The Rochester DISSIDENT: news, views, and poems from JACK BRADIGAN SPULA

Kudos for the Omnium

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:06:00 -0500

All of Rochester owes the good folks at Full Moon Vista a big round of applause and a few high-fives. The Rochester Omnium, sponsored by the downtown bike shop and steered to victory by FMV owner Scott Page, has already become a local tradition - and an international attraction.

As a commuter and solo/family bike tourist, I've never been involved in bike racing, except marginally, through watching events like the Tour de France on TV - i.e. being a velo-couch-potato. But I took in all three Omnium events this year and loved every minute.

First came the time trials in Charlotte Friday afternoon. I approached the event the right way: biking out St. Paul St., then taking the designated trail through Maplewood Park and the Turning Point, and ending up at the harbor. Things were pretty quiet that morning along the trail, and also along Lake Avenue, which had been cordoned off. (What a contrast to the "other" Lake Avenue, which thunders with beer-powered motorcycles on Boys' Nights Out.) The contestants were amazing: the winning average speed over the 4.4 mile course was, if my calculator doesn't lie, a hair under 36 mph. Damn showoffs. Hell, I probably hit 36 mph for a good twenty seconds as I coasted down the big hill at the southern approach to Turning Point Park. I won't discuss the 3.6 mph I achieved on a notorious short uphill stretch on my way back.

My brother came in from Buffalo Saturday night to join me at the Criterium downtown. He's been riding the Riverwalk in Buffalo and Tonawanda and is showing more and more interest in longer excursions. But he'd never seen a live bike race - and so, as you'd expect, he was blown away. Just like anybody who considers the pure athleticism of the pro riders. Talk about muscle tone and lung capacity.

I had an unusual experience during the Sunday road race, a 101-miler that ended with a few rousing 6-mile loops in and near Genesee Valley Park. There I was on Wilson Boulevard at the north end of the River Campus, innocently minding my own business and trying to get near the action, when I was "drafted" by an RPD officer to monitor an exit from the UR's back parking lot. Actually, I volunteered; I seen my duty and I done it - keeping errant vehicles and pedestrians from wandering onto the closed course. Well, the errant traffic never materialized, so I was left standing there, a solitary sentinel - though I did have a great view of the racers as they flew down the slope toward the boulevard. More showoffs! They ride a hundred miles in a leisurely four hours and then, as if from the ultimate caffeine rush, really pour on the speed.

When things got preternaturally quiet, I figured the race was over. And so it was: I got to the finish line, a half mile from my guardpost, just as the awards ceremony was starting. Too bad I missed the winner crossing the line, but I have no regrets. The event was a success, the weather was cooperative, and the crowd was lively. Actually, that brings up one regret. I wish more people had come out to watch the end of the road race, and I wish the same about the Charlotte time trials. Each of these deserves a crowd of thousands, the kind that swarms downtown for the "Crit." I'll bet the turnout will be better next year, because the Omnium seems to be on a steep upward curve.

This piece first appeared at RocBike.com.

Plowing through the Farm Bill: much more than empty calories

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:00:00 -0500

Whoever first said that "the more you watch the news, the less you know" must have been thinking of how the media treat the Farm Bill. But now that we're safely past the latest chapter of this ongoing story - a couple months back, Congress overrode a presidential veto to enact the Farm Bill of 2008 - we can make some sense out of it all.

Start with what the Farm Bill is and is not. Yes, it is indeed a $300 billion measure, as many stories have told us, including a widely circulated May 21 Associated Press story that reported on the Bush veto. But the latter report repeated a common error: it neglected to mention that the bill covers a five-year period (and some items in the bill actually cover ten years). So in terms of annual spending, which is the usual and most intelligible framework for understanding what's in the federal budget, the bill runs to average of about $60 billion.

