Some time ago a local talk show host sent me an email question in response to a link I sent about the House Health Care Resolution, to wit:

"What has Joe Lieberman done that is wrong in this case?"

I didn't answer, or, more clearly, I answered so much and so little I never sent a response. Any "truth" I felt we could see eye to eye on was so fragile and complicated, it left me either mute or bloviating. Analogy, the Socratic vortex, syllogism, dialectic and the law weren't wrong, they just didn't cover the territory close and far enough. So this isn't an answer, it's not fair, it's not a conversation, solitary and unforgivable it's an essay into my own inner darkness, but it's either that or nothing. Sometimes....like when you're rubbing your lover's back late at night when she'd rather be sleeping and she asks "What are you doing?"....sometimes good questions have no good answers. The host and I are both U.S. Citizens but we're from different countries, we speak different languages and have different sets of facts. Where could we find common ground? What can I say that isn't too much and too little, what truth do I hold to be self evident that isn't an affront? Was I selling him short when I said to myself people just believe what they believe and there's nothing to say, or do I still believe the attempt to communicate itself has value?

What I believe is writing even this as an essay is insane. Believing as I do that language is just decoration for desire and doesn't really communicate anything, I should be doing art and poetry. Why aren't I?

Because the question intrigued me like the alarm device hanging on the wall outside the restroom at my bank. Whenever I come out it says in big red digital letters:

"CHECK PREMISE" (i.e. zip up your pants?)

I liked it so much I took a picture of it, and by the time I got to the parking lot a deputy sheriff was in my face checking my premise for taking the picture. When he saw my art car he understood that I wasn't part of his game.

But all the more reason to ask, why am I writing this, because I thought I had already answered his question when I said,

"He (Lieberman) can have any politics he wants, I just hate the hypocrisy."

So what is there to say? But say I wanted to (and why not?) entertain the ultimate absurdity and explain the explanation:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy)

"Etymology
The word hypocrisy comes from the Greek (hypokrisis), which means "play-acting", "acting out", "coward" or "dissembling"[2]. (---MY NOTE HERE: GW Bush said the people criticizing his handling of Guantanamo were "DISSASSEMBLERS, which means....uh....that they're LIARS!"....and in a way disassembling as in deconstructing gets at the meaning also---) The word hypocrite is from the Greek word (hypokrisis), which means "play-acting", "acting out", "coward" or "dissembling"[2]. (---MY NOTE HERE: GW Bush said the people criticizing his handling of Guantanamo were “DISSASSEMBLERS, which means....uh....that they're LIARS!"….and in a way disassembling as in deconstructing gets at the meaning also---) The word hypocrite is from the Greek word ὑποκρίτης (hypokrites), the agentive noun associated with υποκρίνομαι (hypokrinomai), i.e. "I play a part." Both derive from the verb κρίνω, "judge" (»κρίση, "judgement" »κριτική (kritiki), "critics") presumably because the performance of a dramatic text by an actor was to involve a degree of interpretation, or assessment, of that text. The word is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hypo-, meaning "under", and the verb "krinein", meaning "to sift or decide". Thus the original meaning implied a deficiency in the ability to sift or decide. (---OR BACK TO "W" AS REFERENCE: he said once, "You know there's an old saying, 'Fool me once.....uh....’" (He forgot the rest.)---) This deficiency, as it pertains to one's own beliefs and feelings, informs the word's contemporary meaning[3].”

In other words, and according to me, Joe can’t sift or decide whether his loyalty should be to his constituents or to his contributors or to the Constitution, or to Republican or Democrat. When he’s asking us to go deeper into Afghanistan, when he’s in favor of bailing out AIG and Lehman Bros., when he’s threatening to filibuster against the public option in the health care resolution, is he speaking on behalf of United Technologies, Lehman Brothers and Purdue Pharma and the rest of his contributors or is he speaking for his constituents?

http://www.opensecrets.org/pol

If you click on the "top 100" contributors there, you'll see Goldman Sachs, a company that was on public welfare during the bailout and is now getting enough H1N1 vaccine for their CEOs and employees to supply an entire hospital while poor people have to wait their turn.

http://act.credoaction.com/h1n1

And according to the book, “The Tyranny Of Oil”, these same companies are heavily invested in oil, the first big contracts are being let on the oil coming out of Iraq and a pipeline is planned across Afghanistan. None of which proves anything, but even if you can't accept it as a conflict of interest, isn't it just a remarkable coinkydink? Or as Lily Tomlin said,

"No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up."

