers) saw it as a regional or local-interest offering primarily (and certainly it has done well enough regionally), but not something they wanted to spend the space on reviewing. Haven't there been a bunch of internment books already?

Of course, I knew there were a lot of internment books already available. But Strawberry Days is fairly unique in a lot of regards: it's constructed more as a non-fiction narrative than as an academic or strictly historical work. It also examines critical aspects of the internment and the Japanese American community that are often missed in other texts, including a frank assessment of the role of white supremacy in the overt oppression of the Japanese immigrants, as well as the role of the agricultural life among the Japanese.

But, you know, people won't know that without reading it. So it largely went unreviewed in any major publication. The only national newspaper (so to speak) to review it was, ironically enough, the Washington Times, which wrote glowingly about it.

And, even though we sold out the first two smallish (2,000) runs, the publisher reports tepid sales and so far is hesitant about putting it out in paperback -- a critical step for this book, I think, since doing so seem to me critical to helping it find its audience. It's the kind of book I think people would be far more likely to pick up for $16 instead of $30.

So I'm hoping the interest generated by the FDL book salon can help get Strawberry Days over the hump. It's part of a critical chain of support for what I'm doing here: the book writing gives me the time and financial space to blog. If it doesn't stay afloat, then I'll probably have to shutter the other things I'm doing. That's not a threat, just a reality.

I've set up the link above to go to Jane's Amazon page for the book. If you haven't gotten a copy, you should do it pronto. If you already have one, well, see you at Jane's place.

'Beyond politics'

One of the really offensive aspect of the right-wing drumbeat of eliminationism is that so many of its purveyors -- notably Rush Limbaugh and his many imitators, including Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin -- try to slough off criticism of the nastiness of the things they say and write by pretending that it's just "entertainment," or merely a "joke".

The crude reality, of course, is that the things they say are not only deeply personal, they play out in the real world by poisoning our personal lives as well as our public discourse. Pretending afterward that it was all "just kidding" is palpable disingenuousness.

And the right-wing response -- claiming that liberals are responsible for the poisoning of the public well -- is especially offensive because it not only serves to disguise, but provides a positive justification for, the escalation of this kind of rhetoric into real action.

In upstate New York's Orange County, a left-leaning city councilwoman named Gail Soro is reaping the consequences of this kind of rhetoric:

The bent windshield wipers annoyed her. The sex toy glued to her windshield back in June made her furious. But finding a horse's head in her swimming pool yesterday hit Wawayanda Councilwoman Gail Soro right where she lives.

It left her angry and frightened last night, as state police scoured the Orange County town for suspects. They were treating it as a case of harassment and trespassing, at the very least.

Soro and her husband, Ed, were in the pool until about 8:30 p.m. Monday night. Yesterday morning, they noticed the water looked a bit dark. They thought that an animal might have died in the pool.

Ed Soro grabbed the skimmer, raised a dark object from a corner of the pool and called out to his wife as he dragged it to the surface: "That's a horse's head."

She quickly went back into their house. "I was hysterical," she recalled last night.

As the day went on, her hysterics gave way to anger. The stunt with the windshield wipers and the sex toy both happened at Wawayanda Town Hall, where Soro is the lone Democrat on the five-member Town Board.

But the horse's head was brought to their home, while they slept, where their grandchildren come over to swim.

Soro, to her credit, is not backing down:

Gail Soro sent her own message last night: She won't be chased out of office. She's up for re-election next year, and she's running. Soro's been right in the middle of tussles over growth and planning that are the hot-button issues in the town.

Still, she wondered if her story would discourage others from running for office.

"Who would want to put up with this?" she said.

Republican Councilman Dave Cole acknowledged that he's knocked heads with Soro, but he flatly condemned what was done to her yesterday.

"This isn't politics. This is beyond politics," Cole said. "This is beyond the pale."

Credit Councilman Cole with recognizing that this kind of thuggery has no place in American politics.

Too bad he doesn't also take the time to note that the conservative movement's chief figureheads are the folks most publicly fomenting it.

[Hat tip to Rob.]

UPDATE: Edited to reflect that this Orange County is in New York, not California.

The bicycle solution

I've only alluded to it previously, but your humble correspondent is also something of a bike nut. I try to bicycle to work, to the store, on errands, as much as possible. Fiona rides a third wheel behind me to school.

I don't write about it a lot because, well, it's really not all that interesting. But the concept of bike commuting -- and the ethics involved in it -- is something I am interested in, and recently had a chance to write about.

Specifically, I've got the lead piece in this week's Seattle Weekly, and it's about the realities of bike commuting in Seattle, a supposedly bike-friendly community. It's kind of a local thing, but I like to think that the idea of bicycling as at least a partial solution to a host of environmental and political ills -- from global warming to our dependency on oil -- is something that goes unnoted by too many people. I actually tend to blame it on what I see as a culture of convenience and laziness endemic to Americans generally, but that's mostly when I'm feeling grumpy.

In any event, be sure to check it out, as well as a couple of sidebars only available online: a piece on how bikes and cars can get along, and another with tips for beginning bike commuters.

Oh, and if you happen to live in the Seattle area, be sure to pick up the latest edition of Seattle Magazine, which contains my in-depth look at the Minutemen of Whatcom County. Unfortunately, it's not available online.

Conserving orcas, and humans too

One of the words you don't hear used a lot in the debate over global warming is conservationist. Most of the people raising the alarm about its effects are described as "environmentalists."

The two are related, but significantly different. Conservationism is about trying to keep the environmental resources we currently have intact; it's about ensuring that those resources are not being wasted in the short-term pursuit of the dollar. It is, in reality, conservative in the best sense of the word.

Environmentalism, in contrast, encompasses a whole panoply of beliefs aimed at improving the planet's environmental health, many of which take a much more idealistic approach to issues. Some of these -- including the so-called "deep ecology" movement -- are in fact profoundly inimical to the approach taken by conservationists. And many are, frankly, fairly radical in their belief systems.

This is partly why so many of the apologists for global warming are able to get away with pretending that their opponents are radicals with an anti-business agenda -- just call them "environmentalists" and you're halfway there to framing them negatively. It doesn't matter if you're actually talking about a mass consensus of trained scientists.

But the fight over global warming, when you get down to basics, is essentially conservationist -- it's about conserving the environment we currently have. It's about trying to prevent the catastrophic effects that radical climate change could have on all of us -- on our livelihoods, on our economies, on our survival itself. There's nothing the least bit radical about it. If anything, it is often criticized for being too accomodating, in its approach to using natural resources, to those who would exploit them.