Yes, that's still real money, but put it into perspective. It's less than an eighth of the Pentagon budget, and much less even than the annual "supplemental" outlays in recent years for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, if we look at what's actually in the bill and where the money goes, we find the bill is misnamed. Since two-thirds of the spending goes for Food Stamps (now gone higher-tech via debit cards) and other nutrition programs, we really should call it the Food Bill. This rhetorical shift would transfer the emphasis to tens of millions of American families directly impacted by provisions of the bill - and contradict the parochial view that the bill exists only to benefit special interests like the Farm Belt states, their Congressional delegations and lobbyists, and a constellation of corporatized commodity producers (corn, soy, cotton, etc.) who reap humongous subsidies.

Questions about subsidies surely need to be debated - for example, why many big farmers bring home a ton of bacon while small vegetable, fruit and dairy farms that could be saved from extinction by targeted assistance are put on a low-cal diet. But thanks to years of hard slogging by progressive advocates, there's much in the Farm Bill to celebrate, starting with things that will benefit those small farms.

In its review of the bill, the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture (sustainableagriculture.net) has identified many provisions worth celebrating: an enhanced Rural Microenterprise Assistance Program to boost rural businesses through "micro-credit" (analogous to development strategies in South Asia, inspired by the work of economist Muhammad Yunus, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize); more money for the Value-Added Producer Grant Program, with new targeted funds for small and medium-sized farms; more funding for the Farmers Market Promotion Program; mandatory funding for the Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers program, which includes technical and other forms of assistance; and similarly, a shot in the arm for the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program.

Many people, journalists and laypeople alike, wax indignant about spending for conservation programs - usually reduced to a shorthand phrase, encouraging farmers to "idle their land." True, in worst-case scenarios this might translate to paying farmers for doing nothing. Yet the public has a real interest in conservation programs that help preserve topsoil, streambanks and watersheds, and other vital habitats/ecosystems. And the Farm Bill does some of this through its Conservation Security Program, which strikes a balance between "working farmland" and broad environmental values.

Last but not remotely least are the new Farm Bill's supports for organic agriculture, the new and quickly sprouting kid on the block. The bill has some provisions to facilitate organic conversion (that is, moving land from conventional chemical methods to certifiably organic cultivation), including a cost-share program that helps small farmers cross that potentially expensive bridge. There's also a four-year, $78-million Organic Agricultural Research and Extension Initiative, which will, among other things, help develop new seed varieties well-suited to organic ag. And a new "classical plant and animal breeding" initiative will help organic farmers' efforts to save traditional strains of crops and livestock that conventional, industrialized ag has left to wither.

No legislation this massive and comprehensive can be all "wins," of course. Organic advocates like the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture lists some notable losses, from a progressive point of view. For example, regarding contamination of crops by "genetically modified organisms," which is an increasingly serious problem for organic farmers located near conventional farms, the bill failed to assign liability to those responsible for the contamination - namely, 800-pound companies like Monsanto that develop and patent the risky, aggressive genetic invaders.

So the next time you get news about the Farm Bill - make that the Food Bill - remember there's almost certainly more to the story than what you're hearing. And if you deplore some of the bill's priorities, remember that in many significant respects the bill is right on the money - and that much of the money will pay back the taxpayer many times over, in terms of environmental, personal, and community health.

This article, which was commissioned by the Northeast Organic Farming Association (nofa.org), first appeared at RochesterEnvironment.com and CounterPunch.org.

Notes from Italy

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:17:13 -0500

It seems like I've been away from my blog for a long time - and yes, it's been more than a couple weeks since I even checked in. But my absence was for a good cause: a trip to Italy, with lots of biking there (I brought my Dahon folder, which fits easily into a couple suitcases for air travel) and now some impressions to pass along.

My trip took me to several northern Italian cities: first to Modena, home of fabled tenor Luciano Pavarotti, almost equally fabled soprano Mirella Freni, and oddly fabled, expensive, gas-guzzling Maserati, whose headquarters are not far from downtown. Modena's population is about 177,000, and I'll bet the figure includes about 40,000 regular cyclists. As in many European communities, regular Modenites in huge numbers get around by bike, doing the shopping, dropping around to the caffe/café, going on dates (two per bike, and not on tandems), and otherwise getting through the day. If you wander the deliciously narrow and pedestrian-friendly streets and alleyways of the old parts of town, you see hundreds of bikes locked up everywhere. The bikes tend to be utilitarian, affordable models, some of them decades old and well-worn. (It's only out in countryside, on the beautiful but narrow ancient roadways, that you see helmeted, bright-jerseyed riders on fancy road bikes.) Partly for economic reasons, and helped along by a human-scaled urbanscape and bike-friendly traditions, Italians depend heavily on appropriate transport technology.