But on principle:

If Goldman Sachs and the drug companies have a right to representation and special treatment by giving large sums of money to Lieberman's (& et al's) campaigns, how do we balance that with the right of former homeowners now sleeping in their own refrigerator boxes and patients denied treatment or insurance to representation? The original Constitution did not GIVE corporations personhood. The early corporations had to BUY theirs. If you ask me, personhood (like the Marine recruitment poster says, “EARNED, NEVER GIVEN”) should be contingent on community service. But instead we usually get a criminal level of disservice:

http://www.democracynow.org/hood

A top contributor during Joe's campaign was the Bush White House:

http://www.nowpublic.com/joelib

He was the lead off speaker at The Republican National Convention. Did the people of Connecticut have the dignity of an informed choice and an honest and open election process when they replaced a faux Republican, Lowell Weicker, with a faux Democrat? It stretches what little credence I have left to have to assume all those who voted for him three more times weren't duped and had any good way of knowing he would vote consistently with the Republicans. The situation just seems to lean more toward misrepresentation than representation, disservice more than service and lack of disclosure. It begs the question: how many flags can a person fly and still be trustworthy? Or to put it in military terms if you had a soldier who always sided with the enemy in daily conversations but said he was pro American you might say he was entitled to freedom of speech and therefore not drum him out of the corps but would you necessarily want someone with a tormented and divided mind (a hypocrite by any other word) walking behind you on patrol?

Ah those mixed emotions. It was only a couple thousand years ago when a sarcastic old Roman stubbed his toe on the very same stone:

"At once I hate and love as well.
For godsake Catullus,
tell us
how? God
knows but I feel it
here in my heart the whole
of hell."

Lieberman, as chair of The Homeland Security Committee, will be investigating the terrorist ties of another apparently conflicted soul, Nidal Malik Hasan, whose divided loyalties and inability to sift or decide were dangerous for his mental health and the health and safety of those around him. But we’re safe now, with Lieberman at the helm. And the irony is so rich we need never feel poor again.

Hasan broke into a sweat when he was asked to defend The Constitution over his faith. He couldn’t find a woman pure enough to marry but he could find women he could talk to, be nice to, and buy lap dances from. Spending three or four hours at a time at a strip club was in contradiction to his Muslim faith and culture, and his calm, polite and respectful behavior there doesn’t jive with his being at odds with American culture when he was working at Fort Hood. But it is consistent with the 9/11 hijackers choosing to spend their last hours on earth at a strip club. (Could there be some kind of connection, maybe, between sex and religion (not to mention a death wish)? Naaah, Jimmy Swaggert and hundreds of Catholic priests would tell you that’s impossible, a contradiction in terms---about which we will speak more later.) Absolutely no connection between sex and religion in the 71 virgins, the promised reward for Muslim martyrdom, though anybody who has been with one virgin probably can’t imagine the misery of being with 71, and I hear that text can also be translated as 71 grapes. He was about to be deployed in a theater where he’d have to kill other Muslims. If, instead of being confused and conflicted, he was plotting and premeditating he wouldn’t have been openly proselytizing his patients months before he decided to become a martyr. If the Army had a clue it would have been plotting and premeditating to get him out. We don’t need these people with divided minds (so unlike our own) in the Army, so why was he there? He was there, like a lot of us, to play a part and fill a void. Recruitment was down, the divorce rate and suicide rate of our conflicted soldiers was skyrocketing, and there was literally nobody to take care of the thousands of returning vets with PTSD. Michael Savage says it’s the fault of sensitivity training and in a weird way I agree. Anytime you have to train or force somebody to be sensitive you’ve already won all the battles and lost the war. The army, mired in rigid bureaucratic protocol and full up with little boys playing soldier could not react quickly enough to an unanticipated danger and sift and decide him out. The lone voices of individual conscience and concern that through the ages have served as a sea anchor to the ship of state could not be heard this time over the roar of the engines. Lone voices aren’t always right but when we can no longer even hear them we’re in trouble.

