He thought he knew better than his people; thought he could, through sheer force of will, change a public mindset centuries in the making.  He was an iconoclast (literally) 2000 years before the term would be coined by medieval Byzantines, but within a couple of decades after his rule, the enemies he’d created had obliterated nearly every trace of his reign, as well as the monotheistic religion he had promulgated as a state faith.  A victim of an histoicide of staggering proportions, his name was virtually excised from the public record, his monuments altered and defaced, and he was forgotten for almost three millennia.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look at the sort of thing that would cause a civilization to try to erase one of its own leaders from history.  With all the talk of Romney’s misunderstanding of the nature of freedom and religion in America, not to mention the ongoing historical embarrassment that is the Bush Administration, it only seems appropriate.  It’s not meant, however, to assert that either the clearly-megalomaniacal President, or his would-be successor is the mental or spiritual equal of the thoroughly remarkable “heretic pharaoh” Amenhotep IV, who called himself “Akhenaton” and whom history sometimes terms the world’s “first individual.”

He was as bullheaded, stubborn, and patronizing as George W. Bush, but utterly unlike The Decider in most of the really important ways.  While our President is doomed to historical derision and mockery, Akhenaton is alternately known as “the first scientific mind,” the “first romantic,” and the “first revolutionary” in human history.  For 20 bizarre years, he and his beloved wife Nefertiti transformed Egypt from a priest- and temple-dominated polytheism with a largely secularized government to an imperial theocracy holding forth as a state religion what was probably the world’s earliest monotheistic faith.  Akhenaton was also responsible for initiating the chain of events that led to what may have been the first bona fide revolution ever recorded.

Before we traipse off into the desert, though, I should mention a couple of matters to keep in mind when working with the history of Ancient Egypt.  The first thing we have to get our heads around is that when talking about these guys, “Ancient” means really, really ancient.  Commonly-cited dates for the founding of the kingship of Egypt are around 3000 BCE; Akhenaton’s rule began around 1350 BCE.  This means that as much time – and history – had elapsed between the ages of Menes-the-Egypt-uniter and Akhenaton as has between the Roman emperor Constantine and the Commander Guy.  Through rise and decline, invasion and expansion, and all the other things that happen to civilizations besides, the people of Ancient Egypt could trace their story as far beyond the mists of prehistory as anyone, and much further than most.

Weird Historical Sidenote:  The other matter alluded to above relates to the rendering of hieroglyphs into modern alphabets.  The Egyptians themselves had several ways of turning sounds into symbols, and these naturally changed over the course of the ages.  The fact that we use the same symbols to convey different sounds doesn’t help things (not to mention that much scholarship has gone through a double-translation cycle of Egyptian-to-Arabic-to-English), and is part of the reason why Egyptian words can be spelled in many different ways.  

It’s also why early Egyptologists rendered the name of the chief god as “Ra,” which usually leads to the modern reader hearing a soft “a” in his or her head (i.e., “Rah”).  As guys like Dr. Daniel Jackson of SG-1 resurrected more of the language of Ancient Egypt, however, it became apparent that the name was probably pronounced more like “Ray.”  To correct for this, many later scholars have taken to scribing the sun god’s name as “Re” – and this is but one, simple, two-letter example.  When one starts talking about aspects of the god Horus being subsumed by an abstract concepts of the sun god’s power and turned into some kind of composite deity, things can get really confusing, so I’ve elected to go with the most traditionally accepted (if not phonetically accurate) renderings of the symbols, and extend my apologies to any Egyptologists enraged by this decision.

But Mr. President, what if ours gods are human/animal hybrids?

Over all that time, a complex religious system developed around a polytheistic understanding of the natural world.  Ancient Egyptian Religion was based on the same birth-death-rebirth cycle the people saw every year with the flooding of the Nile – just as the god Set had killed his brother Osiris, only to see the latter resurrected by his sister-wife Isis, so, too, did the floods replenish the soil with rich and fertile silt for the new year’s crop.  Dozens of other minor and local deities vied for attention, each with its (the pronoun is appropriate: many of these gods were chimeras of the sort the President was presumably warning us about a couple of SOTUs ago) own temple and attendant priests.

At the pinnacle of the pantheon stood the sun god Ra, whose cult center at Iunu (Heliopolis, near modern Cairo) went back to the Old Kingdom Period (2575-2150 BCE; 4th-8th Dynasties).  Like most things Egyptian, Ra’s life was pretty cyclical: every day, he sailed the Barge of the Sun across the sky in the company of his vizier Thoth and his daughter Ma’at, only to face a dangerous journey across the underworld before the next morning’s rebirth.  Liking the symbolism of Ra’s shining benevolence, kings of Egypt began to claim descent from the sun god during the 4th or 5th Dynasties, and with the passing of centuries and subsequent dynasties, Ra-worship became the province of the pharaoh (Egyptian for “Great House”).  

With all that royal support, Ra enjoyed the most consistent worship during the whole of the Egyptian pantheon’s run, but in his purest, sun-god-only form, he wasn’t really considered a “people’s deity.”  Oh, sure, they’d take the feast days off from work and enjoy the sacrifices at Ra’s temples, and his cult remained strong in Heliopolis, but most Egyptians paid more attention to the gods and demigods that resided in their locale, or who took a more active role in their day-to-day lives.  