The principle held true for two other communities I visited: the small city of Vignola, the mid-sized Parma, and sizable Bologna (ca. 400,000 people in the urban core). I recommend all three to bikers and walkers - again, it's the traditional urbanscape that makes the difference. Bologna, with plenty of piazzas and 38 km of "arcades," i.e. Gothic-arched covered walkways, is especially attractive to pedestrians. I think this town's Renaissance and Baroque architects could teach our RenSquare planners a thing or three. (And isn't it odd that not long ago, Rochester was courting Parma interests for a deal to redevelop Midtown Plaza - without so much as considering the physical features that makes the city of Parma a resounding success?)

Not that Italy is a total Paradiso for bikers. At least in the Emilia Romagna region that I toured, the secondary highways are miserably clogged with trucks and cars moving at excessive speed, and there's precious little space for bikers or pedestrians. But in town, everything's rosy: ample bike paths and lanes, urban traffic that's respectful of cyclists, and an official commitment to alternative transportation. Modena also has begun a bike-borrowing/rental program. You just put down a deposit and get a key, then access publicly-owned bikes at any number of parking stations around town. There's no fee for the first three days - perfect for travelers, though I must say the bikes themselves are a little stodgy in design, not suitable for serious riding.

Well, I'm now coping with transpo-culture shock. I went to the Rochester Public Market last Saturday, as usual, and did a few errands. Amazing how few bikes you see around the market (I counted about a dozen), considering the huge turnout (thousands on- or just off-site) on a Saturday morning. Part of this is the durability of the Auto Craze, part is the result of the Rochester's failure to create the infrastructure that would seduce people into going to the market by bike. Why, the city only recently added another parking lot, this one on Railroad St. And still - as any competent traffic planner should have foreseen - the cars and "light trucks" jam the access roads and turn the market grounds into ground zero for air pollution and conflicts with mere persons who make such daring, self-indulgent moves as trying to cross a street! Maybe RocBikers (check out RocBike.com, by the way), joined by Critical Massers and others, should target the market for some kind of actions. City Hall shouldn't be allowed to ignore or downplay bike issues any longer. (I note with pleasure the departure of Dumbass Supremo Steve Minarik, the Republican boss who did something to offend everyone - and did everything to maintain the status quo that barely acknowledges alternative transport. Not that I expect M's replacement will be much better.)

One last note: Italian towns also are home to vast numbers of motorbikes and scooters. This was especially evident in Bologna. But the odd thing is, I didn't hear any straight-pipe monstrosities like those that take over Rochester-area roads every summer. Interpret that as you will.

My archive: articles from 2000-2004

Fri, 30 May 2008 10:44:16 -0500

Some of you may have noticed that the articles and columns I wrote for City Newspaper (ending in spring 2004) are not retrievable on the paper's "improved" website by author search. This is the result of what was originally a technical glitch - somehow the bylines, and not just mine, were not transferred from the old online archive to the new one. But as the months turn into years, the glitch is becoming a more and more serious ethical lapse. To my knowledge, City management has never explained the situation to readers. Nor have they responded adequately to my personal communications. So I'm assuming that the bylines are forever lost. As you can imagine, the situation presents us writers with real practical difficulties; in the internet age, online archives serve as primary research sources not just for readers but for employers and others. Thus a new feature of this blog: I am beginning a long project to scan and save (in my Photo Album; see the left margin of this page) many of my City pieces so they can be retrieved more easily. The first article I've scanned (a March 2004 piece about windmills) is now in the album. Send me your comments - and by the way, I retain hard copies of almost all my articles for City (from the late 1980s to 2004) and can supply you with a scan on request.

