Welcome to 201k.com - A Commonwealth Perspective.

While we're busy with "real life" we thought we'd share this contribution from a local musician:

In Cobb County, Georgia, the school board is mired in an ugly court case with the ACLU over a sticker, a parental advisory label of sorts, on the covers of high school biology textbooks: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." What they really wanted to say was "Science is a bunch of hooey."

A theory is a widely accepted explanation of observable or measurable principles in the world. It is used to explain the relationships between facts. Theories are considered valid until proven wrong. When a scientist promulgates a new theory, all the other the other scientists get really jealous and try to disprove it. If they can disprove someone else's theory, they are eligible for grant money.

We are all familiar with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. No one has been able to disprove it because it is too hard to understand. He used very complex mathematics (cipherin') to prove, among other things, that nothing moves faster than the speed of light in a vacuum and that in Cobb County "everyone is your mother's second cousin." (e=mc2)

In the Bible belt, a lot of parents don't like Darwinism. They prefer the creation story from the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis should be studied in school...in English class. One can find the book of Genesis, as well as other selections from the Old Testament in any good anthology of world literary masterpieces. It is always "in the beginning", before The Iliad, before The Aeneid and before The Divine Comedy, even though the part where the second word of every sentence is "begot" gets a little tedious. (Scholars cut this some slack because Peter Roget didn't publish his first Thesaurus until 1852.) The book of Genesis, like all literary works has to be considered within its historical context. In biblical times, before the theory of germs and disease, the only way to prevent leprosy was to practice abstinence. (Zen koan of the day: "How do you practice nothing?") It would be thousands of years before a Polish astronomer, Nicolaus Copernicus, published his theory of the solar system. (The earth and the other planets revolve around the sun and if you are on the Cobb County School Board, your head is up Uranus.)

Despite its scientific naivite', the book of Genesis and in fact, the entire Old Testament, is a great read. It has everything one would want in a great screenplay: nudity, falls from grace, murder, triumph over adversity and awesome special effects. It's no wonder that Charlton Heston jumped at the chance to star in "The Ten Commandments" and turned down a role in "The Adventures of the Compassionate Buddha."

Charles Darwin's "The Origin of the Species" is also a great read. It too has its moments of tedium: "Australopithecus afarensis begot Australopithecus africanus who begot Australopithecus robustus who begot Australopithecus boisei who begot homo habilis who begot homo erectus who begot Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) and homo sapiens neandertalensis. (Ron Artest)" It also tells a compelling story of how the genes of an organism can mutate and recombine over eons to produce a new and improved species. Agricultural scientists at Georgia Tech use these principles every day to develop new strains of peanuts that are resistant to disease and to ensure that each generation of sheep are even sexier than their parents. The theory of evolution helps explain why Komodo dragons only exist on a few Indonesian islands and helps pharmacologists develop too few new flu vaccines every year. Someday it might even explain why there are more three legged dogs on front porches in Marietta than anywhere else in the world.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone with the possible exception of the Cobb County School Board.

Someone forwarded us a link to this site which, we have to warn you, contains a whole lot of bad words. It is, however, great to read.

Be sure to follow the links, especially this one.

Not a day has gone by since the election without a front-page story on the impending US attack on insurgent-held Falluja.

Call us naive, but why are we advertising this attack? The insurgents in Iraq aren't regular army--they're insurgents. Won't they simply melt away now and reappear later? Isn't that what they've done all along?

We're having a hard time shaking the feeling that this entire effort has at least as much of a marketing component as a military one. There is no military reason for the Pentagon to want all Americans and all the world to know about it ahead of time--just the opposite in fact. The level of detail clearly indicates that this information is not just being gathered by industrious reporters (an oxymoron anyway) but is coming from the military itself.

So the whole point must be that they actually WANT everyone to know.

We hate to keep being right in our cynical predictions, but could it be that the Bush administration knows the insurgents, having been informed of the attack, will melt away and give the US a big post-election victory? It would certainly be in keeping with their thinking to put the inevitable insurgent counter-assaults off for another day.

The media have swallowed whole and are hard at work promoting the GOP notion that Tuesday's election was a referendum on "values". We even heard someone on NPR suggest that the Democratic party needed to "rethink its commitment" to social causes like gay rights and a woman's right to choose.

201k recommends exactly the opposite.

Look, if affluent and middle class Americans give up on issues of social justice then liberalism is dead in America. But millions of working Americans have indicated with their votes that they will vote against their own economic interests to stop social progress. That is the reality we are faced with.

The only sensible option is to defend to the death issues of social justice and let the Republican economic future run its inevitable course right over working Americans. We're essentially powerless to stop it anyway, especially if those being run over won't help. When it gets bad enough--and it will--perhaps those issues will emerge as viable again.

In the meantime 201k will concentrate its efforts on issues of social justice. We will oppose the so-called "tort reform" movement, we will oppose attempts to deny rights to gay Americans, and we will defend a woman's right to control her own body.

These are the battlegrounds for liberalism in America now.

As we feared.

Apparently we're supposed to believe two things:

1. That 113 million people showed up to vote, and more of them voted for George Bush.

2. That the exit polls were somehow completely wrong in the two states, Ohio and Florida, where there were the most questions about the integrity of the vote-counting.

Anyone out there think Bush really got more votes?

We've reached the end of the road.

Tomorrow is the day; soon we'll either be dancing in the streets or deeply worried about the country's future. Maybe you feel the same.

Whatever happens, our work is not over. If Kerry wins he'll have to undo Bush's disastrous domestic agenda and catastrophic foreign policy--and he'll have to do it while being ceaselessly assaulted by the right-wing media machine. If Bush wins, well, hard as it is to believe the next four years will be even worse than the last.

We implore you to not jump off a bridge if Bush wins, or stop paying attention if Kerry wins, because in either case the fight will go on. We'll all need a break after the election, but eventually we'll have to jump back in. President Kerry will need everyone's support to battle the entrenched interests that dominate government and the public discourse--and President Bush will need to be disabused of the notion that he has a mandate to strengthen the grip those interests have over every aspect of American society.

In either case all Americans need to stay vigilant and keep fighting. If tomorrow night causes us either to give up hope or think the battle is won then the battle will be lost.

Make no mistake: the Republican Party believes that a Bush victory tomorrow will mean the end of the Democratic Party--and the end of the two-party system. Their goal is nothing less than a one-party state--and they believe that goal is in sight. They believe a Bush win will demoralize Democrats, liberals and progressives beyond recovery. We can't allow that to happen.

What's at stake here is the standard of living of all Americans. The Republican effort to drive down the cost of labor in America--with no regard for the effect on working Americans--will go on no matter who wins tomorrow. Ordinary people will still be fighting to provide for their families, women will still be fighting to keep control over their own bodies, soldiers will still need adequate pay and benefits, the deficit will still need to be driven down so our children won't have to pay for it, Social Security will need to be protected from looters in pinstripes, and all of us will need to be kept safe from radical religious zealots both foreign and domestic. No matter what happens tomorrow we can't walk away from those battles.

Thanks for reading, and for hanging in to this point--and beyond. Cross your fingers.

201k.com