The strength of other gods – and their attendant cults – were more subject to the whims of politics or fads among the people, like the ascendancy of Theban favorites during a period of pharaohs from Thebes, and sometimes new interpretations of the faith (or conniving business practices, depending upon how you look at it) would result in gods assimilating one another’s aspects.  By the 9th Dynasty (ca. 2100 BCE), Ra had adopted facets of several other deities, as in Ra-Horakhty, reflecting the sunrise-oriented aspect of the god Horus, and Amun, who was positively Borg-like in his/her assimilation of other gods’ spheres of influence.

Weird Historio-Literary Sidenote:  H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), master of horror and all things Cthulu, once ghost-wrote a piece for Harry Houdini that presents a terrifying, florid, and wholly inaccurate picture of the Ancient Egyptian predilection to combine things; presumably this was the source material for the President’s urging of national bedwetting at the imminent human/animal hybrid threat:

I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifice to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.

…(snip)…

Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse products of decadent priestcraft – composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might return some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human and the animal in the same mummy – only in the decadence, when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul.

Imprisoned with the Pharaos

The Megatemples of Amun-Ra

Religions change over time: philosophers uncover hitherto-hidden truths, cultural mores evolve (or decline), war and trade introduce new ideas, and charlatans add their own self-serving twists that somehow find their way into the dogma (we can see this in the doctrine surrounding the Rapture – not found anywhere in Bible, undiscovered until a British evangelical preacher discerned it in the 19th century, it’s now national policy).  So it was with the cult of Amun-Ra, “Amun” being the creative air/wind god who came to represent the “hidden aspect” of the sun.  Centered in Thebes, his cult credited Amun with every victory and advance they could, presaging the techniques of Christian missionaries in Middle Ages-Europe by more than two thousand years.

For a while, every conquest brought a new aspect to Amun-Ra.  He became the protector of the oppressed during the occupation of northern Egypt by the Hyksos during the Second Intermediate Period (1630-1520 BCE), and when the invaders were evicted by the armies of the 18th Dynasty, Amun-Ra was there to take on the role of dispenser of justice – an aspect that later led to the confession of sins becoming part of his worship.  He added fertility to his sphere when the Egyptians conquered Kush and declared that their chief god (represented by the ever-fertile ram) was, in fact, Amun-Ra.  This theme was expanded upon when his worship was encouraged during the New Kingdom period (1539-1075 BCE) as a means of re-unifying the nation after the turmoil of Hyksos rule.

Weird Historical Sidenote:  The cult of Amun-Ra remained influential through the 20th Dynasty (to 1075 BCE), but had a difficult time recovering from the Akhenaton-related events babbled about below.  Still, Amun-Ra had an oracle as late as the time of Alexander the Great, and was still highly regarded enough for the conqueror to traipse out into the desert to be declared a Son of the Sun and descendant of Amun-Ra, effectively coronating Egypt’s first Macedonian pharaoh.  Today, the god is remembered chiefly through the word ammonia – the Romans called it the “Salt of Amun” because they collected it from a pool in the Libyan desert near to one of Amun-Ra’s ancient temples.

…but I digress – the odiferous end of the deity’s career is getting outside the province of this story.  During the time of Akhenaton, the cult of Amun-Ra was immensely wealthy and powerful, with megatemples and vast congregations scattered up and down the Nile.  There was much money to be made from pilgrimages and the like, and entire industries sprang up near the larger temples to serve the tens of thousands (100s of thousands, in some cases) of worshippers who passed through every year.  From selling food to renting rooms to fashioning trinkets, a significant portion of the economy came to rely upon the priests, temples, and cult of Amun-Ra.

Those Crazy Cats of the 18th Dynasty

With the defeat of the Hyksos interlopers around 1539 BCE, Egypt was set to embark upon one of its more colorful dynasties.  The 18th line of rulership included some figures who are diary-worthy in their own right, like Hatshepsut, Egypt’s longest reigning female pharaoh, and King Tut, whose odd story is inexorably bound with Akhenaton’s.

For nearly two thousand years, things had been going passably well, theologically speaking.  The people enjoyed a rich spiritual life, associating the natural cycles of life with their many gods, making pilgrimages to great temples, and harvesting the fruits of their devotion with a timeless understanding of the order of the universe.  Politically, Egypt was organized; militarily, she was mighty.  By the reign of 9th king of the 18th dynasty, Akhenaton’s father Amenhotep III (the name means “Amun is content”), things were fairly peaceful, fairly settled, and humming along fairly nicely.

Amenhotep III ruled for 38 years, during which he didn’t do much but play aggressive footsies with the Babylonians, Nubians, and Mitanni, and add on to the already-gigantic temple complex at Karnak.  He had several wives and daughters, but only two sons.  The elder of these, Thutmose, took on the traditional role of the crown-prince-in-waiting, that of a priest of the god Ptah in Memphis, but died sometime late in his father’s reign.  Thus, when Amenhotep III went off to get his ka weighed against a feather, it was the younger son, Amenhotep IV, who succeeded to the throne around 1352 BCE, though it is unclear if there was a period of coregency (possibly with his mother, Queen Tiye), and, if there was, whether it lasted 1, 2, or 12 years.