The Renaissance squares

Fri, 23 May 2008 10:47:37 -0500

I made the mistake of going to the Renaissance Square dog-and-pony show this week. The organizers - the seemingly unbreakable coalition of downtown business interests, county government lickspittles, and engineering and construction firms - did a good job of hiding the event in the inner reaches of the Riverside Convention Center. No signs directed the few attendees to the room. But that turned out to be good for social intercourse: you had to ask directions from passersby in the hallway.

You didn't actually need to get into the room, though, to understand what the project - a perennial shapeshifter now hastily reconfigured to meet funding deadlines - is all about. You only needed to meditate on the convention center itself. Remember when the East Main-South Avenue area was packed with historic buildings and storefronts? And remember when so many of them came tumbling down to make way for a, well, conventional design?

That's exactly what the well-connected downtown crowd wants for East Main and Clinton. Go to the Democrat and Chronicle feature on the new RenSquare plan and see for yourself. The plan is pure Suburban Office Park: a series of off-the-shelf, boring facades, varied at the eastern extremity with a few big windows, and shown up big time by the magnificent Granite Building to the west. (The bus station is hidden in the back, with a platform design that will require buses to back up as they leave the bays. I can't wait to stand there and take in the music and fine aromas of the massed diesels.)

Nothing in any of the RenSquare literature or on the dog-and-pony-show placards refers to green features, intermodality (remember the case made long ago for putting the buses at the train station?), accessibility, or bike-and-pedestrian friendliness. Choose your favorite element from the pro-environmental list - and you won't find it at RenSquare.

When I said some of this to a honcho at the unveiling (and put that veil of shame back on, pronto!), I was asked if I wanted to see downtown continue to deteriorate. This is the rhetorical equivalent of what the RenSquare design team has done: deploying the crassest of clichés to weaken the opposition. They surely must understand that downtown's real friends want an entirely different pattern of redevelopment to unfold: compare the incremental growth and repopulation of the East End, accomplished organically and on a human scale - with, admittedly, some aesthetic clunkers thrown in.

But look for RenSquare honchos to stay on message. If you're not on board with their scheme, you're an enemy of downtown and an impediment to economic revitalization. And don't be so cheeky as to talk about transportation policy or green ideas. What do you think this is, a transit center? And where do you think you are, Copenhagen?

In their relentless campaign to saddle us with an example of old-fashioned, white bread Americana, the RenSquare pushers are leading with a rhetorical cousin of "if you're not with us, you're against us." And make no mistake, in regard to the fine points democratic engagement, they have taken more than a little from the playbook of Rove, Cheney, and Bush.

Straighten those priorities

Tue, 6 May 2008 20:09:43 -0500

At this moment, while results from the Indiana and North Carolina Democratic primaries roll in, we're a bit closer to knowing which pair of warmongers will duke it out for the presidency. John "Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain may ultimately face off with Hillary "Obliterate" Clinton. Or McCain's opponent might be Barack "Hit Pakistan" Obama, a relative pacifist who has a soft spot for diplomacy - at least before he becomes commander-in-chief, a role that history shows is synonymous with "lock-and-load."

The three contenders' silence about the situation on the ground in Iraq (and Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) excites almost no concern from the people or the media. Gas prices and the nose-diving economy have grabbed the top spots in the opinion polls. Not that Americans shouldn't be worried about high prices and stagnant incomes, especially since they're accompanied by the usual profiteering - hedge fund thieves as well the classic merchants of death. But really... Everyone should be shaking with outrage about the mass murder now being committed in our name.

Thank goodness the Friends Committee on National Legislation is on the job. Today this Quaker organization, the sort of group that shows a "lobby" doesn't have to have bloody or dirty hands, issued a call about US attacks against Iraqi civilians. Here are the opening paragraphs of an open letter the group has addressed to the White House:

"Press reports indicate that more than 900 Iraq civilians have died so far in the ongoing U.S.-supported assault on militia forces in the Sadr City section of Baghdad. Many of the civilian deaths are the result of US air strikes in this densely populated and impoverished urban area in the heart of the Iraqi capital. A photograph published in newspapers last week of a two-year-old child killed in the rubble created by one U.S. air strike is grim evidence of the toll the offensive and the U.S. tactics to prosecute it are taking.