Unfortunately, the American right -- in its knee-jerk defense of all things corporate, as well as its complete capture by religious fundamentalists -- is eager to obliterate the hard scientific realities presented on a number of political fronts, not merely global warming. So it keeps presenting a picture of scientists and their supporters as radical environmental wackos with an anti-business political agenda.

They also take a ridiculously short-term view, both economically and in the raw impact on human life (which always becomes an economic issue anyway), of the effects of their own agenda -- namely, unfettered exploitation of the environment -- on the rest of us. The results, in fact, are responsible for what is about to be a significant, and perhaps irrevocable, change in the natural world that supports us all.

When you contrast this with, say, a strictly conservationist outlook, it becomes fairly clear which party is the more genuinely radical of the two. Take your pick: the faction conducting a radical experiment on the global environment, or those warning that the change is a major disaster in the making -- and, moreover, that it can be at least ameliorated if not prevented altogether?

Yet somehow -- mostly by wrapping themselves in the mantle of "traditional" capitalist values -- the corporatists and their enablers manage to depict their opposition as the "radical" faction and themselves the "common sense" side.

This dynamic is starting to take root in the battle over the Puget Sound's endangered orcas. Lynda Mapes had a pretty solid feature on the difficult road to recovery ahead for orcas in the Sunday Seattle Times. It included this passage from the people who are filing suit to overturn the listing:

"I see catastrophic economic impacts," said Tim Harris, general counsel for the Olympia-based Building Industry Association of Washington, a plaintiff in the suit. "I see it slowing and crippling development, driving up housing costs and hurting jobs."

This is, of course, simply a short-term view of the matter. Because there will be other catastrophic impacts, of a much broader, more severe, and longer-lasting variety -- if the Puget Sound orcas are allowed to go extinct.

As Mapes' piece explains (and as I explored in depth in an earlier piece for Seattle Weekly), the orcas are an ideal indicator species of the overall health of the Puget Sound ecosystem, precisely because they are long-lived creatures who reside atop its food chain.

What we know is that when orcas start disappearing, the chief reason is that they're not getting enough to eat -- particularly the chinook salmon that constitute the large majority of their diet. There is, of course, the impact of the loss of tourism dollars drawn to see the killer whales here (estimated currently at well over a million dollars annually) would be only the first felt. If those salmon are disappearing, then whole other segments of the Puget Sound economy that make their living from it as a resource (particularly fishing) will begin to suffer. In other words, the traditional conservationists who use the Sound to make their living are going to be affected, disastrously, as well.

There is, moreover, the stark reality of the waters they inhabit:

Secondly, the recovery plan is expected to seek a reduction in pollution and chemical contamination in the orca's habitat. That would mean addressing industrial-waste disposal, agricultural and household use of chemicals. It also would mean dealing with discharge from wastewater and stormwater. And it would mean cleaning up contaminated sites and sediments.

Today, the orcas' home waters are a stew created by 17 pulp and paper mills in the Puget Sound and Georgia Basin region; 34 million gallons of raw sewage a day spewed by the city of Victoria, B.C., into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; and thousands of discharge pipes from industries, sewers and storm drains. Contaminated areas dot the region, including 24 Superfund sites around Puget Sound still not cleaned up.

Southern residents have become the most contaminated marine mammals in the world. They carry loads of toxins high enough to suppress their reproduction and make them more susceptible to disease.

The story concludes with a quote from Ken Balcomb of the Center for Whale Research:

"It's not a popular solution. But what's called for is looking at the big picture. We have an endangered whale eating a threatened fish. We have to change our ways. I hope this is part of the wake-up."

The problem is that the armies of the right are fully invested in keeping everyone asleep on issues where science, and hard common-sense reality, are not on their side. And they do this by constantly muddying the issues, presenting false choices as the only ones available, and grossly distorting both the science and the scientific debate.

A prime example of just how intentionally obtuse they can be was noted by Chris Mooney the other day, in the form of Peggy "Divine Dolphins" Noonan's recent ruminations on global warming:

During the past week's heat wave -- it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday -- I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warming is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?

Well, as Mooney points out, many of these questions were in fact directly addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which put out a detailed report answering most of Noonans's questions back in Geneva in April 2005.

But the IPCC's answers weren't the ones that Noonan, and the Republican right generally, wanted to hear. So they keep asking the same questions, and when they get the same answers, they pretend that the politics that they say is "contaminating" the science renders any serious judgment impossible -- when in fact the only people injecting politics into the science are those on the right who are busily plugging their ears to the evidence.

But as weather maps like this become increasingly common -- as do the rolling blackouts caused by the demand for air conditioning as a result -- the evidence will keep getting harder to ignore. You can pretend, as the Bush administration has been doing, that we can all just "adjust" to the realities of global warming. But when those realities include a frying-pan America addicted to air conditioning and the energy it consumes, the economic equation begins to shift, heavily.

That, in the end, may be what finally awakens Americans to what has been happening to our national policies, especially those in which science plays a significant role. Playing semantic and partisan games with science in pursuit of short-term political and personal gain is bad for a lot of things: bad for the environment, bad for wild animals, bad for humans. But it's also bad for business.

The conservationist ethic, with its eye on preserving what we've got, always recognized this reality. It might be time to start breathing life back into it.

That right-wing logic

My dad is always sending me crappy e-mail jokes. You know the kind: dependent on stereotypes, often predicated on violent fantasies, and utterly devoid of wit or insight. I think everyone has someone in their family like this.

I love my dad, though, and am content to have him send me these things. It's kind of a way of staying in touch.

So last week he sends me this joke. It depends on the usual stereotypes (this time about rural hicks and professors), but ...

Two South Texas farmers, Jim and Bob, are sitting at their favorite bar, drinking beer. Jim turns to Bob and says, "You know, I'm tired of going through life without an education. Tomorrow I think I'll go to the community college, and sign up for some classes."

Bob thinks it's a good idea, and the two leave.

The next day, Jim goes down to the college and meets Dean of Admissions, who signs him up for the four basic classes: Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Jim says. "What's that?"

The dean says, "I'll show you. Do you own a weed eater?"

"Yeah."

"Then logically speaking, because you own a weedeater, I think that you would have a yard."

"That's true, I do have a yard."

