The end of the world

Mike summed it up nicely in an email to me today: "i'm terrified, disturbed, sad, f-ing angry, confused..."

Mostly, I am hoping more than ever before that I have been wrong, and that Bush won't continue to wreak his own kind of terror (the ultra-conservative gay-hating close-minded smirky self-righteous kind that he has wrought in the past four years) on this vastly diverse country. But The Economist seems to agree that we are in for even more of Bush's contradictory blabber, such as his simultaneous battlecries of freedom and unequal gay rights.

After a bitterly fought election, Democrats and liberals will hope that Mr Bush now governs from the centre. But they have hoped that before, and were disappointed. With a more decisive victory under his belt, expect him to try to consolidate and expand the gains of his victorious conservative movement.

god help us all.

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Square wheels

This past weekend, I went to Washington DC as part of the Department of Homeland Security Graduate Fellowship program (check out some photos I took while there). While the meeting was aimed toward firing us up about the Department, I have to say I emerged from the experience fairly discouraged. The reasons for my discouragement are:

[1] DHS suffers from a highly partisan, overbearing image that I'm not sure the government cares to fix.
Let's back up a couple of years to 2002, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was founded. From the senate's Democratic Policy Committee archives:

After Senate Democrats announced their support for a Department of Homeland Security more than one year ago - on October 11, 2001 - the Bush Administration continued to oppose the idea for eight months, even refusing to allow the Director of the Office of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, to testify before Congress.

In the meantime, Senate Republicans voted in committee against legislation establishing the Department. After the Administration changed its position on the issue and H.R. 5005, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, came to the floor in September 2002, Senate Republicans filibustered the bill for weeks in an attempt to strip away workers' civil service and collective bargaining protections. Republicans voted three times against ending their filibuster on the bill and two more times against ending their filibuster on their own version of the bill.

That's right: the Democrats first proposed a department of homeland security, which the Bush administration then REJECTED. Only months later did the Republican Party write a second version of the Homeland Security Act, which then passed. So it is only through this political mumbo jumbo that we have come to perceive DHS as a Republican entity.

My point here is not to show just how conniving the Bush administration really is (not to mention guilty of some serious flip-flopping), but to help make clear that the Department of Homeland Security truly was the result of strong bipartisan support. (The Homeland Security Act of 2002 passed the senate by a remarkable majority of 90/100).

Now, regardless of why the American public has come to see DHS as Bush's Big Brother Tool (his inflated heroic sense of self, perhaps? the Patriot Act, perhaps?), it is undeniably a big problem. The Department can only achieve so much without the support of the public. As long as people feel the need to protect themselves against DHS, our security will remain somewhat compromised. In the best of situations, the people themselves would contribute as much to their own security as would the overarching organization. Right now, though, DHS hovers like a shadow in the minds of Americans.

As little as it counts, I can assure you that DHS really is intent on increasing the safety of Americans. But the government itself has to make this clear, and I don't think they are expending any energy to do so. In the meantime, try your hardest to believe that there really is no ulterior motive. You scoff, but government conspiracy is not what should be worrying us. We should be worried whether, even if DHS has the best of intentions, it can actually achieve anything amidst the unbelievably complex machinery of our government.

[2] The mud of bureaucracy is thick.
During the meeting, I sat through lecture after lecture in which Department leaders spoke of budgets and allocation and organization and committees and sub-committees and directorates and branches of directorates. I can now say with confidence that the wheels of Homeland Security are in motion, but is it going anywhere? I sure as hell can't tell.

In all fairness, it is early. The Department of Homeland Security is a large entity, that, rather than being created from scratch, was assembled in patchwork from a number of different government organizations. Mobilizing large bodies takes time, and so does change. Two years after its creation, a lot has been done. DHS has grown from a handful of people to hundreds. Many grants have been awarded in both industry and academia to promote security-related research. Improvements in our protection are being made every day.

All the same, our threat seems to be on our doorstep. Research is a gradual process, and the wheels of government turn slow slow slow. Will we ever have all of our bases covered? I doubt that very much. Will we even cover our asses? Only maybe.

