Monday, Oct. 24, 2005 THIS IS GOING to be an interesting week in the news. I feel 100% confident saying this. But there is an equally vast question hanging over whatever happens. Let me see if I can sum it up, and I may need to do so in the context of my personal feelings...about government and justice and the way society works or does not work. There is no reason at this point for anyone to have any faith in government or its mechanisms. In the United States, the federal government, particularly on top, is very nearly at the total corruption point. For federal employees reading this, I am not talking about the hardworking non-political employees who actually keep the gears of society ticking along. People who have devoted their lives to public service and who hardly get noticed for the benefits they bring to everyone, for their dedication, and for a quiet patriotism that's expressed mainly in hard work, taking care of people, risking your life or doing what you're told to do every day. You know who you are -- including just about everyone serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I speak, rather, of the people who get flushed when a new administration comes in: the political appointees, those who serve at the leisure of the president. And at the moment, this is definitely a mountain where shit rolls downhill. It is obvious to [nearly] anyone following the Valerie Plame case that something very wrong has happened. (Yes, there are apologists, but they are a sorry lot.) This is the situation in which administration officials exposed an undercover spy network in the press to get revenge on Plame's husband for exposing the lies leading to the Iraq war. Remember that this would all be meaningless if the invasion and occupation of Iraq had not turned out to be based on blatant deception, had not gone disastrously, and had not worked mainly to the profit of Halliburton (Dick Cheney's company) and the Carlyle Group (the Bush family company, formerly partly owned by the Bin Ladens). That last paragraph alone should be enough to make anyone who has heard of the US constitution want to throw up. But we have developed quite the stomach for "anything goes -- anything at all." That, and "nothing matters anyway." This is the week when we find out what has happened with the 22-month effort of a special prosecutor named Patrick Fitzgerald. He is the dedicated, zealous, even obsessed federal lawyer who has the former governor of Illinois under prosecution, and has the current mayor of Chicago neck-deep. How he got to be the special prosecutor on the Plame incident is interesting. But the short version is that because he was involved in bringing the case against terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, some people in the Bush administration thought he since he was against terrorism, thus would he be a good person to look into the Plame incident when John Ashcroft (remember him? The former head of the Justice Department? Prayer meetings in his office every day?) recused himself for a conflict of interest on the case. That fact alone is really weird; it means Ashcroft may have been involved; but anyway, Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney for the Chicago area of Illinois, got the assignment. Whoever Fitzgerald is and whatever my real and imaginary reasons for trusting him (i.e., he is from Brooklyn; he is Irish; he doesn't care what political party anyone belongs to; he is young; he likes to work), he is the guy whose government job involves making sure the government does the right thing. If there is evidence that the almighty vice president of the United States of America committed a crime, it's Patrick Fitzgerald's job to get him indicted and prosecute his case at trial. The same is true for the capos in the White House, Rove and Libby, and for whatever "journalists" participated in the treasonous exposing of a US spy or the careless distribution of other classified information. There are also likely to be people involved whose names we have never heard. We have absolutely no reason to have faith in any such process, as a government mechanism. Common sense would say the whole thing is a ruse. Speaking personally, I have seen governments and their watchdog agencies ruin people, their children, their homes, their entire worlds, over and over again. I could write 5,000 words in an afternoon on the New York State Health Department, starting with the story of the contaminated Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, or the General Electric murders of thousands of PCB-contaminated employees in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward; another on the State University of New York; yet another on the federal EPA; and on and on. And then very now and then, somebody does their job. It's not because they work for a good system; it's because they know what they need to do, and because their personal sense of values is functioning accurately. Far more important, it's because they have the guts to stand up, to speak, to risk their lives. The guts to fight. The guts to fail. I have had the privilege of talking to some of these people, and even having their help when I needed it. The main advantage I get from this experience is that I know they are real. I've heard their voices, I've visited their labs, hung out with them at conferences, and thanked them personally for risking their necks and protecting people from what would otherwise be unmitigated deception and evil. I know their limits; they do what they can; and sometimes that gets results. So I can set aside my disbelief. I can hold out faith. And it still remains to be seen what Patrick Fitzgerald will do this week. My instincts and my intuition tell me he's the real thing. The astrology for the week is spot-on. And finally after the last half decade of Bush one administration travesty after the next, something is bound to go right. If it turns out that he issues a one-paragraph press release that says "close but no cigar," will I be let down, disappointed and pissed off? Yep. Will I take that as a cue to quit working for justice, for change, for awareness? Not for a second.