"I'm not done," the dean says. "Because you have a yard, I think logically that you would have a house."

"Yes, I do have a house." "And because you have a house, I think that you might logically have a family."

"Yes, I have a family."

"I'm not done yet. Because you have a family, then logically you must have a wife."

"And because you have a wife, then logic tells me you must be a heterosexual."

"I am a heterosexual. That's amazing, you were able to find out all of that because I have a weed eater."

Excited to take the class now, Jim shakes the Dean's hand and leaves to go meet Bob at the bar.

He tells Bob about his classes, how he signed up for Math, English, History, and Logic.

"Logic?" Bob says, "What's that?"

Jim says, "I'll show you. Do you have a weed eater?"

"No."

"Then you're a queer."

OK, so I laughed at this one. Because this is what passes for logic not just among rural hicks, but nearly the entire right wing in this country.

[FWIW: In strictly logical terms, the joke illustrates a false syllogism, or more precisely, a failed enthymeme. A simple Venn diagram would make clear how it fails.]

This is true not just when it comes to sexual politics and cultural assumptions. It's also true of nearly every other issue that the American right confronts these days:

-- Worried about global warming? You're the same as the Nazis!

-- Opposed to the war in Iraq? You're "objectively pro-Saddam". Even if it turns out later you were right.

-- So you object to nativist scapegoating in the immigration debate? You must be part of the "open borders crowd" willing to surrender our national sovereignty to the "Reconquistas"!

-- You think Joe Lieberman is an out-of-touch Democrat who needs to be replaced? You must be an angry liberal blogger!

-- Think President Bush overstepped his constitutional bounds by ignoring the law and ordering surveillance of American citizens? You must by a traitor who wants to harm national security!

The list, and the beat, goes on and on.

And you were wondering why so much of our modern discourse resembles Bizarro World? Wonder no more.

The Minuteman scam

The growing rift in the ranks of the Minutemen (first reported here) driven in part by the activities of the consulting firm responsible for Chris Simcox's remarkable makeover is now going public.

And you know that it's a serious rift when the report appears in The Washington Times, which has a long history of running article supportive of the Minutemen:

A growing number of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leaders and volunteers are questioning the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in donations collected in the past 15 months, challenging the organization's leadership over financial accountability.

Many of the group's most active members say they have no idea how much money has been collected as part of its effort to stop illegal entry -- primarily along the U.S.-Mexico border, what it has been spent on or why it has been funneled through a Virginia-based charity headed by conservative Alan Keyes.

Several of the group's top lieutenants have either quit or are threatening to do so, saying requests to Minuteman President Chris Simcox for a financial accounting have been ignored.

As so often happens when right-wing scamsters are caught with their hands in the cookie jar, they've continually promised to provide a full accounting and then, of course, never do:

Mr. Simcox, in an interview last week with The Washington Times, estimated that about $1.6 million in donations have been collected, all of it handled through the Herndon-based Declaration Alliance, founded and chaired by Mr. Keyes. He said the donations, solicited on the group's Web site and during cross-country appearances, included $1 million directly to MCDC and $600,000 for a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border.

But Mr. Simcox's numbers could not be independently verified, including claims in a 3,961-word statement issued after the interview that he spent $160,000 on "our last two monthlong border-watch operations."

The Minuteman organization has not made any financial statements or fundraising records public since its April 2005 creation. It also has sought and received extensions of its federal reporting requirements and has not given the Minuteman leadership, its volunteers or donors any official accounting. A financial statement promised to The Times by Mr. Simcox for May was never delivered.

And note how they dismiss their internal critics: Why, these folks are just the racists and bigots we've been trying to weed out!

Several other Minuteman members question why Mr. Keyes' organization is involved in collecting MCDC donations, saying donations to the movement should be handled by the Minuteman leadership, who could be directly responsible for it.

Mr. Keyes has financially endorsed and supported the Minuteman organization as programs of Declaration Alliance and the Declaration Foundation, another Virginia-based charitable organization that he heads. He accused internal MCDC critics of being "decidedly racist and anti-Semitic," saying they had been removed as members of the Minuteman organization.

"I personally applaud Chris Simcox for his diligent adherence to a rigorous standard that weeds out bigots from the upstanding, patriotic mainstream Americans who participate in the Minuteman citizens' border watch effort that I am proud to support," he said.

Mr. Keyes said that MCDC is in the process of applying to the IRS for nonprofit status and that those responsible are "adhering to all relevant federal regulations." He called concerns over finances and accountability "groundless," saying they were being "bandied about by members of anti-immigrant and racialist groups, and other unsavory fringe elements attempting to hijack the border security debate to further their individual agendas."

By smearing his critics without any supporting evidence, of course, Keyes is conveniently diverting attention from the substance of the questions. And well he should. After all, he is part of the same group of businessmen, headed by Philip Sheldon, that operates both Diener Consulting -- with whom Simcox has a contract -- and Response Unlimited, the mailing firm that, as I explained previously, was making use of Minutemen donors' contact information.

The Minutemen, it's clear, are becoming very profitable indeed, even if their fence projects don't go so well. For a few people, at least.

It's dehumanization time

The immigration debate -- already rife with all kinds of extremist rhetoric and appeals -- took another notch downward this week when Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa compared illegal immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to cattle:

It was prop time on the House floor Tuesday night when Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), making the case for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border, showed a miniature version of a border wall that he "designed."

He had mock sand representing the desert as well as fake construction panels as C-SPAN focused in on the unusual display.

But it got really interesting when King broke out the mock electrical wiring: "I also say we need to do a few other things on top of that wall, and one of them being to put a little bit of wire on top here to provide a disincentive for people to climb over the top."

He added, "We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement for them to be fooling around with it. We do that with livestock all the time."

Of course, this is par for the course for King, who earlier published a hateful, disinformation-laden screed against illegal immigrants on his Web site. But it's worth noting how, in both cases, the rhetoric was all about dehumanizing border crossers.

The ugliness of the rhetoric in the immigration debate generally is being observed elsewhere. The recent debate in the Colorado Legislature over illegal immigrants raised all kinds of red flags among legislators regarding the thinly veiled racism that underscores so much of the right-wing response to illegal immigration.

This kind of rhetoric has all kinds of real-life consequences. In California, for instance, the total number of hate crimes declined 4.5 percent last year but hate crimes against Hispanics increased 6.5 percent.