[3] There is a trend toward an increasingly powerful executive branch that our Republican-majority congress will only exacerbate.
Part of the past weekend's activities included a visit to Capitol Hill to meet with Congressional representatives from our districts. Technically, we were supposed to chat about homeland security, but I ended up chatting with Tom Udall's (D - NM) staffers about science policy and the current state of our government. Mostly, I wanted to know just how helpless Democrats are in Washington right now. The answer: very. They can filibuster and re-name courthouses, but that's about it. To make things worse, a staffer (unfortunately I don't remember her name) pointed out to me that Congress seems to be abdicating its essential role of overseeing the executive branch. (Our legislative branch has the ability to call "congressional oversight hearings" in which it may question the executive branch and keep it in check.) From the Washington Post:

When President Clinton was in office, Congress exercised its oversight powers with no sense of proportionality. But oversight of the Bush administration has been even worse: With few exceptions, Congress has abdicated oversight responsibility altogether.

Republican Rep. Ray LaHood aptly characterized recent congressional oversight of the administration: "Our party controls the levers of government. We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn."

This is especially relevant to the Abu Ghraib scandals, in which the Bush administration did little to hold itself accountable. Udall's staffer told me that while Congress held over a hundred oversight hearings during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, they held only six after the much-more-serious prison abuses. And six is a lot for the Bush camp. From The Economist:

As for Congress's other main job—oversight of the administration—that has declined too, with a few exceptions (the Senate Armed Services Committee held useful hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal). Serious investigation has been left to special commissions, such as the one that looked into the September 11th attacks. The responsibility for this lies largely with congressional Republicans: they are reluctant to investigate one of their own. But Mr Bush has not exactly shown deference to Congress's oversight role. The White House refused to let Tom Ridge, the head of homeland security, testify in 2002. It declared it would not answer questions from Democrats on budget committees. Mr Bush refused to testify before the 9/11 commission. In all these cases, the administration finally backed down. But at a time of dramatic change, the watchdogs of Congress have been dozing.

(For more information on the executive branch's increasing power, see the US House of Representative's Committee on Government Reform, which has released an interesting factsheet about this very topic.)

So how does this all relate to homeland security? Probably not directly; but certainly an unchecked president can do plenty of damage to our international stature (it is beyond tarnished at this point). Even more relevant is the fact that Donald Rumsfeld is still secretary of defense after Abu Ghraib while many hold that he should have resigned long ago. We cannot afford to have ineffectual members of government, especially in those sectors related to defense and homeland security. And without accountability, the government has no need to purge itself of its rotten bits.

Despite all of this very discouraging talk, Udall's staffer did give me hope, somehow. Surprisingly, it comes from the same place as the discouragement. While the wheels of government turn slow, and we may feel bogged down for it, it is also perhaps our saving grace. We have hope that not much damage can be done before a change of power takes place; we have hope that four years is not very long on the government timescale. It's not shining hope, but it's there.

Cross your fingers, folks.

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Pieces of November

I first saw Pieces of April in the theater last fall, and vowed then to make it something I watch every year around Thanksgiving.

Well, this year was, I suppose, the second annual viewing, and I have to say I forgot how much it touched me the first time I saw it. The premise is simple enough: girl makes Thanksgiving dinner for estranged family; oven is broken, so girl enlists help of neighbors; family arrives after tumultuous day journey; dinner ensues. I realize the plot sounds outright boring, but the film, in its simplicity and grace, really has the power to remind us what, at its core, Thanksgiving is. Not just eating and thinking for a few minutes about what it is we are thankful for. Something more.

Sure, I learned in the first grade, while cutting the shape of my hand out of brown construction paper to make a turkey, that Thanksgiving is about a really hard winter, when two groups of people who really did not get along worked together to make it through. But I had kinda forgotten. I think these days it's easy to forget such things. So I urge you to join me in my new Thanksgiving tradition. It's not too late for it to count for this year!

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