"We at FCNL condemn the U.S. government's decision to launch an airwar against Sadr City, an area of Baghdad that is roughly equivalent in size to bombing of Chicago's South Side, West Philadelphia, or Southeast Washington. As Quakers we oppose all war. But this use of airpower against a civilian population estimated at 3 million people is immoral and a violation of the law of war. We urge you immediately to order a halt to this illicit use of U.S. military force."

The FCNL is asking all of us to join this call for a cessation of violence. It's obvious that many people in Congress, too, need such a letter in their inboxes. And that emphatically includes McCain, Clinton, and Obama.

(After you write your emails/letters, tune into the peace march to Fort Drum, the western branch of which begins this Thursday morning at the Peace Storefront on Monroe Ave. For detailed info, go to nysmarchesforpeace.org.)

Go figure - MLK's "greatest purveyor of violence" by the numbers

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:52:00 -0500

Like so many communities today, the Rochester area is being hit with a fiscal three-fer: the city's looming annual budget deficit (on top of deficits and liabilities past), the county deficit (in part the effect of long-term regressive tax policy), and inadequate federal aid. And like others caught in the crunch, many Rochesterians are hitting back at convenient targets: public sector jobs, services, and taxation itself. Layoffs, cutbacks, rollbacks, austerity in all its miserable forms is on the march.

But the biggest target of all - truly a global bulls-eye - goes unnoticed. It's the fact that the nation is now spending $1.45 trillion annually, well over 10 percent of GDP, on organized violence and its aftereffects. And that's a lot of dough that can't be made available for schools, libraries, fire departments, and all the other vital functions of local government.

The $1.45 trillion figure comes from the War Resisters League's annual publication, "Where You Income Tax Money Really Goes" (go to www.warresisters.org). The total, based on the 2009 federal budget, includes current annual military spending of $965 billion; the Pentagon (DOD) accounts for the bulk of this, but other federal programs account for plenty more, like nuclear weapons under the DOE ($17 billion), Homeland Security's military ops ($35 billion), veterans benefits ($94 billion - and in this one case, a morally necessary expenditure), and not least, military-related interest on the national debt ($390 billion).

And of course we can't overlook the "War on Terror," which, including the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, eats up around $200 billion all by itself - most of it in new debt that future federal budgets, not to mention hungry children, will have to deal with.

Yes, a trillion here and a trillion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money. But get this: according to the War Resisters analysis, which is scrupulously based on the relevant federal budget documents, points out our non-military spending comes in at $1.21 trillion, considerably below what the warrior-state gets.

Note that all these figures don't include Social Security and Medicare, which are funded through payroll taxes and thus are properly considered off-budget - though the feds fold the trust funds into the "unified budget" precisely to mask the true proportions of outlays for America's grossest domestic product: state-sponsored terror.

Viewed in the most basic moral framework, maybe the constriction of local budgets is simple justice, another form of Malcolm X's, and more recently Jeremiah Wright's, "chickens coming home to roost." But in the present crisis, only the privileged and insular can take refuge in such a conclusion. The point is, we need to take action against the warrior state while resuscitating the best aspects of the increasingly embattled, and misunderstood, welfare state.

We owe a moral debt to the poor and distressed of America as much as to the millions worldwide who've been at the wrong end of our gun. And we should find no contradiction or irony in the fact that when we turn away from organized violence as a policy tool, we'll make ourselves infinitely safer than we are today.

A deplorable state of affairs

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 21:23:16 -0500

"State of..." speeches are supposed to be taken as grand civic convocations, celebrations of unity and shared purpose, but they're really no more than elites talking to one another - just like most other aspects of very small "d" democracy. You know how it works: the president or governor or mayor appears before the citizenry secondhand - quite literally mediated through the camera and microphone. His or her principal, if not exclusive audience is the assembly of legislators, political appointees, business leaders, and other powerbrokers, joined by certain invited guests who serve as rhetorical props when the Head of State must soften the script with a touch of humanity. Everything's carefully scripted, and the speaker is showcased to convince Everyman and Everywoman that he or she is the center of attention. But that's illusory. There's no real communication, no give and take, no opportunity for the voice of the powerless to be heard.