Perhaps most ominously, the right-wing fervor over immigration continues to fuel white supremacists, who have recognized it for the opportunity that it presents to expand their base and broaden their appeal.

Recently, there were New Hampshire rallies by "White Pride" groups against illegal immigration, while the Aryan Anarchist Skins at their rally in Oregon, Ill., recently, also focused on immigration.

Of course, one can rest assured that folks like Rep. King have nothing -- no, nada, nuthin' -- to do with that.

The origins of 'eliminationism'

Well, since this blog is the first entry in a Google search of the term "eliminationism," I suppose I'm going to have to take some ownership of it. And I'll gladly do so, because its increasing appearance in right-wing rhetoric is indeed an important phenomenon.

But I will be the first to point out that I didn't invent the term. I first encountered it in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's text Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, where it appears extensively and plays a central role in his thesis that "eliminationist antisemitism" had a unique life in German culture and eventually was the driving force behind the Holocaust.

A word about Goldhagen: In the ensuing debate over his thesis, I found myself falling more in the Christopher Browning camp, which doubted that "eliminationist antisemitism" was quite as pervasive as Goldhagen portrayed it, and that, moreover, it was as unique to Germany as he described it. Having some background of familiarity with the history of American eliminationism (particularly the "lynching era" and the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the "Yellow Peril" agitation and the subsequent internment of Japanese Americans during World War II), I agreed especially with the latter point.

That said, Hitler's Willing Executioners is an important and impressive piece of scholarship, particularly in the extent to which it catalogues the willing participation of the "ordinary" citizenry in so many murderous acts, as well as in the hatemongering that precipitated them. And his identification of "eliminationism" as a central impulse of the Nazi project was not only borne out in spades by the evidence, but was an important insight into the underlying psychology of fascism.

Reexamining the text, it's hard to find a single point at which Goldhagen explains precisely the meaning of "eliminationist," except that it is spelled out in nearly every page of the book's first hundred pages (Part I is titled "Understanding German Antisemitism: The Eliminationist Mind-set"). Probably the closest I can come to a distillation of the concept appears on p. 69:

The eliminationist mind-set that characterized virtually all who spoke out on the "Jewish Problem" from the end of the eighteenth century onward was another constant in Germans' thinking about Jews. For Germany to be properly ordered, regulated, and, for many, safeguarded, Jewishness had to be eliminated from German society. What "elimination" -- in the sense of successfully ridding Germany of Jewishness -- meant, and the manner in which this was to be done, was unclear and hazy to many, and found no consensus during the period of modern German antisemitism. But the necessity of the elimination of Jewishness was clear to all. It followed from the conception of the Jews as alien invaders of the German body social. If two people are conceived of as binary opposites, with the qualities of goodness inhering in one people, and those of evil in the other, then the exorcism of that evil from the shared social and temporal space, by whatever means, would be urgent, an imperative. "The German Volk," asserted one antisemite before the midpoint of the century, "needs only to topple the Jew" in order to become "united and free."

Of course, I'm struck in that passage by how easily one could replace "Jewishness" with "liberalism" and "liberals" in much of the current environment -- as well as a number of other targets for right-wing elimination, particularly illegal immigrants.'

I'm planning to write more on the subject soon, but I've noted previously that the eliminationist project is in many ways the signature of fascism, partly because it proceeds naturally from fascism's embrace of palingenesis, or Phoenix-like national rebirth, as its core myth. And I've also noted that eliminationist rhetoric has consistently preceded, and heralded, the eventual assumption of the eliminationist project.

This is the case not merely in Europe, but in America as well. Perhaps more germane in terms of our current milieu, eliminationism has a long and colorful -- and ultimately, shameful -- history in this country.

Halfwits and propagandists who assure us that it can't happen here are ignoring that, in fact, it has. It's buried in our hard-wiring. And the modern American right is doing its damnedest to bring it back to life.

Eliminationism? Whuzzat?

That most excellent of Morans, the one named Rick, has decided to try to tackle the growing use of the term "eliminationist" to describe right-wing rhetoric by suggesting, of all things, that it's just one of those words that means whatever we want it to mean.

As I responded in his comments:

Hilarious and pathetic.

Of course, nowhere in this post is an explanation of the actual meaning of the term "eliminationist," even though it has been given numerous times at my blog. (Nice spelling of my name, BTW. Guess it goes along with this.) So, by pretending that no such definition or explanation exists, you effectively create a nice little straw man that you conveniently set aflame. Impressive. Not.

Incidentally, go back to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's work for more on eliminationism.

My understanding, for what it's worth, is that the concept of "eliminationism" was originated by scholars of fascism studying the Nazi phenomenon. However, it's clear that the impulse existed well before the 20th century.

I'll have more on this in the next few weeks.

The projection strategy

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, who has been dealing this week with the latest surge in eliminationist rhetoric -- and actual behavior -- from the right-wing blogosphere.

The main focus has been on the fake "controversy" over an obscure blogger named Deb Frisch who wrote a disgusting and evidently threatening comment at Jeff Goldstein's blog, which set all the right wing -- including Fox News -- abuzz with righteous indignation over the specter of an increasingly "unhinged" and violent left.

I especially noted the his initial roundup on the Frisch matter (including the antics of the Perfesser, whose ethics we've limned previously along similar lines):

With those brilliant and elevated responses assembled before him, Instapundit -- who endlessly parades himself around as a righteous advocate of civil discourse, and who was one of those who spent the weekend lamenting the terrible language directed at Jeff Goldstein -- also weighed in on my post. He did so by approvingly linking to the very high-level responses from Dan Riehl, Sister Toldjah, and Patterico, and then shared with us: "I'm no fan of Greenwald." (Incidentally, Instapundit, who claims with great self-satisfaction to be an adherent to the privacy-protecting "Online Integrity" concept, links to Riehl, who currently has posted on his blog satellite photographs of Punch Salzburger's home along with his home address).

So that's the level of discourse that comes from right-wing bloggers, every one of whom cited here -- each and every one -- doled out solemn lectures this weekend about how terrible it is for people to write mean personal insults on the Internet, only to respond to my post today with the above-excerpted tantrums. And all of that leaves to the side the fact that they were unable to comprehend the actual arguments that were made in the post -- most of them responded to the opposite of the argument that was actually made -- an embarrassing fact which QandO's Jon Henke had to explain to them here and here. But ultimately, their whiny, ad hominem tantrums seem more notable than the lack of comprehension.