The Pyramid of Church and State

He’d been raised in a traditional household, worshipping Amun-Ra like everybody else, but he seems to have developed at an early age a reverence for the earlier times, that simpler age when pharaohs did the sun-worshipping on behalf of the people and the gods weren’t amalgamations of one another’s aspects.  Perhaps his evolving theology grew out of a Bushlike desire to centralize dictatorial powers, or maybe he earnestly felt himself a prophet, sent by a monotheistic god to lead his people away from pantheonic madness – it’s hard to say.  The measures taken by his enemies to obliterate evidence of his reign makes it difficult to say with certainty what motivated Amenhotep; though possible, it doesn’t seem likely that he would be found at the ends of the either/or extremes, but instead would take inspiration from a mix of avarice, compassion, egoism, and intellect.

If the priests of Amun-Ra weren’t at first concerned that the status quo was going to be interrupted by the new king, they were by the third year of his rule.  That’s when Akhenaton – he began styling himself “Favored by the Aten” since early in his reign, but may not have made the change official until his 5th year in power – threw himself a Heb Sed, a “Feast of the Tail” which rarely-violated tradition said could only be celebrated after a pharaoh’s 30th year of rule.  The jubilee involved huge processions, much pageantry, and a whole lot of temple visitation.  Akhenaton was inviting people to come pray in his newly-designed, open-to-the-sun temple at Karnak, and promoted his own cult to a position previously enjoyed by the priests of Amun.

His take on religion centered upon the solar disc itself (the “Aten”), which he regarded as an all-encompassing deity unencumbered by the complexities of manifestations, purviews, inter-cult politics.  The Aten was the life-giving force upon which all things depended, and only the pharaoh – the descendant of the sun god and faithful intercessor in all matters solar – could show the people the path to salvation.  When represented artistically, the rays emanating from the sun end in hands, denoting either the Aten’s munificent benevolence or the desire of Akhenaton to stick his paws into every aspect of Egyptian culture and life.

In a speech prior to his Sed festival, Akhenaton used the disrepair of the temples at Karnak to bolster his argument that the only thing eternal was the Aten, and when the jubilee started, he sprung a heretofore unheard-of artistic style upon his subjects.  In this new school, artists were encouraged to portray and even exaggerate the distinguishing features of the royal family, which has led to a rousing academic argument about whether or not Akhenaton suffered from some sort of genetic malady.  He is often shown with a pot-belly and elongated face, and though the beauty of his wife Nefertiti is celebrated by one of the most famous works of antiquity:

 

…other portrayals of her are far less flattering.  The emphasis on non-stylized scenes of daily life extended to the almost Camelot-ish images of the pharaoh kissing his wife, hanging out with his kids, or gnawing on a bone at the supper table.

City of God

In the fifth year of his rule, Akhenaton took his most dramatic step to date when he vacated the royal palace at Thebes in favor of constructing a brand-new city of his own in a cliff-ringed valley about 360 miles south of Heliopolis.  He named the place Akhet-Aten, or “Horizon of the Aten,” and in moving his capital there, he both isolated himself (this had both pros and cons) and removed the center of power from where the priests of Amun were accustomed to having it (which had only pros, as far as Akhenaton was concerned).  The modern name for the spot is El-Amarna, and the next 15 years or so of Egyptian history is often called the Amarna Period.

As his city rose up around him, the political situation around the Middle East crumbled.  Later generations of Egyptians portrayed Akhenaton as having a Rumsfeldian sense of foreign policy, but he wasn’t quite as disassociated with reality as the disgraced former SecDef, though the record wasn’t clear at all until the discovery of the Amarna Letters in 1887.  These 350 or so tablets, written in cuneiform (the diplomatic lingua franca of the day) were divvied up by the imperialist powers for their national trophy rooms – about 200 now reside in Berlin, 80 in the British Museum – but once deciphered, they provided a fascinating look at political discourse between the pharaoh and the local leaders at the edges of his empire.

                                                   

                                  Map of the ancient Near East during the Amarna period, showing the great powers of the period: Egypt (green), Hatti (yellow), the Kassite kingdom of Babylon (purple), Assyria (grey), and Mittani (red). Lighter areas show direct control, darker areas represent spheres of influence. The extent of the Achaean/Mycenaean civilization is shown in orange.  Wikimedia

Some of the letters – they’re all incoming mail; no outgoing memos from Akhenaton were found – sound like they could have been written by Nancy Pelosi:

At the feet of my lord, my sun, I fall down seven times and seven times. Let the king, my lord, know that Gubla, your handmaid from ancient times, is well.

However, the war of the ‘Apiru against me is severe. (Our) sons (and) daughters are gone, (as well as) the furnishings of the houses, because they have been sold in Yarimuta to keep us alive. My field is “a wife without a husband,” lacking in cultivation. I have repeatedly written to the palace regarding the distress afflicting me, . . but no one has paid attention to the words that keep arriving.  Let the king heed the words of his servant…

Letters by Rib-Addi of Byblos

while others accuse rival kings – and even the pharaoh himself – of double-dealing exploits worthy of the vilest Bushco escapades:

