The corrupting nature of power...

Watching the Mark Twain biography, tonight, it occurred to me the corrupting nature of power...

It is in our power to inflict tragedy and suffering on others to avoid tragedy and suffering ourselves...it is our cowardice cloaked in the clothing of courage...

Our capacity for vindictiveness and punishment (and this tendency of ours' to use power to avoid suffering ourselves) is captured well in Twain's Reflections on Religion (1909)...

http://www.totallyok.com/rel/marktwain

"Our Bible reveals to us the character of our God with minute and remorseless exactness. The portrait is substantially that of a man - if one can imagine a man charged and overcharged with evil impulses far beyond the human limit; a personage with whom no one perhaps, would desire to associate with now that Nero and Caligula are dead. In the old testament His acts expose His vindictive, unjust, ungenerous, pitiless and vengeful nature constantly. He is always punishing - punishing trifling misdeeds with thousandfold severity; punishing innocent children for the misdeeds of their parents; punishing unoffending populations for the misdeeds of their rulers; even descending to wreak bloody vengeance upon harmless calves and lambs and sheep and bullocks as punishment for inconsequential trespasses committed by their proprietors. It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast."

If you haven't seen the Ken Burns documentary, I highly recommend it...one of the best I have ever seen...

And one of the most powerful lessons I learned from the movie...that Twain was at his most brilliant when he was most fearless and courageous and compassionate in his tackling with humanity's plight...

Love,
Ben

The Bush Administration and its international partners showing their true colors...

It's so funny...the response by the Bush Administration and its international partners reflect just what they think about democracy, today, and what is so wrong in democratic countries, today...

Ahmadinejad challenges Bush to debate...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060829/pl_nm/nuclear_iran_dc

President Ahmadinejad challenges the President to the penultimate democratic tradition: a debate...and the President's spokeperson calls it "a diversion"...

Thought and engagement, the spokesman and his French counterpart, respond, is a diversion from our desire to keep Iran from getting access to nuclear weapons...

Is the Administration scared, do you think? They should be...because I think on this particular argument -- I don't trust Ahmadinejad, personally or as a world leader, but he happens to be right about his country's right to self-determined defense policy, I think -- the Iranian President has the stronger argument...

So the last thing you would want to do if you were wrong, I imagine the President reasoning, is have a debate and have your poorer argument revealed for all the world to see...

But...that's the great thing about argument...it will just keep going on until it gets resolved in the right direction...and even then it will be on-going...no matter what you try to force to the contrary...

It's a brilliant move on Ahmadinejad's part...and happens to be the right one, I think...

"Who's the democratic nation, now?" Ahmadinejad can brag to the Iranian people whose democratic freedoms he regularly tramples on...
Neither Iran nor America lives up, completely...but it's better to raise that democratic bar than the lower it...

And in this case...it is President Ahmadinejad who is raising the bar...and President Bush who is lowering it...

Bad form as an argument for democracy...

But something tells me that this debate will not go away just because President Bush nor his international partners want to engage the argument...

Love,
Ben