As Greenwald went on to describe today, this derangement and open adoption of extremist ideas and appeals -- especially to the most thuggish elements of the right -- may be most prominently visible in Glenn Reynolds' case (though regular readers here are well aware that this has been his MO for some time) but is in fact widespread throughout the right blogosphere:

The extremist and increasingly deranged rhetoric and tactics found in the right-wing blogosphere -- not only among obscure bloggers but promoted and disseminated by its most-read and influential bloggers -- is, indeed, "a very common disease." When it becomes commonplace to hurl accusations of treason against domestic political opponents, or when calls for imprisonment and/or hanging of journalists and political leaders become the daily fare -- all of which is true for the pro-Bush blogosphere -- those are serious developments. And they merit discussion and examination by the media.

What we're witnessing on a massive scale, of course -- as the foofaraw over Deb Frisch so amply illustrates -- is projection: the classic right-wing propensity to see in its enemies its own dark side. I've described its appearance in recent years many times here, including discussions of its subtler aspects.

The classic description of projection comes from Richard Hofstadter in his examination of "The Paranoid Style in American Politics":

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

As I noted quite awhile back, projection from the right has become such a common phenomenon that it's now a very useful gauge in guessing where the right is taking us next:

Indeed, one of the lessons I've gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

Whether it's sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn't matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they're busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor of a hundred.

For a long time, I really believed that this was simply the right acting out on its own psychological predisposition. But as it's gathered volume and momentum -- especially as the right has avidly accused the left of the very thuggishness, both rhetorical and real, in which it is increasingly indulging -- a disturbing trend began to emerge:

What is particularly interesting about this kind of projection by conservatives is that it then (as the comments indicate) becomes a pretext for even further eliminationist rhetoric against liberals -- and eventually, for exactly the kind of "acting out" of rhetoric that Van Der Leun foresees from liberals.

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

And it is extraordinarily successful precisely because projection, as a trait, is so deeply woven into the right-wing psyche. Those who engage in it consciously set off waves of sympathetic response from their audiences because it hits their buttons in exactly the right spot.

The signal event for this, I think, was Michelle Malkin's book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild which was a black-and-white-case of intentional projection. Indeed, as I noted further, it provided a pretext for a whole explosion of hateful, eliminationist rhetoric from the right:

Indeed, books like Unhinged actually serve a specific purpose: to provide epistemological cover for conservatives' own behavior. If those wackos on the left are wrecking America with their unhinged bombast, well, a little return fire is well earned, isn't it?

This is why, in the weeks after her book's release, we were subjected to so many instances of truly unhinged rhetoric from the right, Bill O'Reilly in particular. Within a week of Malkin's appearance on his show, O'Reilly was suggesting that San Francisco deserved to be attacked by terrorists, compared anti-Iraq war protesters to Hitler sympathizers, called all Europeans cowards, and promised to "bring horror" to his ephemeral foes in the "war on Christmas."

Did anyone on the right utter a peep? Well, no. Not even Michelle Malkin.

Of course not. That is, after all, her entire purpose in doing this. It's a strategy -- and so far, it's working like a charm.

Sunset at the Park

A family of barn swallows has built a nest in the peak of the roof at the front of the rangers' cabin at San Juan County Park. You can hear them chirping away when you sit on the bench there, taking in the view of Smallpox Bay. Every now and then one of the adults swoops out, gracefully, over the bay and back.

It's still early evening and the bay is glassy calm when Fiona and I come down from our campsite to use the phone. We talk to her mom (who is still back at home, getting ready to join us the next day) a little while, and then Fiona spots the baby swallow.

It is huddled on the ground in the space between the soda machine and the rangers' cabin, chirping, answering the calls from above but clearly unable to become airborne and return to its nest. Fiona wants to pick it up and pet it and comfort it, but I explain to her that if we do, it will smell like humans and its mother will reject it and it will die. If we can find a ranger, I tell her, maybe he can find a way to get it back up there without a human scent.

Just then the chief ranger, a kindly, middle-aged man named Joe Luma, comes down from the campsites and Fiona runs up to implore his help with all the urgency a five-year-old can muster. "Joe! Joe! Come quick and see the baby bird! It needs our help!" She leads him around to the soda machine and he bends down to examine it.

"Okay," he reassures her. "I'll get out the ladder and we'll see if we can't return it to its nest." He stands up and smiles, somewhat winsomely, because he has done this before and knows what the eventual outcome will almost certainly be, regardless.

He beckons his longtime assistant, Ron Abbott, and they go about fetching the ladder and a box to put the bird into on its return trip to the nest. Not far away, I see Ron's cat, a friendly black-and-white fellow named Vinny, playing in the rushes near the bay. Cats will be cats, and cats eat birds. But Vinny evidently hasn't clued in to the presence of the fallen swallow.

Fiona is happy now that Joe and Ron have gone to work on her behalf, and we go back to our campsite, where she regales her little troupe of friends with the tale of how we rescued a baby swallow. They are all appropriately impressed.

The next morning Fiona insists we go back to the ranger station to check on the baby swallow. We can hear the family chirping away in its nest, and the nestling is nowhere on the ground, so she is satisfied that it has been saved: "See?" she says. "It's back home in its nest now," pointing up at the chirping nest.

A little while later I see Joe and Ron inside the station and poke my head in. Joe smiles ruefully and checks to make sure Fiona is out of earshot, then tells me: "We put that bird back up in its nest, and it was back down on the ground in twenty minutes. It was still there when I went home." Of course, it was gone in the morning; whether it was Vinny or one of the wild animals that populates the park -- most notably a family of black foxes -- that finished the job, we'll never know.

But of course, we don't tell Fiona or the kids this. The nestling's fate is one of those adult realities: that in nature, beauty is intertwined with death, love with cruelty. Those charming black foxes survive by eating, among other things, fallen nestlings.

Children will learn this in their own good time; death and life and its cruel ways will intrude on their lives eventually, and so we do what we can to shield them from it when they are young and the world is still sweet and beautiful.

Death, however, is not always so kind to those of us doing the shielding.

****

Joe Luma and Ron Abbott are the kinds of fellows you like to have as park rangers, especially in a place that draws as many children as San Juan County Park. They're older men who like people, and they love the park and having people use it. Especially children, for whom its twelve acres on the western shore of San Juan Island are an open chest of nature's treasures.