I…asked your father, Mimmureya, for statues of solid cast gold, one of myself and a second statue, a statue of Tadu-Heba (Tadukhepa), my daughter, and your father said, “Don’t talk of giving statues just of solid cast gold. I will give you ones made also of lapis lazuli. I will give you, too, along with the statues, much additional gold and (other) goods beyond measure.” Every one of my messengers that were staying in Egypt saw the gold for the statues with their own eyes. Your father himself recast the statues (i)n the presence of my messengers, and he made them entirely of pure gold….He showed much additional gold, which was beyond measure and which he was sending to me. He said to my messengers, “See with your own eyes, here the statues, there much gold and goods beyond measure, which I am sending to my brother.” And my messengers did see with their own eyes! But my brother (ie: Akhenaten) has not sent the solid (gold) statues that your father was going to send. You have sent plated ones of wood. Nor have you sent me the goods that your father was going to send me, but you have reduced (them) greatly. Yet there is nothing I know of in which I have failed my brother. Any day that I hear the greetings of my brother, that day I make a festive occasion…May my brother send me much gold. (At) the kim(ru fe)ast…(…with) many goods (may my) brother honor me. In my brother’s country gold is as plentiful as dust. May my brother cause me no distress. May he send me much gold in order that my brother (with the gold and m)any (good)s, may honor me.

Via Wikipedia

As the years passed, the domestic orders coming out of Amarna were increasingly aimed at wiping out references to all deities but the Aten – even the plural version of the word “gods” was ordered replaced on monuments across the empire with the singular form, and the spelling of the word for “mother” – “Mut” – was altered so as not to reflect a goddess of the same name.  Akhenaton also ordered the destruction of his own father’s royal cartouche, as it contained the name another god – Amun.  It is unknown if it was written by the king’s own hand, but somebody during this period put together and distributed The Great Hymn to the Aten, a masterpiece of monotheistic prayer.

The Descent into Historical Obscurity

Akhenaton tried everything he could to personalize faith in the Aten and draw people away from their covert support of the old religion, but all the pharaoh-as-regular-guy art and esoteric discussions on the nature of life-giving energy couldn’t compete with centuries of hoary tradition.  The people grudgingly did what the pharaoh told them to do, but it must have been apparent to all concerned that Akhenaton’s religion wasn’t going to survive his term in office, especially since the Aten seemed unable to protect Egypt from a series of plagues or pandemics during the Amarna Period.  These could well represent the first influenza outbreaks in human history – new agricultural techniques were bringing humans into contact with mixed-up waste from waterfowl and pigs – but regardless, the Sun Disc appeared unable to help.

Akhenaton died in the 17th year of his reign (1336 BCE), having failed to carve enough of a foothold for the Aten-faith to ensure that his religion would live on.  The immeadiate line of successors is a little unclear: it seems that someone named “Smenkhkare” assumed the pharaohship for a couple of years, but just who Smenkhare might have been is an object of speculation.  Not a few folks think that it might have been Nefertiti in disguise:  

All of the above would be cheerfully accepted as signs of a queen’s growing prestige if it weren’t for the “Smenkhkare question”.  Nefertiti began life with a fairly simple name which later in the reign she changed to Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti.  There is also, however, a record of Ankhkheperure-Neferneferuaten and Ankhkheperure-Smenkhkare.  The latter ruled Egypt in the brief interval between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun.  Do these names represent three different people, two people, or just one?  It is possible that the switch in role from Great Wife to Pharaoh required a change to a more regal sounding name.  If all three names are the same person it would fully explain the regal nature of some of the pictures of Nefertiti and how she disappeared so completely.

DID NEFERTITI SHARE AKHENATEN’S THRONE?

Around 1334 BCE, Smenkhare was succeeded by Akhenaton’s 9-year-old son,  Tutankhaten (there’s debate about Tut’s parentage, with some thinking that he was a late-born son of Amenhotep III, or of Smenkhare).  Within a couple of years, the returning power of the priests became evident, as the kid changed his name from “Living Image of the Aten” to Tutankhamen, or “Living Image of Amun.”  He – or, more likely, his vizier and successor, Ay – began the process of de-Atenization by returning the capital to Thebes, restoring the privileges of the priests, and the temples of Amun-Ra were rebuilt.

In the Wake of the Wierdness

Tut’s reign lasted only 9 years; he died under what may have been mysterious circumstances at the age of 18 and was hastily buried in what ultimately became the only pharaoh’s tomb to be discovered intact.  Though the spin on the curse which “protected” the sarcophagus has all the earmarks of a Dana Perino propaganda job, the mind-boggling wealth of his burial chamber belies Tut’s short, pretty much insignificant reign.

Ay – an old man when he came to the throne by marrying Tutankhamen’s widow, who was likely his granddaughter – continued the heretic practices of Akhenaton, but he was unable and/or unwilling to staunch the flow of worshippers heading back to the old ways.  He only lasted about 4 years on the throne, afterwhich he was replaced by the decidedly anti-Aten Horemheb, the last pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty.  A military leader who was probably fighting in Syria at the time of Ay’s ascension, Horemheb was an ambitious man who won some sort of power struggle in gaining the throne – a triumph he credited to his local god, Horus of Hnes, and not the Sun Disc – and solidified his claim by marrying a woman who might have been Neferetiti’s sister.

