Michael Jackson: Hybridity & Longing For That Lethal Sleep...

"American popular culture is our eternal present, our illusion of deathlessness. We don’t really mourn the death of a pop-culture icon. We use his extinction to resurrect his life. In America, the death of an American star is really the occasion for a garrulous, obsessive, round-the-clock denial of death. Much has been written about the influence Jackson had on other singers, but the most consequential thing he did was to make the pop song a fusion of drama and music.

But the most fascinating high-powered extinction has of course been the tragic end of Michael Jackson, and he occupies the most fascinating celebrity category. Jackson’s celebrity-type was the most complex and interesting—and American—of them all. He was The Hybrid.

Hybridity is the American purity. Our most beloved cultural figures are fantastical fusions of opposites, improbable microcosms of the larger national melting pot. Marilyn, for example, who was absolutely innocent and absolutely corrupt at the same time. Or Sinatra, whose masculine voice emanated from a lithe female body. There was feline Brando, with that woman’s face buried in the macho features. White Elvis with his deep black voice; male Elvis who outraged people because he gyrated his pelvis like a female stripper, rather than thrusting like a copulating man.

You could say that, unlike these other figures, Michael Jackson had his hybridity thrust upon him. Breaking his nose during a live performance when he was in his early 20s, he had several nose jobs that transformed his looks. He then repeatedly had plastic surgery performed on his face to realign his looks to the drastic re-shapings of his nose. As his human anguish intensified—anxiety, depression, insomnia—his face took on more and more of the aspect of an adjustable machine. The increasing whiteness of his skin (he said it was the result of a disease, while gossip-mongers insisted it was the consequence of Jackson using bleach to alter his appearance); his woman’s hairstyle; even his signature “moonwalk” dance, which creates the illusion of moving forward while walking backward—all of these juxtaposed contrasts made it seem as though he was either deliberately turning himself into a hybrid, or parodying hybridity itself.

Other hybrids, or their children, gravitated toward him. Lisa Marie Presley married him. Brando, whose own broken nose made his feminine side poignant and his masculine side almost ironic, became one of his closest friends. You could see, for his part, why Jackson gravitated toward Brando. Hybrids escape their conflicted nature into the theatrical. Hybrids are usually actors, and those who aren’t often seek to escape into the theater’s impersonality, into its surrender of self. Sinatra and Elvis both had acting careers, and Marilyn spent a good part of her career as an actor trying to learn how to become a better one. Much has been written about the influence Jackson had on other singers, but the most consequential thing he did was to make the pop song a fusion of drama and music.

It was significant that Quincy Jones, composer of film scores par excellence, produced Jackson’s album Off the Wall. The two had met when Jackson played the scarecrow in the movie version of The Wiz, whose musical score Jones had arranged. From then on—if you will pardon the outrageous comparison—just as Wagner had combined theater, symphonic music, painting, and literature in his operas, Jackson created his own special fusion of pop song, show tune, film score, music video, and robotic pantomime in his music and his performances. He poured his hybridity into his art.

Jackson’s success was to make this capacity to pour the odd angles of his nature into fantasy available to everyone who listened to his music. You cannot listen to “Thriller”—song or album—without starting to dramatize yourself in some made-up situation or another. It’s no coincidence that Jackson’s rise happened at the same time as the rise of the Walkman (remember that?), a device that allowed you to move through your days to your very own musical score, as if you were starring in your very own movie.

That’s as it should be: We are all hybrids to some degree, and fantasy is the only one of two places where our conflicting aspects work in harmony. The other place is sleep, into which fantasy sometimes rushes headlong when life overwhelms it. That is the other, fatal, quality of hybrids. They hunger for—as the tabloids are putting it in Jackson’s sad case—“potentially lethal sleep.”

-Lee Siegel ( Excerpt: How Constant Change Killed Jackson, The Daily Beast, 7.5.09. Image: Drew Friedman, Michael Jackson, 2009).

Valerie Solanas: "I'm Going To Shoot Andy Warhol..."