I have been camping here every year for the past fifteen, sometimes on multiple visits over a summer, as I will be this year. Many of the rangers the county had hired in previous years had been young men who seemed not very interested in the people using the park, so I had never gotten to know many of them. I've only gotten to know Joe the past couple of years, though he has been here four, but camping here has become remarkably better in his tenure as park manager, and most of the credit belongs to him.

Some of it, though, also belongs to Ron Abbott, who I've gotten to know rather well over the six years he's been a ranger here. I first met him back in the spring of 2000 when I got a wild hair and decided to bike out to the island during one of our periodic "surprise" warm spells in April. The day I rode out was sunny and warm, and I was the only camper there that day. But that evening a wind kicked up across Haro Strait and right through my open campsite, and suddenly the view was too cold to take in. Rather than huddle in my tent, I wandered down to the ranger station to chat with the new ranger.

I don't remember what all we talked about, but I liked Abbott right away. He was in his early fifties, curly red hair and a beard, medium height, with square wire-rim glasses, straightforward countenance, and a ready smile. I never asked too much, but he seemed like someone who had been through his share of rough patches and was out here piecing his life back together. His job doesn't pay especially well, and it's isolated back here. But he always seemed happy.

Certainly, he worked hard. Every time I saw Ron he was cutting brush or fixing a piece of equipment or chopping wood, or just patrolling the grounds and checking to make sure everyone was fine. He saw himself as a real steward of the park, I think, and the park showed it.

Just this spring, Ron and Joe together built an eighty-foot staircase from the upper bench of the park down to its lower second beach, following a plan that Ron had devised. Previously, you had to shimmy down an increasingly slick set of rocks at one end of the beach to reach the pebbly beach, and doing so with children could be risky. Now, you can just walk your kid down a freshly built set of Trex stairs.

This is great news for us, because we brought a whole load of youngsters -- mostly five- and six-year-olds from my daughter's school, along with their parents and siblings -- to the park last week, just in time for one of those marvelous sunny weekends you dream about when you make plans in the spring. We use this second beach a lot, since it is ideal for beaching and storing kayaks, and heading out onto the water quickly, especially if killer whales should appear.

The park's main feature is a massive open grass field that faces out over Haro Strait, and it is visible from most of the campsites in the park. So parents can simply let their children go run and play and still keep an eye on them, though many of us are content to simply sit out on the edge of the field and watch kids play while we watch for whales too. At the open end of the field lays a giant fallen Madrona, trimmed and aging, transformed into a gigantic wooden jungle gym for kids of a broad range of ages.

[Movie trivia note: This park was the site of the exterior shots for the Nicole Kidman/Sandra Bullock popcorn chick flick Practical Magic. The ancient Madrona was still standing in those shots. Proceeds from the shoot paid for the park's brand-new bathroom.]

As far as many of the kids are concerned, though, the chief draw is out there in the water: the whales. The endangered southern resident population of orcas prowls these waters frequently in the summertime, and your chances of seeing them here are better than most places in the United States. Lime Kiln State Park, about a mile and a half south, is actually the best place to see them up-close from land, because they like to come in right next to the rocks there sometimes; when they come by County Park, they usually pass farther out, beyond the rocky little island that serves as a home to peeping oystercatchers about 200 yards offshore.

This all changes, of course, if you have kayaks, which we do, including a couple that are designed to accommodate children. Over the years I've learned how to spot the whales' approach from a ways off (on weekend, the activity of whale-watching boats is a dead giveaway), and so we often set out from the beach in time to watch them. We get close enough for a good look, but we try never to get too close or interfere with them.

On Saturday, they started showing up around noon, and they kept coming by periodically for much of the afternoon. We took most of the kids who wanted to go -- which was all of them -- out to sample the water and for some to see the whales.

At one point, we observed a behavior I'd only heard about previously: logging. A female named Slick -- designated J16 -- was lolling for long stretches at the surface, in some cases three minutes or longer; most of the time, orcas are constantly submerging themselves after they surface. Accompanying her was her fast-growing calf, a seven-year-old named Alki, or J36.



Alki (whose sex is still unknown) was playing with its mother, lolling upside down, its pectoral fins in the air; sometimes as it came up behind her it bumped its nose playfully into her side, at others it swam out ahead by a few feet and spyhopped, checking out its surroundings and spouting mist over the glassy surface of the water.

What they were doing was what we all like to do on hot summer days: lazing. There was a powerful northern current that the rest of the pods were taking, and these two were just enjoying the sun and letting the tide do the work.

Riding with them, we were more or less doing the same thing. The current pulled us steadily north, and the only time we dipped our paddles in the water was to pull back if it looked like we might come too close to our companions. Fiona's friend Felix was seated before me, and his father sat in the front; I had out my hydrophone, and the speaker sat in Felix's lap as we drifted along. The orcas were vocalizing a lot; it wasn't as chorale-like as my last listening, but it was magical nonetheless. The beatific, awestruck look on Felix's face said it all.

At last, after drifting for what seemed like a dream's worth of time, we found ourselves about a quarter-mile south of Smuggler's Cove, so I pulled us out of the current and close to shore. We promptly caught the backcurrent there, and it pulled us back south almost as eagerly as the main-channel current had taken us north. It made for an easy day's paddle, and while we didn't exactly drift back, we scooted back to camp with such ease that it still seemed like a dream as we pulled up to the beach.

Days like that, for me, make life worth living. There is something immensely rewarding about connecting kids with nature, letting them taste and smell and feel the real world, the one that they can never get from a video or computer program. When you do that, you pass on to them values that words cannot communicate. These values were passed on to me the same way, and I believe that some of these children will one day pass them on to theirs. So I am participating in something timeless, and that is inexpressibly satisfying.

This is how nature, the stuff of life in its raw form, so often appears to children. Beautiful, dreamlike, the source of so much awe. And for most of the day, I was swept up in it, drifting in it, soaking in it like Slick.

And then the evening came, and with it the other side of nature.

****

A couple of bicycling campers, who had initially set up their tents in the hiker-biker campsites, decided they didn't like the noise in the adjoining open field that evening and moved their tents and bikes down to a grassy knoll outside of the camping area near one of the overlook benches. Stuff like this rankles old-timers like myself, who know that the park's resources are carefully managed because they are used so much and can be easily run down.

More to the point, I knew that they really rankle Ron Abbott, who was relentless in keeping campers relegated to their designated sites. But he hadn't been around for awhile and I knew he would want to know about this development, so I moseyed down to the ranger station to give him a heads-up.