Horemheb was a strong, no-BS leader, who moved to strike Akhenaton from the historical record even as he sought to avoid returning all their previously-enjoyed powers to the priests (there’s debate on this, too: some hold that Horemheb was simply enforcing de-Atenization policies started under Tut and Ay).  To re-build the temples of Amun and the others, he allowed for the destruction of the temples of the Aten and the use of their blocks as foundation stones and recycled rubble-fill.  Horemheb also acted strongly to curb corruption, which had become a bit of a problem under Akhenaton’s ill-thought-out restructuring:

Though these documents known as the Great Edict of Horemheb, he apparently invoked harsh punishments for those found guilty of corruption. Abuses included the unlawful requisitioning of boats and slaves, the theft of cattle hides, the illegal taxation of private farmland and fraud in assessing lawful taxes and the extortion of local mayors by officials responsible for organizing the king’s annual visit to the Opet Festival. Convicted officials faced the removal of their noses and then exile, while soldiers who stole animal hides, for example were subject to a hundred blows and five open wounds. In fact, there seems to have been a whole body of laws intended to stamp out widespread bribery and corruption. Many of these problems have been viewed as the result of the iconoclastic policy of Akhenaten, whose disruption of the traditional temple based economy had opened the door to all kinds of excesses by local administrators, as well as military officials.

ibid.

Horemheb ruled for around 30 years, and during that time, Egypt rang with blows of hammers smashing Akhenaton’s images and working over mentions of him in the bas-relief.  By the time Horemheb’s successor confirmed the start of the 19th Dynasty, Akhenaton was already a 40-years-dead memory, and since nobody except a handful of Amarna-dwellers remembered his reign as “the good ole’ days,” their doesn’t seem to have evolved a group dedicated to preserving his memory.  Or perhaps they did: Sigmund Freud’s last marriage of syphilis and the typewriter, entitled Moses and Monotheism (1939), argued that Moses had been an Atenist priest forced to leave Egypt with his followers after Akhenaten’s death.  (I must confess to not having read the book, and furthermore, to cheating via this study guide – u.m.)

The de-Atenizers were meticulous, but they weren’t perfect – evidence of Akhenaton’s remarkable reign started to surface in the 19th century.  Still, it’s a testament to their destructive capacity – to think: they did it all without electric papyrus-shredders! – that the priests of Amun and the other dissed gods of the Egyptians were able to obscure enough of Akhenaton’s reign that he got little credit for his failed innovations.  His reign became an early anomaly rather then a generative source for artistic or theological movements, and for more than two millennia, his name was spoken with contempt, on those rare occasions it was spoken at all.

Historiorant:

So what’s all this got to do with George W. Bush?  I dunno; it was Huckabee’s proclamation that the Almighty is manipulating his poll numbers and Willard’s chilling assertion that freedom is impossible without religion that got me thinking about Akhenaton and his visionary/boneheaded/ham-handed reforms.  If nothing else, I guess the story shows that “this, too, shall pass” – that it could be upwards of 2000 years before George Bush’s name is spoken with anything approaching respect.  So we got going for us, even if we haven’t found our own Horemheb yet…

Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.

(An op ed column from Sunday’s Wisconsin State Journal, in Madison.)

The fifth Christmas with U.S. troops in Iraq is upon us, with no end in sight.

It’s a time to remember those families who are missing a loved one this season, especially those who are facing the first holiday of the rest of their lives without their loved ones. It’s a time to remember and honor the troops who are away from home.

It ‘s also a time to ask: How can we stop the war? And it’s a time to do something — even if it ‘s something small — to say we want it to end.

President Bush will not be moved, despite the fact that every poll says a solid majority, perhaps two-thirds, of the American people want to end the war and bring our troops home.

The Democratic Congress, elected a year ago with a mandate to end the war, is too chicken-hearted to confront the bull-headed president. Next year’s presidential election offers precious little hope, as the leading candidates refuse to commit to having our troops out by 2013.

Opponents of the Iraq war have become the new Silent Majority. They tell the pollsters they ‘re against the war, but do nothing — perhaps because it seems fruitless.

It is understandable if they are disheartened. They spoke out in huge numbers before the war began, and were ignored. Four years of beating their heads against the wall may have worn them out.

But it’s not a time to give up. Doing nothing is not a viable option.

That’s why I have joined many who have signed on with the Iraq Moratorium, a decentralized but growing national grassroots effort that asks individuals to take personal responsibility to do something — anything — to show their opposition to the war.

The moratorium asks people to take some action, individually or collectively, on the third Friday of every month, from wearing a black armband or button to participating in a large-scale protest, or many things in between.

The group’s website, IraqMoratorium.org ,has ideas, information and reports on past and upcoming actions.

The fourth monthly Moratorium Day is Dec. 21, four days before Christmas. It is guaranteed to be ignored by the media, George Bush and the Congress.

The cynics say nothing we do matters, so why do anything?

The answer is obvious: Doing something is infinitely more likely to have an impact than doing nothing. That’s what the Iraq Moratorium is all about.

Buttons and armbands won’t stop the war by themselves. Neither will rallies and marches, or letters to the editor, or phone calls to Congress, or speeches or civil disobedience. There ‘s no single magic solution.

Those who want to end this war need to do everything to keep the flame alive until the silent majority catches fire and demands an end to this senseless war.

That’s why I will do something for Iraq Moratorium No. 4 on Dec. 21. And you?

like no other Democrat, feigned or real.

http://www.alternet.org/story/…

Edwards makes no attempt to be more Republican than the Republicans like Clinton.  He doesn’t seek to get along like Obama.  

Edwards is not appealing to the mythical middle class of the DLC.  He is talking to the people.  People don’t count for much these days.

Edwards is not the plutocratic candidate with money to burn.  He doesn’t have the glamor and the backing of the two that occupy the front of the stage.  Most polls don’t even bother to record the horrendous drubbing Edwards would deal the Republicans.