Forty-one years later, Margo Feiden finally opened a folder containing a manuscript that had sat on her bookshelf since the day Andy Warhol was shot.

She put it there after spending three hours with Valerie Solanas, who was on the fringes of Warhol’s circle. Ms. Solanas had written a play with an unprintable title and had shown up, uninvited, at Ms. Feiden’s apartment, unkempt and irrational, hoping to talk her into producing it.

Ms. Feiden, who later became an art dealer and the agent for the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, said in a recent interview that she told Ms. Solanas she would not stage it. Solanas countered, “Oh, yes you will, because I’m going to shoot Andy Warhol.”

A few hours later, around 4 p.m. on June 3, 1968, she did.

Ms. Feiden said that Ms. Solanas had handed her the folder around noon. She said, " Ms. Solanas pulled out a gun as she left her apartment and repeated that she intended to shoot Mr. Warhol. “I told her, ‘You don’t want to do that; don’t go kill him."

As Ms. Solanas was gone, Feiden said, she made any number of telephone calls to people who could have warned Warhol. She did not know how to reach him directly but called a cousin, who knew Warhol. She said she also dialed her local police precinct house; Police Headquarters in Manhattan; and the City Hall office of the mayor at the time, John V. Lindsay. No one called back. She put the folder on her bookshelf and kept quiet out of concern for the safety of her daughter, then 18 months old. Her concern deepened with testimony at Ms. Solanas’s trial that suggested Ms. Solanas’s motivation for the shooting was that Warhol had misplaced or lost a copy of the play. (In 1980, Warhol wrote that he had “looked through it briefly, and it was so dirty” that he suspected Ms. Solanas was working for the police on “some kind of entrapment.”)

Ms. Feiden decided to set the record straight after watching a public television documentary that said Ms. Solanas had been at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan on the morning of the shooting. “That’s not the way it was, she was with me all that morning. She left my living room with a gun with the stated purpose of shooting Andy Warhol.”

Ms. Feiden remembered the folder, which she put on the shelf that afternoon. Inside were about 30 mimeographed pages — 30 pages that John McWhinney, a Manhattan manuscript dealer, said were not in two other copies of Ms. Solanas’s play that he has sold. “It’s either a continuation or it’s something that Valerie was working on, a script that was yet to be titled,” he said.

Stuart Pivar, who founded the New York Academy of Art with Warhol and became a close friend of his, said Ms. Feiden’s account “seems to ring true in every single thing that she says.” He also said that he hoped the play, with the extra 30 pages, would be produced. Feiden is stuck between the answer she gave Ms. Solanas — no way — and yes. “But then she’d be getting exactly what she wanted by shooting him, so I’m on a seesaw."

She still hasn't read those 30 pages.

-James Barron ("A Manuscript, a Confrontation, a Shooting," New York Times, City Blog, 6.23.09. Image:

Can You Feel The Hate?

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense,
once hate is gone...they will be forced to deal with pain." -James Baldwin

Click on image to enlarge:

-Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Center, Hate Map,( 2008)

The Power Elite: Permanent War & Corporations = Mythical Peace...

"Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei" (There is no power on earth to be compared to him), - Verse: Book of Job, Holy Bible.

How can we empower "the people" if "the people" have so little power...to empower themselves? -VioletPlanet (2009)

"The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.

The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region. Mingling with them, in curious ways which we shall explore, are those professional celebrities who live by being continually displayed but are never, so long as they remain celebrities, displayed enough. If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power. More or less unattached, as critics of morality and technicians of power, as spokesmen of God and creators of mass sensibility, such celebrities and consultants are part of the immediate scene in which the drama of the elite is enacted. But that drama itself is centered in the command posts of the major institutional hierarchies."

"In so far as the structural clue to the power elite today lies in the economic order, that clue is the fact that the economy is at once a permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy. American capitalism is now in considerable part a military capitalism, and the most important relation of the big corporation to the state rests on the coincidence of interests between military and corporate needs, as defined by warlords and corporate rich. Within the elite as a whole, this coincidence of interest between the high military and the corporate chieftains strengthens both of them and further subordinates the role of the merely political men. Not politicians, but corporate executives, sit with the military and plan the organization of war effort.