http://www.democracynow.org/warhome

or:

http://logosteleos.blogspot.com

or:

http://www.democracynow.org/worst

In the thirties George Orwell talked about how the kind of language governments used was determined by the kinds of hypocrisy they needed to participate in. For all the clarity of his research, insight and outrage, our time is no less conflicted. Political labels are full of even more cognitive dissonance, and divide us all against ourselves. We don’t have wars, we have incursions and police actions and rejustifications of borders, we don't have assassinations we have eliminations, we don't colonize we liberate and organize over engineered infrastructures which put poor countries permanently in our debt; the U.N. partitions a country, gives part of it to a displaced population and it becomes legal, but could it have done that to the U.S., or to China? And every time I think I know somebody they shape shift on me & I find myself agreeing with Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage and Ron Paul (not to mention the Roman Emperor, Hadrian) on Afghanistan, and with the Republicans and our renegade du jour, Joe Lieberman, on the house health care resolution, for all the wrong reasons. Feeling as I do that in the conflicts since WW II, Big Money, Big Oil, Big Pharma etc. http://www.youtube.com/vid1 http://www.youtube.com/vid2 [URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6afjdjjG1mI]http://www.youtube.com/vid3[URL] and the military industrial complex have time and again forced the U.S. to squander its moral authority, how am I supposed to interpret Obama's "solemn decision" to send more troops to Afghanistan? Seems to me the solemnity is mostly ceremonial and his loyalties are divided from trying to please all his many contributors and constituents at once. Can he still sift and decide out the moments when two heads are not better than one and collective intelligence turns into situational stupidity? To continue the original question: What has Obama done wrong? Nothing. But I supported him because he gave every indication he’d act differently than Bush. So what happened to my vote, my representation? I know what I did wrong in his case. I didn’t follow the money. Early on, the list of his contributors gave every indication he was a hypocrite.

I’m sick of seeing mangled bodies and minds, that once belonged to pumped up young recruits, coming home and politicians making speeches over flag draped coffins using words like “honor”, “freedom” and “democracy”. I look at the war magazines on the rack at Basha’s and see the faces of gung ho soldiers and ask myself is there anything at all I could tell them about how hollow these words ring to me what with all the exchange of money and drugs in Karzai’s and our governments? I don’t know enough, to address those faces and that urge to fight, and what I don’t know hurts me, big time. I write my Congress person and I get form letters. I write letters to the editor, and try to explain in 250 words how it worries me when a member of Congress says he believes that a decrease in an increase in carbon emissions can reverse the feedback loops which I heard about from scientist after scientist in the McCain Climate Change Hearings. The right wing talk show hosts tell me O that’s all political B.S., those people just went through 8 plus years of college and field work so they could be political pawns. And those hosts whose mouths cover their ears have no ulterior motives for their criticism of the scientists? Such purity of scientific insight is wasted on AM radio, we need to get these people cabinet level positions. And Exxon, AIG, Safeway, Halliburton, Chiquita, United Technologies, Goldman Sachs have no vested interest at all in stoking the fires behind all this short term hope and patriotic posturing? Things don’t mean what they seem to mean, and I don’t sleep good…anymore.

If melting sea ice and longer and longer lines at soup kitchens and people dying for their freedom of choice with insurance company bureaucrats, and vets with illegally extended tours of duty and broken homes and broken minds is somehow logical and democratic and honorable then I’m too stupid to understand that logic and too lame (or hypocritical) to participate in that form of democracy and my sifting and sorting ability is so far beneath the military strategists who think to invade a country that for thousands of years has repelled all invasions that…..well the honor is just too great. But some people need those words, and I’m afraid they and I can’t have a good conversation. As someone who shares the same physiology and common ground with people who have no money and are filling the waiting rooms of hospitals these days, I can’t understand why Joe and a lot of other hired votes are in the Senate at all. Wouldn’t they be far less dangerous to themselves and others as lobbyists for United Technologies, Purdue Pharma or whoever at this point would be the highest bidder?---just something I think about now and then.

