So soobee asked if 9/11 woule ever just be another day. I answered that:

It’s sort of the way Mother’s Day was invented for greeting card sellers. 9/11 continues to be Christmas for politicians.

This was on my mind because of this re-run by Jonathan Schwartz.

Basically, he’s citing Bush and Rumsfeld and Rice saying that 9/11 and other terrorist attacks represent an opportunity, a great opportunity, a GRAND opportunity. And goes on to offer that people in that political class pretend to feel what the rest of us feel, but ultimately are only opportunistic about what follows that sort of mayhem.

And he’s right, of course, but he’s also wrong to see the… lack of opportunity.

I wrote about this at the time, and have written about it subsequently, too. 9/11 gave us the opportunity to do the right thing, to change our ways, to amend our national character in important aspects. It was the perfect time for real leadership and character, healing the grief instead of exploiting it. That was the opportunity.

And ever since then we’ve had opportunity after opportunity to heal these wounds that are constantly re-opened by the political class. But, as Naomi Klein points out, we’re vulnerable when we’re wounded, and one thing about Americans is that we tend not to understand our own wounds. The blood is gushing out of our punctured artery, but we act as if we’re ready to kick ass on someone. We then thank our politicians for re-opening the near-fatal wound yet again a year later.

Rudy Giuliani got national attention by showing up in Manhattan on 9/11 and walking around in front of news cameras. On the basis of this, he’s running for President. Whenever he appears, he’s talking about what a manly man he was, how he was there doing just as much work as the first responders and those who sifted through the rubble looking for survivors. Of course it’s all bullshit.

It just re-opens the wounds, and in your wounded state, your state of shock, you can’t think it through as clearly.

I’m singling out Giuliani because he’s an easy example, but he’s not unique in this respect. There’s no one running for President who hasn’t used 9/11 as a prop, as a garotte. Silence your speech, make you bleed. Every position up and down the political power structure and the political spectrum wants you to hurt.

I don’t know how to heal this. If I did, I’d wave the magic wand and it would be over. We lost the greatest, grandest opportunity when the decision was made to appeal to paranoia and bloodlust at the expense of humanity.

So my question here is: How to heal?

Because some terrorists attacked the US, compounded with lack of oversight, I (and you) have no more right to habeus corpus.

The Habeas Corpus Act passed by Parliament in 1679 guaranteed this right in law, although its origins go back much further, probably to Anglo-Saxon times.

Sir William Blackstone, who wrote his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England in the 18th Century, recorded the first use of habeas corpus in 1305. But other writs with the same effect were used in the 12th Century, so it appears to have preceded Magna Carta in 1215.

Its original use was more straightforward – a writ to bring a prisoner into court to testify in a pending trial. But what began as a weapon for the king and the courts became – as the political climate changed – protection for the individual against arbitrary detention by the state.

It is thought to have been common law by the time of Magna Carta, which says in Article 39: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land.”

Over the next few hundred years, concern grew that kings would whimsically intervene on matters of detention, so it was enshrined in law in 1679.

Who cares? You should.

Habeas Corpus is an ancient common law prerogative writ – a legal procedure to which you have an undeniable right. It is an extraordinary remedy at law. Upon proper application, or even on naked knowledge alone, a court is empowered, and is duty bound, to issue the Extraordinary Writ of Habeas Corpus commanding one who is restraining liberty to forthwith produce before the court the person who is in custody and to show cause why the liberty of that person is being restrained. Absent a sufficient showing for a proper restraint of liberty, the court is duty bound to order the restraint eliminated and the person discharged. Habeas Corpus is fundamental to American and all other English common law derivative systems of jurisprudence. It is the ultimate lawful and peaceable remedy for adjudicating the providence of liberty’s restraint.

There are plenty of other ways 9/11 has changed my life, but this is a pretty fundamental one. Somehow, while many of us cowered in fear of another terrorist attack, 500 years of common law evaporated, turning from substance to mere echo of odor almost overnight.

Other stuff I’ve said about habeus corpus.