Ron's living quarters comprised the back half of the ranger station, and the door to them was to the right behind a gate next to the community woodpile. I could see there was a light on inside the home, and I leaned my head over the gate and called out his name.

"Ron?" No answer. I looked to the left of the gate and into the yard and froze.

Ron was lying there on his back. One arm was slightly raised in the air, and one leg was slightly askew. At his feet was a wheel with a crowbar jammed into a half-peeled tire. Vinny the cat sat next to him, his feet together, as if he were guarding him.

I said something -- "Oh shit!" or "Oh God!" or maybe both, I can't remember -- and ran into the yard and knelt next to him. The skin on his arms and legs was a pale gray, his face was purple, and his eyes stared blankly into space. I felt his wrist for a pulse, but there was none. Still, his body seemed warm.

I ran to the phone and dialed 911. After hearing me out, they said EMTs would be arriving shortly. It's about a 15-minute drive from Friday Harbor for even the fastest vehicle, though, and after I hung up I knew I had to do what I could for him.

I quickly checked on him again, tried some chest compressions, but I could see it was useless. I cursed the fact that I had never taken a CPR course, got up and ran out to get help.

I was lucky. I had barely made it across the parking lot before finding someone -- a middle-aged woman coming up to the group camp from the bay below. Her name was Anna Stern, and she was there with a group of 4-H kids. I told her, breathlessly I'm sure, what I had found, and asked if she could help.

"I'm a nurse," she said, and we took off running back to Ron's yard together. Her husband and son, having heard the story, took off to find more help.

Anna and I began working on Ron, repositioning his body, turning him on his side to drain the esophageal fluids, and then on his back so Anna could apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But she couldn't get a seal on his mouth, so I got a quick hands-on lesson in how to do it and began trying to breathe life back into my friend, while Anna went to work giving him chest compressions.

I think I gave him about ten breaths, and each wheezed back out effectlessly. Then two of Anna's friends, both nurses themselves, showed up, and the one who had been a nurse in Vietnam took over. I stood up and backed away, looking helplessly at those blank eyes.

It struck me then, as it often does at funerals, how little the body that is left behind actually looks like the person we knew. Life, the thing that animates us, gives our bodies, our faces, a character that vanishes when it does. I knew that Ron was dead because he was not there anymore; his spark had disappeared as tracelessly as a baby barn swallow.

I realized that my wife would be wondering where I had gotten off to, so I told Anna I'd be back as soon as possible and ran back to my campsite. I called Lisa over to me -- loudly, I'm sorry to say -- and then told her as quietly as I could what had happened, and to keep it quiet. I didn't want a word of it to reach the children.

The other parents heard it all as well, and quietly took over watching Fiona while Lisa and one of the other fathers, Adam Peck, ran back to the ranger station with me.

By the time we got there, the nurses had wrapped Ron in a blanket, and one was telling the EMTs on the radio that this was a coroner's case. The EMTs arrived soon afterward; Lisa went back to put Fiona to bed, and I stayed to write out my statement for the sheriff's deputy.

****

The EMTs told me later that evening that they figured Ron had been dead about an hour when I found him. This was small consolation, really; and I've since come to ponder how it is that EMTs get by emotionally when they lose someone they've been trying to save. No matter how one rationalizes it, there is still some guilt there, and it will haunt me. For how long, I don't know.

I do know it was a good thing I had gone down and found him. If I hadn't, he'd have laid there overnight, and no amount of guarding from Vinny could have kept all the various wild animals in the park away. As it was, his body was tucked safely away by the sheriff's deputies before nightfall.

They're not sure whether it was a heart attack or an aneurysm that laid him low. It seems likely that whatever it was hit him quickly. My friend Bob Leamer was felled a couple of years ago by an aneurysm that took him like a Mack truck. Sudden deaths like that are terrible because we don't get to say goodbye; but then, lingering deaths in which we can give our farewells are in reality much more likely to be source of enormous suffering. There are certain advantages to going out quickly like that.

Still, it is a tremendous jolt for those left behind. I'm not nearly as affected by it all as Joe Luma, and the rest of the county parks crew, who all knew and loved Ron far better than I. And I was equipped, perhaps, better than others to handle finding him, since I have years of experience covering death in all its grim countenances, including several far more horrible than this. Still, I've never been the first on the scene, and it's never involved a friend.

The children in our group, as far as I know, never caught wind that anything bad happened that weekend. If they had been older, perhaps we might have said something; but five-year-olds have enough on their plate without having to deal with something like death.

So the rest of the weekend went in similar fashion; balmy days, visits from whales, kids playing in the grass and on the beaches. I think everyone knew I was hurting, but burying myself in the innocent world of five-year-olds, in those circumstances, was a good recipe for sanity.

I'm told that Ron's family back East is having the body returned to their care. The American Legion post in Friday Harbor, where Ron liked to hang out, is planning a memorial service, though it hasn't been set yet.

I was down talking with Joe Luma, who was terribly shaken, the day afterward at the ranger station. He talked about how tough it was going to be running the park because he and Ron were almost a symbiotic team -- they fed off each other, and picked up where the other left off. Mostly, he missed his friend.

I suggested he lower the park's American flag to half-mast in honor of his friend. He looked at it and said: "I thought about that. But then I wondered if someone would object because it might not be exactly proper."

"Joe," I said, "there isn't a soul on Earth who would object. And if there were, he wouldn't be worth listening to."

So he did.

****

One of the peculiar ironies about the evening that Ron Abbott died was that, not only was it at the end of one of the most beautiful days of the year, it was capped by one of the most spectacular sunsets I've seen on the island this summer.

You have to understand: San Juan sunsets are a staple of travel magazines about the place, because they are so brilliant and gaudy. The photo atop this post was taken four years ago, but it is only one of many I have in my collection from this place.

The sunsets across Haro Strait, when the light and cloud conditions are right, are like grand performances from Mother Nature. They often begin with a golden glow spreading across bands of pink and blue, then deepen in intensity as the sun lowers itself on the horizon, creating intense bands of color and light that gradually phase downward into an intense array of beams as the sun drops behind Vancouver Island. A long-lasting glow then caresses the glassy seas for the next hour or so as a kind of denouement, finally subsiding in a soft azure as night descends and the stars come out.

So it was this night, and after sitting for a little while at our campfire, I wandered out to watch the final embers from the sun settle under the bands of clouds. I knew that Ron never lost his appreciation for these displays -- it was much of the reason why he did what he did -- and would have reveled in this one.

