TV Wasteland

My blogging has been less frequent than usual because I’ve been recovering from carpal tunnel surgeries. Regrettably, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching the cable news networks. Hey, I already knew that TV news was a joke, but I never realized the full extent of the imbecility before.

For the most part, the news shows display a phony concern for “balance,” a stance which has become meaningless because it has been drained of content. What you get is a supposed conservative squaring off against a supposed liberal, both spouting talking points instead of imparting information, and both confined within the most narrow and superficial “centrist” mindset.

The presidential election is covered almost exclusively in the aspect of who’s winning, who’s behind, what the candidate that is behind will or must do to catch up, what the one that is ahead will or must do to stay ahead, what the latest speeches say about the campaign strategies, and endless variations on the “horse race” theme. Pity the viewer seeking insight into the actual problems and issues facing us, because the coverage only provides the most rudimentary information on that, mixed up with huge wads of “spin” that bear no relevance to any of the aforesaid actual problems and issues.

This is emphasized in the presidential race—but in fact, all the political coverage follows the same model. In addition, we have the usual tornadoes and hurricanes, along with lurid crimes and celebrity show biz stories. Last year, as you may recall, the death of a former Playboy bunny took up more air time than all the political news from Europe, Africa, and Asia combined. Somehow the purveyors of this rubbish can look themselves in the mirror and think that they represent a legitimate source of news.

One of the excuses we hear is that with 24 hours to fill up, the cable news networks have to rely on junk. But the truth is that they’re lazy, greedy, and dishonest.

To illustrate my point, take a look at Democracy Now, Amy Goodman’s daily news show that is broadcast on community radio and public access TV. Let me say first of all that I don’t idolize Amy Goodman. She has her blind spots, like any journalist. Nevertheless, Democracy Now is the most important non-corporate news program in the country.

Every day, on a shoestring budget, the show covers a wide range of issues, and features interviews and guests that you almost never see anywhere else. Goodman provides a voice for many authors, representatives of organizations, political figures, activists, and ordinary people. During the Democratic convention, for example, she would interview delegates and give them a good ten or fifteen minutes to talk, and you would learn more from these interviews about the feel of the convention than you would from an entire day of CNN. Her guests have the time to go into detail about events, issues, and problems, in a way that facilitates greater understanding.

Her approach, admittedly, is left-wing alternative, although occasionally someone from the right will agree to be on the show and be given the opportunity to explain his or her positions and debate others with different views. If the networks were to follow her methods, they might justifiably include many more establishment figures, as well as conservative, centrist, and liberal guests, etc. But the point is that there are a lot of people out there who could and should be allowed to speak and be heard.

What the networks give us instead are the same people over and over again, ad nauseam. The same political consultants and operatives, the same pundits, the same columnists, are repeatedly interviewed. In addition, CNN has a “team” of commentators who sit, inexplicably, at little computer screens, and offer up the same pablum week after week. On MSNBC, they have a resident right-wing crank, Pat Buchanan. On almost every show, the host will eventually say, “Now we’ll have a discussion with so-and-so and Pat Buchanan” and out trots the right-wing crank for the millionth time. On ABC’s Sunday show This Week we are privy to discussions between Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Sam Donaldson, all desiccated Beltway insiders who haven’t said anything new or insightful in twenty years or more.

I won’t even bother to describe Rupert Murdoch’s Jim Crow channel, which is a nothing but a wingnut propaganda organ that no one with self-respect should ever agree to appear on.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, it should be noted, is more informative than most cable network hosts, yet there is still a reliance on a small group of repeat guests. Rachel Maddow’s show demonstrates some progress in the right direction, but I think there are corporate restraints at work even in her case. I really didn’t encounter, for example, a strong, principled dissenting view on the bailout from watching Maddow’s show.

The excuse that there’s not enough funding for real reporting won’t cut it. Goodman’s show does real reporting every day, on a microscopic fragment of the networks’ budgets. I think the networks could easily fill 24 hours with a huge variety of voices and viewpoints, along with important news from around the world.