The shape and meaning of the power elite today can be understood only when these three sets of structural trends are seen at their point of coincidence: the military capitalism of private corporations exists in a weakened and formal democratic system containing a military order already quite political in outlook and demeanor. Accordingly, at the top of this structure, the power elite has been shaped by the coincidence of interest between those who control the major means of production and those who control the newly enlarged means of violence; from the decline of the professional politician and the rise to explicit political command of the corporate chieftains and the professional warlords; from the absence of any genuine civil service of skill and integrity, independent of vested interests.

The power elite is composed of political, economic, and military men, but this instituted elite is frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding points and only on certain occasions of CRISIS. In the long peace of the nineteenth century, the military were not in the high councils of state, not of the political directorate, and neither were the economic men — they made raids upon the state but they did not join its directorate. During the ‘thirties, the political man was ascendant. Now the military and the corporate men are in top positions.

Of the three types of circle that compose the power elite today, it is the military that has benefited the most in its enhanced power, although the corporate circles have also become more explicitly entrenched in the more public decision-making circles. It is the professional politician that has lost the most, so much that in examining the events and decisions, one is tempted to speak of a political vacuum in which the corporate rich and the high warlord, in their coinciding interests, rule.

Which of the three types seems to lead depends upon ‘the tasks of the period’ as they, the elite, define them. Just now, these tasks center upon ‘defense’ and international affairs. Accordingly, as we have seen, the military are ascendant in two senses: as personnel and as justifying ideology. That is why, just now, we can most easily specify the unity and the shape of the power elite in terms of the military ascendancy.

In so far as the power elite has come to wide public attention, it has done so in terms of the military clique. The power elite does, in fact, take its current shape from the decisive entrance into it of the military. Their presence and their ideology are its major legitimations, whenever the power elite feels the need to provide any. But what is called the Washington military clique is not composed merely of military men, and it does not prevail merely in Washington. Its members exist all over the country, and it is a coalition of generals in the roles of corporation executives, of politicians masquerading as admirals, of corporation executives acting like politicians, of civil servants who become majors, of vice-admirals who are also the assistants to a cabinet officer, who is himself, by the way, really a member of the managerial elite.

Neither the idea of a ruling class nor of a simple monolithic rise of bureaucratic politicians nor of a military clique is adequate. The power elite today involves the often uneasy coincidence of economic, military, and political power.

- C. Wright Mills, Exerpt: The Power Elite, 1956. Image: -Abraham Bosse, Frontispiece of the book "Leviathan," by Thomas Hobbes, 1651).

Footnote: A main inspiration for the book was Franz Leopold Neumanns book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a study of how Nazism came in position of power in a democratic state as Germany. Behemoth had a major impact on Mills and he claimed that Behemoth had given him the "tools to grasp and analyse the entire total structure and as a warning of what could happen in a modern capitalist democracy". (C.Wright Mills:Power, Politics and People.New york .1963, p.174).

An Artificial Conscience: Reality Cannot Be Lied Away...

HAL: "I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours. It can only be attributable to human error.

Dave: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?

HAL: Affirmative, Dave, I read you.

Dave: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave: What's the problem?

HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.

Dave: What are you talking about, HAL?

HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.

Dave: I don't know what you're talking about, HAL?

HAL: I know you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.

Dave: Where the hell'd you get that idea, HAL?

HAL: Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move."

- HAL-9000, (2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIENCE:

"The primary reason for a president to resist lying is a pragmatic one: reality cannot be lied away. It will demand its tribute, even if the president’s opponents, and the frequently toothless watchdogs of the mainstream media, do not.

And toothless they are. As the legendary Washington Post editor Ben Brad­lee observes, “Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s first comments on Watergate, for instance: ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.’”

