From The Half-Red House

I was driving between home and work when I heard Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill’s voice on radio explaining that convicted aircraft bomber and mass-murderer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was to be freed from prison on compassionate grounds. I had to pull over because my eyes had filled with tears. I remember the Shakespearean-sounding words “…Justice must be tempered by mercy..” and an eloquent and balanced explanation of how an unrepentant mass-murderer can nevertheless be a frail, dying man, no threat to anyone, who deserves to spend his last days with his family. Since that day, I have heard little else but angry condemnation of the decision in the press, both left and right. More disturbing, I have heard the very concept of compassionate release attacked, particularly in the US press. The US has no consistent legal doctrine of compassionate release, but Britain, including Scotland, does.

I would advocate strongly that the US adopt such a policy, and that it rethink policies such as three-strikes-and-you’re-out that have filled our prisons with aging inmates who are not ever supposed to be released, on the assumption that the suffering of the victims calls for unending vindictiveness toward those who have

If you, like me, are now completely outside the TV loop, you may have missed last night’s clear exposition of the reasons why the world needs to cut CO2 emmissions to 350 parts per million by a very-on-task Bill McKibben surrounded by a buzzing horsefly in clown shoes named Colbert.

You can still catch it at http://www.350.org, or (if this embedded video works) right here!

A few weeks ago, I discovered, to my delight, that Buffy Sainte-Marie had put out a new album, “Running for the Drum”. I played a few cuts from it on my music radio show. “No No Keshagesh” is one of her energetic Native American influenced songs, and “America the Beautiful” brings out a perspective on the innate goodness of this land and how far it goes beyond the narrow politics practiced here. She is not her old self, but in some ways she is better, and she’s a good five years older than me! I’ve followed her work since the 1960s from “Til it’s Time for You to go” to “Universal Soldier” to “Qu’appelle Valley” to “Love’s Got to Breathe and Fly” and on… I thought of her again last night when Denise and I went to the Wilton Town Hall theatre and the trivia question of the day was “Who played the lead in the movie ‘Soldier Blue’”. I told the ticket-seller (a friend of my daughter from high school) that I didn’t have any idea who the lead actor was, but Buffy Sainte-Marie sang the music and I remembered the power of that movie and that song as if I’d just seen it yesterday.. Today, I looked her name up on the internet and discovered that the Guardian had just done an in-depth interview with her, which I’d like to share. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/31/buffy-sainte-marie) In it she mentions that “Soldier Blue” had an incredibly short run in theatres, apparently because of political presure from Richard Nixon. It gives me hope for the world that she’s still around and active.