Western scripture mentions the torment of hypocrisy when it says, “You cannot serve god & mammon, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also", but the more complex society becomes, as members and especially as pillars of the community, we are required to torture ourselves in that very manner. We can either be miserable as hypocrites or like Dr. Laura, go for the easy, legal, traditional and authoritative answers. They relieve the mind of the burden of constantly sifting and deciding through chaos. In return for a little intellectual cowardice we get something to hold on to, like certain prisoners who, on the other end of the particular to general spectrum, memorize phone books…like the giant in the poem “PATTERSON”

“whose thoughts are listed in the telephone directory.”

We get to say, without Spike Lee's and Stan Lee’s edges of irony, "do the right thing". We get to judge and find wanting and get our S & M rocks off by condemning others for their all too human failures. As they say on TV, “It’s easy and simple, here, let me show you…..”

Kenneth Burke said in “A Grammar Of Motives”, we may never get to objective truth, but we can at least examine arguments dramatically as to Character, Scene, Action and Motive. And it's just my totally emotional assumption that Lieberman fails that analysis on all four counts. It's a consistent emotion with me. I didn't like duplicity on the left when Hillary & Hugh Rodham served as bagmen for the money paid out for Bill Clinton's pardon for Marc Rich which left Leonard Peltier to rot in prison for the rest of his life because Bill was afraid of the FBI and I don't like it on the right when, in my opinion, money is buying Joe Lieberman. I know all politicians and lawyers and judges participate in these legal fictions and do their little kabuki logic and black robe tap dances and generally just put on the best damn show they can, and they do it all for the good of the country (bless their hearts). But why are these tax and spend Republicans suddenly unhappy with the Health Care Bill? One way or another the insurance companies are going to make money. But, they say, we want our constituents to be free, independent, and self sufficient. But they’re not rejecting the health care THEY’RE getting from the government. I want people to be free and independent and self sufficient too. I want everybody to make money. I listen to the conservative congress people, but they dont listen to me. I don’t know what would make them happy. The province of their egos is so vast and they’re just so hung up on their dignity and they get so prickly and irritable about it I just want them to shut up.

So let’s just say it’s nothing personal, I just don’t like the guy. I like people who own their motives, their flags, their funding and their garbage, just a personal quirk of mine. Of course once we’re into politics all language is one kind of fabrication or another because otherwise you can’t try to please a majority of the people most of the time. And all our other all too human lovemaking, from the kiss of habit to the blow that (sometimes) brings salvation, were it not clothed in the fabric of language would be obscenely naked and incredibly lonely. So it’s an esthetic judgment I'm making. I just like some liars' showmanship better than others. Dennis Kucinich is also against the current health care bill (because he’s for the public option) but, also in my opinion, (whose else's would I use?), he's speaking out of conviction.

http://www.democracynow.org/hcbill

He says the argument that this is liberal versus conservative is a phony argument. I think it’s also phony to say it’s about socialism versus capitalism especially in cases where they’re both against democracy. It’s ridiculous in the first place that Korzybski had to remind us that all language is an abstraction. The map is not the territory, word is not thing, numbers on an actuarial table aren’t people, bodies rotting on a street in Palestine or Mogadishsu are more of a demonstration of how little any words mean than of what the word “honor” means….

When we come to a contradiction like waves vs. particles, intelligent design vs. evolution, Muslim vs. Christian vs. Buddhist vs. Atheist vs. Agnostic; Republican vs. Democrat; Socialist vs. Communist vs. Lutheran or whatever, we can usually bet that when the terms contra dict, language is lying to us and we’re not being coherent, as one lone logical positivist, (tho he was kind of sad in a way) Ludwig Wittgenstein, said in his “The Blue Book”:

“If we can ask a coherent question we can get a coherent answer. That of which we cannot speak coherently, we must pass over in silence.”

And a lot of religions would agree. Except for the ones, like Hasan’s, that refuse to pass over anything in silence and take themselves too seriously and take the law and the prophets literally and simply instead of as fables and semi useful fabrications, not to mention get their foundation from a bunch of scraggly bearded, irritable old prophet dudes who tell us not to eat certain foods because they think their personal GI tracts are the word of God, and tell us to stone women to death for adultery because it just personally pisses them off…not to mention language itself as a leap of faith.