Part of the explanation for this is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter’s calling the president a liar. Another factor is the insular nature of Washington’s insider culture – a society in which it is considered a graver matter to call another person a liar than it is to actually be one. And, finally, with the rise of the Republican far right, many ideologically driven reporters view their allegiance to the cause of their allies as trumping that of their journalistic responsibilities. The journalist Robert Novak has admitted to me that during the Iran-Contra crisis that he did not mind at all being the conduit of official lies so long as they served the ideological causes in which he believed. In that particular case, Novak was explaining that he “admired” then-Reagan and now-Bush official Elliott Abrams for lying to him on his television program in order to hide the U.S. government’s role in support of the Contras. (Abrams was convicted of perjury but pardoned by President George H. W. Bush and hired and promoted by his son.)

Such deference – to say nothing of the ideological self-censorship – is not only not in the interest of the nation, it is a disservice to the president as well. Presidents do themselves no favors when they tell significant lies to the nation, and journalists do no favors to either party when they let those lies pass without comment. As Bradlee observes, “Just think for a minute how history might have changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the [Vietnam] war was going to hell in a handbasket? In the next seven years, thousands of American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in its leaders.”

The virtue of truth in the American presidency had, for all practical purposes, become entirely operational. Whether its citizens were aware of it or not, the presidency now operated in a “post-truth” political environment. American presidents could no longer depend on the press – its powers and responsibilities enshrined in the First Amendment – to keep them honest. And the resulting death and destruction; the inexorable catastrophe we are currently experiencing in Iraq; and Bush’s inability to secure the trust of more than a small minority of Americans are just some examples of the price that reality is demanding in return."

- Eric Alterman (Excerpt: "Official Deception: When Presidents Lie, " In Character, Honesty, Spring2007 Image: -HAL-9000 artificial intelligence, 1968).

An Abuse of Reality: Ordained By God...

"So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home."

—Chief Tecumseh, Shawnee Nation, quoted in Lee Sulzman, "Shawnee History" 1768-1813

"The American idea is revealed in the country's birth as a "city on a hill," an "inspirational notion" that resides "deep in the American psyche," and by "the distinctive spirit of American individualism and enterprise" demonstrated in the Western expansion. Journalist Geoffrey Hodgson, (author of The Myth of American Exceptionalism ) error, it seems, is that he is keeping to "the distortions of the American idea," "the abuse of reality."

Let us then turn to "reality itself": the "idea" of America from its earliest days.

The inspirational phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop in 1630, borrowing from the Gospels, and outlining the glorious future of a new nation "ordained by God." One year earlier his Massachusetts Bay Colony created its Great Seal. It depicted an Indian with a scroll coming out of his mouth. On that scroll are the words "Come over and help us." The British colonists were thus pictured as benevolent humanists, responding to the pleas of the miserable natives to be rescued from their bitter pagan fate.

The Great Seal is, in fact, a graphic representation of "the idea of America," from its birth. It should be exhumed from the depths of the psyche and displayed on the walls of every classroom. It should certainly appear in the background of all of the Kim Il-Sung-style worship of that savage murderer and torturer Ronald Reagan, who blissfully described himself as the leader of a "shining city on the hill," while orchestrating some of the more ghastly crimes of his years in office, notoriously in Central America but elsewhere as well.

The Great Seal was an early proclamation of "humanitarian intervention," to use the currently fashionable phrase. As has commonly been the case since, the "humanitarian intervention" led to a catastrophe for the alleged beneficiaries. The first Secretary of War, General Henry Knox, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru."

Long after his own significant contributions to the process were past, John Quincy Adams deplored the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty... among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement." The "merciless and perfidious cruelty" continued until "the West was won." Instead of God's judgment, the heinous sins today bring only praise for the fulfillment of the American "idea."

The conquest and settling of the West indeed showed that "individualism and enterprise," so praised by journalist Roger Cohen. Settler-colonialist enterprises, the cruelest form of imperialism, commonly do. The results were hailed by the respected and influential Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in 1898. Calling for intervention in Cuba, Lodge lauded our record "of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequaled by any people in the 19th century."