Also: Jonathan Schwartz from two years ago, which you really should read.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

(As MP3.)

Via patriotboy.

In more hopeful moments, I want to write a computer virus that fills all iPods with the works of Rumi and Walt Whitman.

“I wore my iPod because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Update: Yes, there are free poetry podcasts on the iTunes store. And I came up with this idea while listening to Bill Moyers interview Robert Bly on my iPod in a pizza place.

Later, after I was home, my housemate had made frozen pizza, and offered me some. So I had a pizza day.

Waking in the middle of the night with indigestion, what could I do but write the above?

I live in a house that’s in the bottom of a ravine. The creek starts about a quarter mile to the west, running down amongst some expensive houses, through dense green foliage, and through our backyard. Oftentimes the dog will trot off across the creekbanks, requiring a hose down before she can re-enter the house.

But it’s a ravine. If you were from Tennessee, you migh call it a holler. It’s a small area, and we’re literally walled off from the rest of the city in terms of sound.

Sometimes we hear the boats on the lake, but just for a tiny slice of time when they pass through the aperture of opportunity. Or if the breeze is just right, we hear the rumbling of tires on pavement from the busy road a few blocks away. But mostly it’s like being in an anechoic chamber, hearing the sound of your own nervous system.

And that’s good.

And we get the birds, too.

Crows and Steller’s jays argue with and to each other. Hummingbirds dart around leaving behind a trail of clicking sounds. Woodpeckers knock, knock, who’s there. Then, after it goes on for an hour someone comes out of their house and startles it, sending it off, complaining in screechy woodpecker complaining sounds.

A great horned owl lives up at the top of the ravine. I only know this by the sound. I hear him many nights, even some early mornings, the banality of crows and jays broken by mysterious call. I think owls are viewed as wise only because they fail to present themselves as fools. He moves down the valley, telling everyone where he’s going, like the ultimate baddas brag: “Yeah, I’m here. And even though you know it, I’ll still kill something.”

I think having owls (and all the rest) is the best kind of pest control there is, except for one thing: There’s only one owl, and he can only eat so much.

And there’s one other bird song I hear. It comes from inside the house, mostly during the day.

Cuz I just can’t get enough of the guy….

Last night, before sean showed up, I was poking around in Second Life and found the IBM Codestation island. It’s a place for open-source SL code and objects, and has a game where you program an object to solve a maze.

It really looks like Darth Vader’s personal SL island, very dark menacing architecture with glowing blue highlights. Note that this pic was taken during in-game daylight hours:

Well, today we learn via Bruce Sterling, that IBM employees are staging a strike *in Second Life.*

Naomi Klein has a new book out: The Shock Doctrine. She sent a copy to Alfonso Cuaron (director of ‘Children Of Men’), who put together a short film that promotes the ideas within the book.

The central thesis is that governments use the shock of disaster as a cover for economic policy such as rolling back regulation and civil rights. I’m sure my readers can come up with their own examples.

I’ll have to go pick this one up, because I’m not depressed enough.

Some call it Wingnut Welfare.

I call it ‘how crimes against humanity occur.’

…Cry ’til you laugh:

To recap, first the public was incorrectly led to believe that Gen. David Petraeus would issue his own report about the situation on the ground in Iraq. Then the Los Angeles Times reported that the so-called “Petraeus report” would “actually be written by the White House.”

Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) then suggested the White House would probably “tweak” the “Petraeus report.” In an effort to put the controversy to rest, Gen. David Petraeus assured lawmakers that the White House was not going to be involved in the “writing” of the report: [..]

Now, apparently there will be no written report from Gen. Petraeus at all. While Petraeus’ statement to Congress will be made available, the public will not know what information he is providing to President Bush. The lack of transparency over Petraeus’ “report” will only intensify the high level of skepticism surrounding his statistics.

See? Everything is JUST FREAKIN’ PEACHY in Iraq, and we don’t have to worry about it at all. Petraeus says that chocolate rations are up, and who am I to doubt a general?