Thought someone here might like to know before Edwards is banished forever from the scene.

Best,  Terry  

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Turkish planes bomb PKK targets in Iraq

By SUZAN FRASER, Associated Press Writer

1 hour, 11 minutes ago

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey said dozens of its warplanes bombed Kurdish rebel targets as deep as 60 miles inside northern Iraq for three hours Sunday in the largest aerial attack in years against the outlawed separatist group. An Iraqi official said the planes attacked several villages, killing one woman. In the nighttime offensive, the fighter jets hit rebel positions close to the border with Turkey and in the Qandil mountains, which straddle the Iraq-Iran border, the Turkish military said in a statement posted on its Web site. It said the operation was directed against the rebels and not against the local population. As many as 50 fighter jets were involved in the airstrikes, private NTV television and other media reported. Turkey has recently attacked the area with ground-based artillery and helicopters and there have been some unconfirmed reports of airstrikes by warplanes.

2 British hand over Basra to Iraqi control

By LORI HINNANT, Associated Press Writer

22 minutes ago

BAGHDAD – British forces formally handed over responsibility Sunday for the last region in Iraq under their control, marking the start of what Britain hopes will be a transition to a mission aimed at aiding the economy and providing jobs in an oil-rich region beset by militia infighting. With the handover of Basra, an overwhelmingly Shiite region home to most of Iraq’s oil reserves, nine of the country’s 18 provinces have reverted to Iraqi government control. “I came to rid Basra of its enemies and I now formally hand Basra back to its friends,” the commander of British forces in Basra, Maj. Gen. Graham Binns, said shortly before he added his signature to papers relinquishing responsibility for the region in Iraq’s far south. “We will continue to help train Basra security forces. But we are guests in your country, and we will act accordingly.”

3 Lawmakers say not deterred on CIA probe

By Randall Mikkelsen

1 hour, 50 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Congress members vowed on Sunday to investigate the CIA’s destruction of videotapes depicting harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, despite Justice Department advice that the agency not cooperate. The top Republican member of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a leading Democratic voice on security joined in a blistering attack on the CIA and on the complex network of U.S. intelligence agencies in general. “We want to hold the (intelligence) community accountable for what’s happened to these tapes,” Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We will issue subpoenas … Our investigation should move forward.

4 Bali climate deal paves way for hotter U.S. debate

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent, Reuters

2 hours, 40 minutes ago

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A breakthrough deal forged by delegates from 190 countries has revived world efforts to fight global warming and may help push the debate to the front and center of the U.S. political debate. The United States joined the deal reached on the Indonesian island of Bali in a dramatic U-turn. But significantly, the accord sets late 2009 as the target for a climate treaty, months after U.S. President George W. Bush leaves office. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who heads the Senate’s environment committee, noted the Bush administration’s lonely position after the Bali deal was reached on Saturday. “In Bali, the president tried to treat the world the way he treats Congress — ‘my way or the highway,”‘ Boxer said in a statement. “The difference is that in Congress he has supporters but in Bali he had no supporters.”

From Yahoo News Most Popular, Most Recommended

5 Bird flu kills first human in Pakistan, child first case in Myanmar

AFP

Sat Dec 15, 2:33 PM ET

ISLAMABAD (AFP) – Bird flu hit two countries Saturday as it was confirmed that a man who died culling infected birds in Pakistan became the country’s first human fatality, while a seven-year-old girl became Myanmar’s first human case. Pakistan’s health ministry on Saturday also confirmed that one of the dead man’s brothers who took part in the cull also died, but he was not tested for the virus, a ministry spokesman told AFP. It was not immediately known why the second man was not tested. But the spokesman ruled out any case of human-to-human transmission — a development that could have signalled a mutation of the virus with the possibility to kill millions around the world.

From Yahoo News Most Popular, Most Viewed

6 Democrats assess Hill damage, leadership

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer

2 hours, 18 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – Congressional Democrats will have plenty to ponder during the Christmas-New Year recess. For instance, why did things go so badly this fall, and how well did their leaders serve them? Partisan players will quarrel for months, but objective analysts say the debate must start here: An embattled president made extraordinary use of his veto power and he was backed by GOP lawmakers who may have put their political fortunes at risk. Also, a new Democratic leadership team overestimated the impact of the Iraq war and the 2006 elections, learning too late they had no tools to force Bush and his allies to compromise on bitterly contested issues.

From Yahoo News World

7 Musharraf foes vow to undo his changes

By PAUL ALEXANDER, Associated Press Writer

Sun Dec 16, 7:12 AM ET

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – A key opposition group vowed Sunday to try to undo amendments President Pervez Musharraf made to the constitution before lifting emergency rule, changes critics say will keep a tight lid on dissent. President Pervez Musharraf lifted a six-week-old state of emergency Saturday, telling a skeptical nation the crackdown was to save Pakistan from a conspiracy rather than ensure his own political survival. But Musharraf entrenched limits he imposed under the emergency, including strict curbs on press freedom and the replacement of independent-minded judges with jurists friendlier to the U.S.-backed leader. Opponents have said the changes set the stage for parliamentary elections next month to be rigged, and have threatened to hold mass demonstrations.

