Dennis and Alice

Howard Dean has Al Gore, Dennis Kucinich has Alice Walker:

Alice Walker Endorses Kucinich, Will Be Keynote at Kucinich Event

What: “A Celebration of Light: Harnessing the Power of Our Diversity” – Public Forum Featuring Dennis J. Kucinich, Alice Walker, and community leaders, activists and artists in the fields of sustainability, peace and social justice.

When: Monday, December 15, 2003, 5:30 p.m. PST fundraiser reception ; 7-10 p.m. PST Keynotes and public forum.

Where: Unitarian Universalist Church, 1187 Franklin Street at Geary, San Francisco, Calif.

Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award recipient Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” and “Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism,” has endorsed Democratic Presidential Candidate Dennis J. Kucinich and will join him on stage for a celebration to mark the 25th anniversary of his stand to save Cleveland’s public power utilities. Then-Mayor Kucinich kept a campaign promise and refused to sell the Cleveland municipal electric system to a private company, CEI, the predecessor to the infamous Ohio First Energy, which earlier this year sent the nation into the largest blackout in modern history.

Kucinich plunged the city of Cleveland into bankruptcy with his immature, confrontational intransigence, but that’s not the matter here. The matter here is that Kucinich is welcoming – nay trumpeting – the endorsement of Alice Walker, who may be a fine novelist but who borders on the insane when it comes to public policy.

This is what she wrote just after 9/11:

It is said that in the Babemba tribe of South Africa, when a person acts irresponsibly or unjustly, he is placed in the center of the village, alone and unfettered. All work ceases, and every man, woman and child in the village gathers in a large circle around the accused individual. Then each person in the tribe speaks to the accused, one at a time, about all the good things the person in the center of the circle has done in his lifetime. Every incident, every experience that can be recalled with any detail and accuracy is recounted. All his positive attributes, good deeds, strengths and kindnesses are recited carefully and at length.

The tribal ceremony often lasts several days. At the end, the tribal circle is broken, a joyous celebration takes place, and the person is symbolically and literally welcomed back into the tribe.

This will not be the fate of Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the attack on North America. In a war on Afghanistan, he will either be left alive, while thousands of impoverished, frightened people, most of them women and children and the elderly, are bombed into oblivion around him, or he will be killed in a bombing attack for which he seems, in his spirit – from what I have gleaned from news sources – quite prepared. In his mind, he is fighting a holy war against the United States. To die in battle against it would be an honor. He has been quoted as saying he would like to make the United States into a shadow of itself as he helped make the Soviet Union, which lost the war in Afghanistan, become a shadow of itself. In fact, he appears to take credit for helping the Soviet Union disintegrate. I personally would like him to understand that the shadow he wishes upon us, of poverty, fear, an almost constant state of terror, is merely the America too many of us already know. It is certainly the shadow my ancestors lived with for several hundred years.

But what would happen to his cool armor if he could be reminded of all the good, non-violent things he has done? Further, what would happen to him if he could be brought to understand the preciousness of the lives he has destroyed? This is not as simple a question as it might appear. I firmly believe the only punishment that works is love. Or, as the Buddha said: Hatred will never cease by hatred. By love alone is it healed.”

Um, yes. As I have oft repeated, the things that make many artists great, or at least good – heightened sensitivity and imagination, narrow moral absolutism and/or broad moral relativism, extreme empathy – are often the things that make them public policy nightmares. Unfortunately, the world is real and must be dealt with as such – too many lives are at stake.

Walker’s tribal ring-around-the-rosies technique for dealing with “irresponsible or unjust” behavior can only work in a small, homogenous community with deeply held, shared values. Dealing in the manner Walker prescribes with a deranged, monomaniacal, civilian-slaughtering religious fanatic who wants only the death of the several billion humans who don’t share his particular worldview would result only in a large ring of dead people, the elimination of the tribe, a bit of simple genocide. There would be no community left into which such a person could be welcomed back. One cannot be shamed into proper behavior with love if one has no sense of love in the first place, if one is driven only by divinely-sanctioned hatred.

Is Kucinich suggesting a few million of his “tribesmen” gather around Afghanistan and western Pakistan and sing the praises of bin Laden’s cave-dwelling, mass-murdering, plane-crashing, world-raping ass into megaphones as a cornerstone of his foreign policy? That’ll show those terrorists. Perhaps he is eyeing Walker for his Secretary of Love position.

Bin Laden and his ilk do not see the “preciousness” of ANY life (other than perhaps their own – let others be the suicide bombers, right Osama?), and they are willing to sacrifice ANY number of their fellow humans – friend, foe or neutral – for their millennial causes.

Mercy, love, human kindness: these are all seen as signs of contemptible weakness punishable by humiliation and death by these anti-human, diabolical, affectless replicas of human beings. People like this cannot be appeased, beguiled, bribed, mollified, or “loved” into submission – the only remedy for their implacable murderous hatred, for the preservation of the “tribe,” is their elimination, not some quaint little fable about a verbal circle jerk.

That Kucinich would enthusiastically accept the endorsement of Walker, and apparently any other dangerously deluded fool with a recognizable name who comes along, says all that needs to be said about his judgment and fitness to run this country – and they called Jerry Brown “Moonbeam.”

And don’t miss “pimping for Dennis” here.