You're probably already seeing Dubya in your mind's eye - and indeed, he and his handlers are true professionals in this context. But the principles of the "State of..." speech apply even to the best of leaders. Take Rochester Mayor Bob Duffy's "State of the City" 2008, delivered at the Hochstein auditorium this week. I think Bob Duffy is an honest man - Rochester has been lucky in this regard, having had decent, honorable mayors in Tom Ryan, Bill Johnson, and now Duffy - but this year's address did not engage the community as it might have, nor did it go to the heart of the problems facing the city.

The venue itself was a confession of failure. Hochstein is a great place for music and theater, but it's not suitable for a true democratic mass gathering. The mayor should be energizing the multitudes from a downtown bridge, like the fireworks on New Year's. Or he could speak at the War Memorial or Frontier Field. Why is it that sports events attract people by the thousands, while actual civic events draw mere hundreds (and small radio and TV audiences)? I remember being at a grand public event commemorating the Triumph of the Revolution in Managua, Nicaragua, in the early 1990s. The Sandinista leadership spoke from a platform directly to 100,000 or more highly charged-up citizens. Why do such things never happen here?

They don't happen here because of a democracy deficit. And because of a string of analytical fallacies and dead ends. Consider, for example, what Bob Duffy didn't say the other night. He spoke about urban problems - you know the litany - but he didn't identify the source. He didn't speak about structural racism, even though his State of the City came only a few days after the much-observed 40^th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. But isn't racism the core issue in places like Rochester and Monroe County? We live under an apartheid regime of impressive persistence. All the more so because it's generally unacknowledged - by whites, that is. Our leaders deplore poverty and violence, but they do nothing to change the paradigm.

Similarly, leaders never, never, never blame the corporate classes for regional decline. The manufacturing sector may have largely abandoned us - tens of thousands of jobs gone down the drain as whole industries left for sunnier climes and more easily exploited labor - but our political leaders won't even mildly criticize, much less sanction the business leaders who made it all happen. No, it's a lot easier to dwell on "entrepreneurship" and "innovation" - witness the bullshit campaign now in full flower at RIT under new President Bill Destler, a man who seems almost genetically wired to deliver empty speeches - and trash the public schools and generations of young people for their shortcomings.

And then there's the war and military spending. The plain fact is that American cities, most assuredly including Rochester, are suffering precisely because we're spending ourselves silly and mortgaging our future to keep the imperial legions operating at levels that would have embarrassed Hadrian and Trajan. What's the figure, 737 foreign military bases? And three-quarters of a trillion dollars in current annual military spending (including the Pentagon, the Dept. of Energy's weapons programs, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and other incidentals)? Meanwhile, we're strangling every community that doesn't hop onto the hypermilitarist gravy train.

Shouldn't all decent, honorable mayors point out this little contradiction?

A poem to help commemorate National Poetry Month

Fri, 4 Apr 2008 14:56:00 -0500

Campbell’s Ledge

From across the Susquehanna
The striated ledge looks
Like a bundle of taut springs
Capable of lobbing a
Volley of boulders
Smack into the floodplain, crumpling
The rail depot
Like a broken toy.
I come the long way around
To be safe.
There’s the trailhead
At the base of the mountain,
Carpeted with sheet metal scraps
And, naturally, coal and cinders
Arranged like scat.
Then comes something of a gate:
A refrigerator frame
Pierced with red maples about my age.
And then comes the climb with a
Vengeance on clay stairs,
More handholds than footholds,
And gusts that could throw you down
As legend says these heights
Threw a man named Campbell,
The only man who knew
If he really made his escape.

Five years... and 95 to go?

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 21:17:52 -0500

Five years and counting... you all know the meaning of the numbers. A million Iraqi dead; countless other Iraqis maimed or terrorized. This on top of a million or more Iraqis who died or whose lives were shattered by the 1990s Sanctions of the Liberals (one of whose backroom players now lusts for the White House). And of course, 4,000 American military deaths in Iraq, plus 15 times that number seriously wounded.