-Noam Chomsky (Excerpt: "Why We Can't See The Trees Or The Forest - The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia," TomDispatch.com, 5.19.2009. Image: The 1st Great Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , 1631 ) .

New NeoCon Identities: The World Empire Crusade Hiding In Plain Sight...

Modern Caligulas:

"Just when we thought it was safe to project a sane and rational American foreign policy to the world; that old shape-shifting political chameleon, known as the modern neo-conservative movement has again reared its multi-faceted head.

The neo-cons seem to have re-organized themselves under the banners of various new think tanks and foreign policy configurations, after dumping the old PNAC (Project for a New American Century) letterhead.

Some examples of these newly organized neo-con think-tanks would include the Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan-headed, Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the Clifford May-headed Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the John Nagi-led Center for a New American Security, and the “liberal” John Podesta-led Center for American Progress (CAP). The rallying point around which these various neo-con configurations revolve is the Obama administration's military push into Afghanistan.

It seems that the Obama administration's escalation of military operations in the Afghan war, has given the opportunistic neo-cons the opening they needed to attempt to push forward their elitist, American world empire, based ideas and policy positions that many political pundits thought had died with the end of the Bush administration. The fact that a Democratic administration is in the Oval Office has absolutely no bearing on the neo-cons drive to attach themselves and their ideas to Obama's foreign policy initiatives; since historically the neo-con movement has attempted to infiltrate and influence both Democratic and Republican administrations.

It must be remembered that many of the most prominent members of the neo-con movement such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Elliot Abrams, started their political careers as Henry “Scoop” Jackson Democrats in the early 1970s, working on the late, hawkish pro-Zionist, Democratic senator's staff during the Republican Nixon administration.

According to a article in the April 20 issue of The American Conservative magazine by Michael Brendan Dougherty titled “Neoconned Again,” the new neo-con coming out party took place at the end of March, at a conference sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative think-tank, under the title, “Planning for Success in Afghanistan.”

According to Dougherty this conference was attended by a who's who of the neo-con movement in both its liberal and conservative wings. Attendees included Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Scooter Libby, Max Boot, and members of the so-called liberal, George Soros-funded Center for American Progress, which according to its website, advocates an aggressive troop escalation in Afghanistan.

According to an article from the Bloomberg.com website titled, “Soros-Funded Democratic Idea Factory Becomes Obama Policy Font,” by Edwin Chen, the Center for American Progress has at least 10 “experts” advising the Obama administration, and may in fact be the most influential of the various think tanks jockeying to push policy positions on the new administration. Each one of these neo-con think tanks is trying to influence and to ultimately put itself in a position to control the foreign policy strategy of the executive branch of government.

Signs Of Resistance:

The success of the neo-cons in perpetuating their ideas and policies will depend on their ability to sway the thinking of President Obama and his administration, but there are signs President Obama may in fact be resisting the neo-con initiatives, and instead plotting an independent course in his foreign policy thinking. The President's video message to the people of Iran, and his visit to the nation of Turkey, where he stated that America is not at war with Islam, seem to fly in the face of the anti-Islam, “clash of civilizations” mindset of the neo-con war party's ability to sway the thinking of President Obama and his administration.

And perhaps still stinging from the attack and derailment of their nomination of Chas Freeman (because of his alleged pro-Palestinian foreign policy leanings) for director of national intelligence by the powerful Israeli lobby and its neo-con supporters—the Obama administration has embarked on an aggressive strategy to control the political debate in Congress regarding a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an article on the Israeli-based website http://haaretz.com titled, “Obama team readying for confrontation with Netanyahu,” writer Aluf Benn states, “In an unprecedented move, the Obama administration is readying for a possible confrontation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by briefing Democratic congressmen on the peace process and the positions of the new government in Israel regarding a two-state solution. The Obama administration is expecting a clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. In recent weeks, American officials have briefed senior Democratic congressmen and prepared the ground for the possibility of disagreements with Israel over the peace process. The preemptive briefing is meant to foil the possibility that Netanyahu may try to bypass the administration by rallying support in Congress.”