They don’t want to. And one doesn’t need to resort to notions of an overt conspiracy in order to understand the reason. Corporate news is set up to make money for advertisers, and to do that one simply needs to “entertain” the audience and stay within a certain narrow framework of information and opinion. The news that is conveyed on Democracy Now doesn’t fit within that framework because it reveals the darker aspects of governments and corporations. Someone working at CNN or MSNBC doesn’t need to be told not to go there—if you’ve climbed the career ladder high enough to get on these networks, you already know how to toe the line without it being explicitly drawn.

As far as PBS and NPR are concerned, they aim at a more educated audience, but their range is still circumscribed, and the right regularly threatens to cut off their funding when they don’t behave. The honorable exception: Bill Moyers, who was not so subtly squeezed off the air during the Bushevik heyday, and finally made a comeback when public opinion started to catch up with him. This brings up another important insight—the TV talking heads only come around when it’s perceived to be “safe” to do so. When Bush’s poll numbers went into the toilet, people like Chris Matthews finally started to voice skepticism. Even so, a comprehensive, critical understanding of the real damage done by the Bush regime is still lacking on network TV. It’s always framed in terms of popularity—Bush is unpopular now; the war is unpopular; etc. The alarming extent of the corruption and degradation of the country and the world is skimmed over. We now go on to the next distraction as if it had no connection to what went on before.

Can you think of an instance in which TV news has broken a national story within the last forty years? 60 Minutes might have done it once or twice—the rest is smoke and mirrors. Then there was the Dan Rather story on Bush’s desertion from the Texas National Guard—which turned out to be a Rovian trap, even though the facts were there. TV news doesn’t break stories. It doesn’t really practice journalism in the true sense. It just receives information from official sources and then chatters over it incessantly.

The newspapers are still the only news sources that actually “break” stories in the classic fashion, but that’s also become rare. Most of the revelations nowadays come from whistle blowers and other people and organizations outside of the media, such as Amnesty International, who courageously bring things to public attention that would otherwise be ignored by the press. We should be grateful for these truth tellers, but most of the time they are attacked and demonized.

There is one more saving grace I must mention—the internet. Oh, it’s not all that the starry-eyed proponents of online community would have us believe, but it’s made a difference. Before the web, the corporate media completely monopolized the political narrative. It was almost impossible for regular citizens to have their views heard in any meaningful way. The internet showed progressives that they were not alone, and that the dominant narrative was far to the right of where most people in the country really were. I’m sure the right-wing establishment hates the internet and wish it could be suppressed and controlled. The corporatists are still trying, and they mustn’t succeed. There’s a sense in which the Fourth Estate—the real one, not the faux press you see on TV—has taken refuge in the blogosphere.

We will need a free press in the struggles ahead. In the meantime, don’t watch too much television. It warps your mind.

A Chance

I wish the White House weren’t so powerful. This imperial presidency, as Arthur Schlesinger called it, is a huge obstacle to any progress. But the reality today is that this power exists. I see the vote in the presidential race, therefore, in purely practical terms. What candidate gives us, gives the people, a chance at achieving progressive goals, a chance to make gains in the areas of peace, human rights, and equality?

The amount of public attention devoted to this campaign has been obscenely exaggerated. It’s been going on for close to two years. The media treats it like a game show, like a huge perverse form of mass entertainment. And this one’s been stupider than ever—the nomination of that idiotic "hockey mom" being only the most obvious example. Meanwhile, the most important things happen at the grassroots. Progressives need to continue organizing at the local level. We need a sustainable movement that doesn’t just protest what the corporations are doing, but actually wrests economic and political influence from them. This slow, often frustrating work is more important than the presidential election.

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: this is not a game show. It does matter who is in the White House, not because electing someone new will overthrow the empire—of course it won’t. That’s obvious just from seeing Obama kowtow to the Israel lobby and talk tough about Afghanistan. No, it’s important because—we need a chance to influence things. That’s all. Just a chance.