The existentialists are right, it’s not just an attitude to say everything is absurd, it’s facing linguistic facts. Therefore? Just accept the proposition, as Buddha says, that existence is suffering, and, as the Chinese exhort, learn to eat bitter, and as Camus moralizes, have no appeal to doctrine, dogma, absolutes, legal fictions, government promises, phony arguments, or BARGAINING: if we get sad or mad enough and, like Michael Savage, fling baby shit in an endless verbal tirade or silent tantrum long enough maybe things will change. Not only will the cosmic axes shift but also in our favor (bonus points).

Hasan had a simple mind and, placed in an asymmetric situation, chose a simplistic political and religious stance to relieve his mind. We can make the same bargain with the devil in the details and choose an apposite opposite stance or we can dare to look beyond the law and the prophets and the norm at the monsters and ghosts in the forest of motives beyond our tribal campfire. We can narrow our focus to microscopic and get a little bit of the territory exactly right or we can widen it and generalize like those macroscopic sights in fighter planes that show miles of landscape on a 6” x 6” screen. They get a lot of the territory approximately right (and generally wrong). But our brains are limited, clumsy things, and you can’t have it both ways. Or should I just speak for myself on that issue because I’m all alone here too?

http://www.newyorker.com/fafacts

(or if a picture is worth a thousand words, are a thousand words worth a plugged nickel?)

Since that article "The Picture Problem" came out, technology has advanced to the point that our most efficient weapon in reconnaissance and in actually fighting insurgencies has become the drone, whose stealth and collateral damage has created a terrorist threat of its own. And now we've developed the nano-drone which can follow a suspect into a door or window and very selectively kill him or her. What do the words civil liberty mean in the face of this technology (including laser, white phosphorus, computer & ultra surveillance) in the hands of our government? In the GHW Bush administration's invasion of Panama was such advance weaponry actually tested on a civilian population? & is that terrorism and/or hypocrisy or what? And did the GW Bush administration actually have plans for civilian concentration camps or was that just paranoia on the left and extreme right? I think that plan gets cut with Occam's Razor, it's not necessary because we're already living in a de facto concentration camp with media Guantanamos scattered around to keep the torment of our own divided minds from being obvious---just my personal paranoia at work there.....

In terms of civil liberty Joe Lieberman is free to be a hypocrite if he wants, but if, as some, I grant you generalizing, surveys are saying, a majority of voters are in favor of the public option, is he still doing his job as Joe Blow’s Senator? And how did that situation get to be legal? But anybody can say anything, I suppose, and everything I have said is, however dire our circumstances, only circumstantial.

I don't have access to a court of law which, even with multiple eye witnesses, has been shown by DNA evidence to be fallible. I don't have connections in the FBI or CIA I could call to have Joe rendered to Guantanamo or Syria to be waterboarded, drugged, and tortured, which would be a high enough standard of proof for some who earnestly believe they are patriots. I don't have a psychology lab at my disposal where he could be used as a lab rat, put on a sophisticated lie detector to see how his brain lights up in certain areas at certain questions. And even if I could do all that what could I say to somebody who didn’t want to believe me? And even if I had unassailable proof that we’re in far more danger from global warming as brought to us by a bunch of white guys in suits at Exxon/Mobile than from one screwed up psychiatrist in a turban (though that’s SCARY on the level of the Undead rising from their graves!), or from these “criminals” coming across OUR border looking for work, what media outlet would give me 30 seconds of airtime? 3000 died on 9/11, 45000 die each year who could be saved by adequate medical care, how many die and will die from the effects of Big Oil?

http://superdummyinloveandwar.blogspot.com

I don't know, but with all the smoke the oil CEOs put out at Congressional hearings, there's got to be a fire somewhere.

If on the other hand I could turn Joe's and our brains into human computers that could only use the digital language and binary logic of zeroes and ones we could get at A "truth" but only in a narrow, totally emotionless spectrum which, if used in their daily lives, even a majority of mathematicians might find uncomfortable.

In the fifties Bertrand Russell and a few other logical positivists tried to invent a language based on math that would be totally logical and not subject to emotional tweaking. They failed. Because, as Wittgenstein also said:

“All propositions are false.
All propositions are true.”

The question, even for scientists, being, how?

On the other hand, William Carlos Williams said the language of poetry contains information that never gets into the newspapers and yet men die daily for lack of it. It's my solitary and unforgivable contention that thirteen people died on one day at Ft. Hood for the Army's lack of it.