The order of the numbers reporting means a lot, too. Have you noticed that US media always update the casualty totals with the lowest figure first - that is, the 4,000 - or often give nothing in addition for context? That's just their way of doing what they and Hollywood (e.g. Deer Hunter) did throughout the Vietnam war: convince us that our victim is actually the aggressor, and the victims are us. The doctrinal system requires that we see ourselves as innocent targets of the evildoer. Even liberals, sometimes especially liberals, hold this self-image as dear as does a fascist monster like Dick Cheney.

(Here I have to emphasize, though, that I mourn every American death from this and past disasters. I do not blame American military personnel, at least not the lower ranks, for what's happened. Nor - equally important - do I excuse them entirely. In my own military service, I avoided directly participating in the mass murder of Vietnamese and others, but I didn't directly resist the war, either. This has left me with a strange mixture of satisfaction and shame. Oh, to have been a conscientious objector from Day One.)

All this brings us to the rhetorical blood-brother of the numbers game: the "mistake" fallacy.

Look through media coverage of the Iraq war's fifth anniversary and you'll see the word "mistake" everywhere. Sometimes "blunder" or "error" will be the mot injuste. In any case, the meaning is consistent: we're supposed to believe the war was simply the outcome of a bad business plan, or the like. Practicality is king in this society - and so when Americans, elite or rank-and-file, call something a mistake, they may believe they're deploying their most devastating charge. Yet Americans never describe, say, a home invasion-murder as a mistake. We fall all over ourselves in such cases to find words commensurate with the facts: heinous, deplorable, disgusting, outrageous, etc. And always, always such things are described as what they clearly are in legal terms: crimes.

Remember the infamous "doughnut hole" people talked about when the Medicare prescription drug plan first came up? Basically, the plan only covers the lowest and highest costs, with beneficiaries bled dry to pay for the bulk of costs that fall in the middle. Something analogous to this goes on in the world of rhetoric: terms like crime, aggression, ethnic cleansing, and sometimes genocide, are attached to what "retail" purveyors of violence do (al Qaeda or small rogue states), or to what defeated maniacal regimes (like Nazi Germany) have done. But terms like mistake, error, and blunder are reserved for the doughnut hole: actions like those of our own country and close allies over a half century, that is, strategies as cowardly and bloodthirsty as those of any past national power, and outcomes as quantitatively horrific as what our most despicable enemies have ever produced.

And so, as I've said again and again: we've got to call the War Against Iraq by the right name. It's a crime, crime, crime. This truth won't change with the passage of time, not even if the occupation of Iraq turns out to be John McCain's new Hundred Years' War. (Let's pause to acknowledge McCain, whose mad-bomber role in the 1960s Rolling Thunder air war in Southeast Asia should temper our view of his admittedly horrendous experience as a POW.) And no crime should be characterized merely as "the biggest foreign policy mistake since Vietnam" - a galling understatement now regularly uttered by liberals like Diane Rehm, probably imagining they've delivered a verbal coup de grace.

As I and many others have pointed out before, the Iraq war, like all "preventive" wars or wars of aggression, is (in Justice Robert Jackson's words) an example of "the supreme international crime." I almost said Jackson's "immortal words," but I'm not betting that the US media, along with other propaganda and "information" systems, won't succeed in erasing from historical memory the lessons of the Nuremberg tribunals. They've done their damndest to do this for a lot more years than five. But thankfully, they're not quite able to strut on the deck of American moral consciousness - which sleeps but still is alive - and declare "mission accomplished."

Peace folks can stay focused on the only proper objectives (a short list): immediate withdrawal of all US and allied forces, based on binding agreements to insure Iraqis control their political institutions and economy for their own national benefit; introduction of a neutral multinational force acceptable to the Iraqi people and their contiguous neighboring states to secure peace and human rights; and prompt payment of reparations by the US to the Iraqi people for decades, not just five years, of US war crimes.

But let's start with something more rhetorically uncomplicated: Get the fuck out now!