8 Exit poll suggests landslide win for Kyrgyz ruling party

by Antoine Lambroschini, AFP

55 minutes ago

BISHKEK (AFP) – An exit poll from Sunday’s legislative election suggested that the party of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s newly-created Ak-Zhol party might be the only one in the new parliament. Figures from the Binom Institute, suggested that none of the 11 other parties had crossed the five percent threshold needed to win seats in parliament, and gave Ak-Zhol 63 percent of the vote. Opposition figures and election observers have described the institute as being close to the ruling party. In the run-up to the election and throughout the day’s voting, opposition politicians have complained of widespread fraud.

From Yahoo News Politics

9 GOP pushes Iowans to focus on caucus

By LIBBY QUAID, Associated Press Writer

Sat Dec 15, 7:28 PM ET

DAVENPORT, Iowa – In a state where presidential hopefuls are supposed to personally ask for your vote, Iowans have heard far more by mail, phone and TV from the Republicans this year. The deluge has not helped Liz Schofield, a homemaker and anti-abortion activist, make up her mind. “I get a lot of mail,” Schofield said. “You know what, it is so difficult to decide with the Republicans. We have such good candidates. They all love the Lord.”

10 U.S. confident troop cuts won’t hurt Iraq security

By Dean Yates, Reuters

Sun Dec 16, 11:00 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Cuts in U.S. troop levels in Iraq will not derail recent security gains, but the Iraqi government must move quicker to take advantage of the falls in violence, a senior U.S. general said on Sunday. Lieutenant-General Raymond Odierno, the number two commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, urged the government to move faster on national reconciliation and improving basic services. Underscoring the improved security in Iraq, Odierno said attacks last week in Anbar province, once the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency, were the lowest ever recorded by the U.S. military. Overall violence in Iraq was at a level not seen since the spring of 2005, he told a briefing for foreign reporters.

From Yahoo News Business

11 Investors await earnings, housing data

By MADLEN READ, AP Business Writer

2 hours, 8 minutes ago

NEW YORK – This week’s data on investment bank earnings, the housing downturn and inflation will help investors decide how the economy and corporate America are faring as they head into the new year. Wall Street hit a few snags last week: the tools in the Federal Reserve’s arsenal look as if they may not be sufficient to battle the credit crisis, and inflation appears to be accelerating, which could prevent further rate cuts. Last week, the Dow ended 2.10 percent lower, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index finished down 2.44 percent, and the Nasdaq composite index ended down 2.60 percent.

12 Fed taking on abusive lending practices

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer

Sun Dec 16, 9:52 AM ET

WASHINGTON – People taking out home mortgages may gain new protections soon against shady lending practices as the Federal Reserve seeks to back even the riskiest borrowers, already hit hardest by the housing and credit crunches. Rules expected to be proposed Tuesday would apply to loans made by all types of lenders, including banks and brokers. The plan from the Fed, which has regulatory powers over the nation’s financial system, could be finalized next year. The effective date would be know then.

13 Writers propose independent negotiations  Writers propose independent negotiations

By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer

Sun Dec 16, 4:12 AM ET

LOS ANGELES – Faced with the indefinite suspension of negotiations, the union representing striking Hollywood writers told its members Saturday it would try to deal directly with Hollywood studios and production companies, bypassing the umbrella organization that has been representing them. The news was welcomed by the company that produces David Letterman’s “Late Show,” which said it hoped to broker a deal that would put the talk show host and his writers back to work. Talks broke off Dec. 7 after the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios, insisted it would not bargain further unless the Writers Guild of America dropped proposals that included the authority to unionize writers on reality shows and animation projects.

14 Retailers see slower holiday growth: reports

By Martinne Geller, Reuters

20 minutes ago

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. consumers, who flocked to malls at the start of the holiday shopping season, have since backed off, kept out of stores by a Midwest ice storm and the ease of shopping online, data released on Sunday by SpendingPulse showed. The retail data service of MasterCard Advisors said that after a strong discount-driven start to retail’s most important season, sales have slowed steadily, returning to the modest growth expected this year as consumers face a housing slump, a credit crunch, and higher costs for food and fuel. SpendingPulse said that over the first 20 days of the holiday shopping season, from November 23 to December 12, sales at U.S. specialty apparel chains, which include Gap Inc (GPS.N), Aeropostale Inc (ARO.N) and Urban Outfitters Inc (URBN.O), rose 0.5 percent this year, down from a 5.1 percent gain last year.

15 Greenspan sees early signs of U.S. stagflation

Reuters

Sun Dec 16, 12:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. economy is showing early signs of stagflation as growth threatens to stall while food and energy prices soar, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Sunday. In an interview on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Greenspan said low inflation was a major contributor to economic growth and prices must be held in check. “We are beginning to get not stagflation, but the early symptoms of it,” Greenspan said.

16 German labour minister says minimum wage for all: report

AFP

Sun Dec 16, 8:02 AM ET

BERLIN (AFP) – German Labour Minister Olaf Scholz has pledged that the country will implement a minimum wage in all sectors, an issue that has been dividing the ruling coalition, a newspaper reported on Sunday. “The minimum wage is on its way, for everybody. I am sure of this,” Scholz, a Social Democrat, told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. “We will extend the law to sectors in which there is no minimum wage and where workers have no security …to fight conditions which we believe are not acceptable.”