I am almost always overcome by a sense of peacefulness here, and that night, listening to the waves and watching the night descend, it washed over me like a soothing balm. There was an edge to it: I knew that even the soothing sea, like all of the natural world, could be as cruel as death when circumstances suited it. Here amid all this beauty there was death too. It was in everything as surely as there was life in it.

Life, and its beauty, are precious to us because they are so fragile and fleeting. We cherish living because we know that it can disappear in the wink of an eye. This is troubling to all of us -- but it strikes paralyzing fear into the heart of a parent. Because, unlike the innocents we protect, we know too well that death can come in a heartbeat, and it can come even for those innocents. Almost as deep is the fear of our own deaths -- not for our own sakes, but for our children's.

One of the mothers in our group is a former extreme climber and adventurist who has climbed spires around the world and participated in multiple high-risk deep-sea dives. But the last time she tried a free dive, she panicked -- because she began thinking about her children and what would become of them if she died. She hasn't gone back and no longer climbs, either.

A couple of months ago, this same mother had held her youngest son in her arms at a city park and breathed life back into him after he had suddenly, and mysteriously, stopped breathing. He runs about with my daughter now at this park and we all bask in the glow of life he exudes. Yes, we know just how fragile life can be. And still sometimes, the baby swallow makes it back to its mother's nest. Sometimes we are lucky, and sometimes we are not.

As the night settled in and the stars dotted the sky, I finally made my way back to our tent and got ready for bed. I went to my daughter's bed, where she lay curled under her Disney Princess sleeping bag, and caressed her face for a little while, feeling the strands of her hair and the smooth skin of her cheeks, the delicacy of her little fingers. Then I climbed into bed with my loving wife, and I held her close as she slept for the next few hours as the scenes from the day -- all of them, good and bad -- played through my head.

Finally, at about 4 in the morning, I dropped off to sleep.

Nazis and the military

Shawn Stuart is an Iraq War veteran from Montana who spent a fair amount of time last week before the podium at the pathetic National Socialist Movement rally in Olympia. He liked to especially rant about immigration issues and talk about how when he came back to America, he found that we had let the enemy in through the back door. How we had let the Jews open it. That sort of thing.

I have no idea what Stuart's story is. He may well have been attracted to the neo-Nazi cause, and joined the NSM, well after his return home. But what we do know is that today, the American military -- including our forces in Iraq -- are increasingly seeing people like Stuart filling their ranks. Right now.

According to a devastating Southern Poverty Law Center report (echoed in the New York Times), it's happening at an alarming rate. And it's happening because of the way the military is being handled at the very top:

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.

"Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture," Fain said. "We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes."

The problem, as the report explains, is the extreme pressure military recruiters are now under to fill their recruitment quotas:

Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.

"Last year, for the first time, they didn't make their recruiting goals. They don't want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."

Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. "Only two have been discharged," he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states -- Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. "They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," Barfield said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."

One of the noteworthy aspects of this phenomenon is the way this meshes with the increasingly military style of the far right in recent years, particularly the militias in the 1990s, who openly recruited veterans and current military members. The cultures have become increasingly enmeshed, as embodied by Steven Barry's recruitment plan for neo-Nazis considering a military career as a way to sharpen their "warrior" skills.

One of the real issues in attacking this problem is in recognizing, first of all, that it does not identify our people serving in the armed forces with white supremacists. Moreover, as Jo Fish observes, recruiters probably aren;t seeking out this element; rather, it is coming to them, and circumstances are forcing them to turn a blind eye to it.

And as Atrios notes, the SPLC raises immediate questions about the kind of men we're sending over to Iraq. To what extent, really, does the spread of white-supremacist attitudes in the military bring about atrocities like the recent murder of a 14-year-old girl and her family, or the Haditha massacre? It isn't hard to see, after all, attitudes about the disposability of nonwhite races rearing their ugly head in those incidents.

The larger political question, however, is a matter of accountability -- the avoidance of which has proven to be the Bush administration's most remarkable skill. Yet at some point, both the public and the military are going to have to ask: What is this administration doing to our armed forces?

On core matters of respect for the law and basic norms of human decency, it has at every turn taken an ends-justify-the-means approach: whether we're talking about torture of military prisoners -- brought to flaming light by the Abu Ghraib abuses -- as well as the warping and twisting soldiers in the field by failing to provide them with adequate mental-health care and screening.

All of these things -- respecting the laws on torture and the Geneva conventions, providing soldiers with care, weeding out hard-core racists -- are aspects of military policy that have been instituted, after all, to protect and benefit the people serving in the armed forces. Degrading them harms people in uniform in material ways.

There was talk, after Haditha, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- on whose watch this has all occurred -- should finally be forced to resign; talk that has quieted down in the weeks since. The SPLC report, however, should revive it, since it lays bare just how harmful this administration's conduct of not just the war but the deployment and recruitment of our armed forces has been.

Finally, there is an aspect of all this that has largely gone unremarked, but is the real problem we all will eventually have to confront about this: Shawn Stuart is just the first of these faces to be returning home from the Iraq War. If the SPLC report is any indication, there will be many more.

Some will have joined the neo-Nazi cause in the military. Some will have developed attitudes sympathetic to theirs and join later. But we can certainly expect to see more Shawn Stuarts, and they won't all be up on podiums.

If we look five years down the road, a disturbing picture begins to take shape: After the war ends in general failure, as seems almost inevitable now, there will be a raft of angry returned veterans back in country. They will have been told, as they are being told now, that the cause of the failure is all those liberals and terrorist sympathizers roaming the landscape. That they were "stabbed in the back" by the "enemy at home."

Sound familiar?

Already, right-wingers are developing "Targets of Opportunity." Already, they're justifying Radio Rwanda tactics for anyone who dares dissent. Just how much better is it going to get in five years' time?

This, folks, is the very real threat of fascism I've been warning about for some time, rearing its truly monstrous head. You know it when you see it -- and seeing it, perhaps, some of my readers (who keep wondering when I'm going to declare the American right truly fascist) will understand why I'm insisting we're not there yet -- that what we are currently coping with is a kind of pseudo-fascism whose chief threat is that it will give birth to the real thing.

What pseudo-fascism is all about, really, is the end justifying the means. And when the end justifies the means, there are always a thousand untold consequences. We are beginning to glimpse them now.