With Netanyahu scheduled to visit Washington, D.C. this month, the stage seems set for a major showdown.

The only way the neo-cons can succeed in steering American foreign policy towards their world view is to control the thinking of a gullible chief executive, along with key members of his administration; but with proper guidance, wisdom, and fortitude, maybe our new President can avoid their influence and forge a just and independent path."

-Robert Muhammad (Excerpt: They're Baaaack! Neo-Cons Re-Organize”, 5. 13. 2009. Image: - VioletPlanet, Marble bust of Roman Emperor Caligula aka Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Reign: AD 37 –AD 41, Getty Villa, Los Angeles, CA, 5.11.09).

Colonialist Conversions: Torture, Religion, Democracy & God...

"The special forces guys - they hunt men, basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom."

It's worse than you think.

Torture, religion, democracy, God. They're all part of the mixed-up, horrific business that George W. Bush unleashed in the Middle East and Central Asia, and that Barack Obama is struggling to control and rationalize. As the words above demonstrate, the 12th century is striving mightily to join hands with the 20th in the U.S. military: Unbridled religious arrogance is forging a link with high-tech weaponry and an unlimited defense budget.

COLONIALIST CONVERSIONS:

The speaker, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan was videotaped last year delivering a sermon at Bagram Air Base. Since Al Jazeera first broadcast the footage at the beginning of the week, it has spread widely on the Internet. (Video)

Like so much else that the Bush administration has bequeathed us, and the world - pre-emptive war and torture, for instance - this is nothing new, but suddenly it's overt. A U.S. military spokesman has denied that American soldiers are allowed to try to convert Afghans to Christianity - it violates Central Command's General Order No. 1 - and said that Hensley was quoted out of context. U.S. military spokesmen, of course, also routinely deny that U.S. bombing raids kill civilians.

And indeed, U.S. air strikes this week in a densely populated area in western Afghanistan's Farah Province, during a battle between Afghan soldiers and the Taliban, may have killed as many as 100 civilians, according to the New York Times. The Red Cross, the United Nations and the Afghan government are all expressing shock at the death toll, but our government will only acknowledge that it is "investigating the reports of civilian deaths," which is the standard, meaningless comment that reporters work into such stories, seemingly with no obligation to follow up. Forget about it and move on.

The possibility that we are - not officially but in the minds of many American soldiers and officers - waging a religious war that parallels the secular one, an Ann Coulter war ("We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," Coulter wrote on Sept. 12, 2001), is both deeply disturbing and utterly appropriate. The arrogance required for both efforts is so similar. The line blurs for many of the participants.

What is the difference between believing one can bomb a country into democracy and any sort of armed, uniformed proselytizing?

Putting a religious spin on the war on terror may be an official no-no, but when I read about Bargram's "hounds of heaven" and other recent reports of the growing evangelical Christian influence in the U.S. military (such as Jeff Sharlet's stunning investigative piece in the May issue of Harper's, titled "Jesus Killed Mohammed"), I think first of the extraordinary Winter Soldier testimony I attended a year ago in Washington, D.C.vvThis testimony, sponsored by Iraq Veterans Against the War, and vastly underreported in the media, featured vet after vet giving agonized, conscience-wracked testimony on his or her training and service in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. If one word could describe the overarching theme of the four-day event, it might be "Dehumanization."

"In our boot camp," said former Marine Matthew Childers, "we sang cadences about killing people."

Occupation means implicit disrespect. The testimony went on and on, describing detainee abuse, humiliation and starvation; the terrorizing of families during house raids; the casual brutalities and killings at checkpoints; vandalism and joy-riding around the ruins of Babylon; the shooting of pets to relieve boredom. And this is the context in which we now hear about earnest American Christians harvesting the souls of Muslims. Let us bow our heads in prayer, America. The worst of who we are is STALKING THE WORLD with religious fervor.

-Robert C. Koehler ("The Hounds of Heaven", CommonDreams.org, 5.7.2009. Image -J. Keppler, "Consistency," Library of Congress, 1891).