From Yahoo News Science

17 India installs antennas for planned moon mission: official

AFP

55 minutes ago

BANGALORE, India (AFP) – India has installed a pair of giant antennas to monitor a planned robotic mission to the moon next year, making it one of a few nations with deep space tracking ability, officials said. The deep space network at Byalalu, 45 kilometres (30 miles) from Bangalore, will keep track of the Chandrayaan-1 lunar mission and provide command support during its two-year orbit around the moon, India’s space agency said. The facility, which reporters visited Saturday, consists of two powerful dish antennas 32 metres (105 feet) and 18 metres in diameter.

18 Small group of US experts insist global warming not man-made

by Jean-Louis Santini, AFP

Sat Dec 15, 9:21 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) – A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth. These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say supports their assertions. These conclusions are in sharp contradiction to those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reached its conclusions using largely similar data.

19 Nuclear Fallout Layer Missing in Himalayan Glacier

LiveScience Staff, LiveScience.com

Sat Dec 15, 9:55 AM ET

Nuclear tests in the 1950s and ’60s spewed fallout all around the globe. Scientists find it when the drill into ice, extracting cores that reveal the layers of history that settle out of the sky. But a new study of ice cores from a big Himalayan glacier lack the distinctive radioactive signals that mark virtually every other ice core retrieved worldwide. The mysteriously missing fallout traces suggest the Himalayan ice field has been shrinking at least since the A-bomb tests more than half a century ago. If true, the melting could foreshadow a future when the stockpiles of freshwater will dwindle and vanish, seriously affecting the lives of more than 500 million people on the Indian subcontinent, researchers said in a statement today.

20 Ancient Egyptian Industrial Complex Revealed

LiveScience Staff, LiveScience.com

Fri Dec 14, 1:20 PM ET

Ancient Egyptians were even more inventive and productive than scholars have thought, according to new findings that depict surprisingly advanced glass-making abilities alongside an industrial complex. The site, at Amarna, is on the banks of the Nile and dates back to the reign of Akhenaten (1352-1336 B.C.), just a few years before the rule of Tutankhamun. Historians have said Egyptians of that time imported their glass. But a team led by archeologist Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University in Wales has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than thought.

From Yahoo News Entertainment

21 Awards shows threatened by Hollywood writers strike

by Rob Woollard, AFP

Sun Dec 16, 1:00 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Hollywood’s writers strike is threatening to take the shine off the movie industry’s awards season, with stars wary at the prospect of having to cross picket lines before walking up the red carpet. The prospect of a resolution to the six-week-old strike drifted further away this week, with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) on Thursday accusing studio negotiators of acting unlawfully by severing negotiations. The latest breakdown between the two warring factions has left organisers of the movie industry’s biggest awards shows — the Golden Globes and the Oscars — nervously considering how the strike may affect their events.

It’s awfully short today and so I went looking for some more-

From Google News U.S.

22 The crux of U.S. budget battle: How to pay?

^{The federal budget is on an unsustainable path, according to a new report by the Congressional Budget Office.}

By Gail Russell Chaddock, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 17, 2007 edition

Washington –  As Congress moves toward a massive end-of-year spending bill this week, both parties claim to be fighting on the side of fiscal responsibility. Republicans are lining up with the White House in enforcing spending caps – a battle they are poised to win. Despite low public approval ratings, President Bush has enough votes in the Senate to block bills that he opposes, as long as most Republicans stand with him. Meanwhile, Democrats are losing ground in their year-long bid to require that Congress pay for new tax cuts. A key test comes this week as the House and Senate work out their differences on a $50 billion “fix” to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which is now set to hit 22 million new taxpayers in the 2007 tax year. The House is requiring offsets; the Senate is not.

From Google News World

23 EU summit gambles on huge Kosovo mission

<sup>1,800 expected to be sent in nation-building exercise

Move a response to ‘strong pressure’ from Washington</sup>

Ian Traynor in Brussels, The Guardian

Saturday December 15, 2007

European leaders yesterday agreed to send up to 1,800 police, judges, and administrators to Kosovo in its biggest foreign policy gamble, aimed at nurturing the breakaway Balkan province towards full statehood. Despite persistent divisions within the EU over how to react to Kosovo’s secession from Serbia, now expected in February, a summit of EU presidents and prime ministers decided to launch Europe’s biggest nation-building operation, telling union foreign ministers to work out the details after the new year. Gordon Brown, making his first visit to Brussels as prime minister, indicated the mission would be deployed – probably in February.

24 Serbia sees Russia, China backing more Kosovo talks

Sun Dec 16, 2007 12:26pm EST

BELGRADE, Dec 16 (Reuters) – Serbia’s President expects Russia, China and some other U.N. Security Council members to back further talks on the status of Kosovo, though the West says all avenues of possible compromise have been exhausted. “I expect several initiatives, and one of them is the resumption of talks … I expect other countries to support that initiative, especially Russia and China,” Boris Tadic told a conference of senior Serbian diplomats on Sunday. The United Nations and NATO took over Serbia’s Kosovo province in 1999 after 3 months of Western bombing to prevent ethnic cleansing by Serb forces fighting a guerrilla insurgency. With no compromise in sight after months of talks, the West says independence for the 90 percent Albanian majority is the only viable solution. Serbia refuses to cede one inch of its sovereign territory but offers full autonomy for Kosovo.

This just in- Joltin’ Joe LIEberman is endorsing John McCain per Bill Kristol as reported by phone on Faux Noise!