There is very little chance for progress as long as the Republicans run the White House. We dare not forget the horrors of the last eight years. Obama and the Democrats tiptoe around this by talking about “failed policies.” The Bush years don’t just represent failure, they represent criminality of the most dangerous kind. These people used terror to try to destroy the last vestiges of freedom in this country. They’ve murdered hundreds of thousands of human beings and displaced many more, while mouthing lies about “democracy.” Their rich allies and military contractor buddies have shamelessly looted our wealth. They’ve made torture and kangaroo courts our official policy. They’ve illegally spied on us, and when they were caught, expanded their spying powers. They’ve rigged elections by voter suppression and fraud, while using the Justice Dept. to cover their tracks. They’ve poisoned our discourse with their sneering, attacking style and their hate radio, labeling anyone with disagrees with them a traitor or terrorist. They constantly sought to divide us with race and ethnicity and gender, demonizing African Americans and immigrants, women and gays. They have opposed women’s rights every step of the way. They let over a thousand people die in New Orleans without lifting a finger to help, and then they blamed the victims. They stacked the government with crazy religious fanatics who want us to go back to the Middle Ages. Their Supreme Court appointees supported the powerful against the weak, marching in lockstep with the right-wing agenda. They lied about everything and sought to conceal all their works from any public scrutiny.

And there’s more. They’ve committed so many outrages, lies, insults, deceptions, betrayals, cynical ploys, and disgusting actions that it would take hours to catalog them all. This is fascism. If fascism wins in this country, there’s no chance for us.

In the last debate, John McCain told Obama that he wasn’t running against President Bush, and that if he wanted to run against President Bush he should have run four years ago. The shithead pundits actually thought that was McCain's best moment. It’s typical of the sort of superficial, amnesiac, twisted thinking that dominates our elections. We’re supposed to think that this is just about personalities. President Bush is a different personality from John McCain, so we’re told not to compare them. But it’s not about personalities. These people represent political and economic forces, powers that hold sway in our government. By himself, Bush is just an empty suit. His power comes from his backers. And the Republicans, with few exceptions, backed him all the way. To pretend now that the last years were all because of Bush, and that they weren’t crucially enabled by all the Republican leaders, including McCain, is to play us as fools. But of course that’s the only way they know how to play us.

With an Obama victory, there will still be a corporate establishment running the country. There will still be a war machine in the Pentagon. The nature of our predicament is such that we do not have truly progressive alternatives at the national level yet. But one thing we would have with an Obama victory is—a chance. A chance to push back against fascism. A chance for progressives and liberals to have some breathing room, and maybe even some influence, if we can flex our muscles. A chance to work for peace, human rights, equality, or at least, some sanity.

I voted for Nader twice, in 1996 and 2000. I was tired of the centrist Democrats taking my vote for granted. Clinton did not offer a meaningful alternative for me in the long term. Gore hadn’t found any courage yet. We forget how much he tried to sound like Bush in 2000—picking Joey the Rat as his running mate, for fuck’s sake.

But I believe the stakes are too high now. I did not foresee the push towards totalitarian rule. I did not foresee 9/11, which became the excuse for an assault on our Constitution. I voted for Kerry in ’04, even though he has the appeal of a soggy piece of driftwood, because I wanted to push back at the fascists. Obama, for all his faults, is a hell of a lot smarter and better than Kerry.

I don’t understand the notion of principled non-voting. When I hear some people say they won’t vote, I just don’t get it. Voting is just a practical thing. You aim at the closest you can get to a practically desirable result. How hard can it be just to get your ass to a voting booth, or to send in a ballot? I do understand the despair and the apathy, but I don’t understand not voting out of supposed principle. That seems phony to me. Of course I’d rather have a real progressive in charge like Nader or Cynthia McKinney. But in practical terms, I want us to have a chance.

If the Republicans win again, it will justify every sick, slimy thing they’ve done to stay in power for the last eight years. They have to be hurt. They have to be beaten down without mercy. That’s another reason I’m voting for Obama. Those fuckers need to be taught a lesson, and nothing hurts them quite as much as losing.

And during an Obama administration, we need to continue to organize and fight and speak truth to power. We need to fight the Democrats’ allegiance to big money and empire, even while we continue to fight the fascist right. Because of course they’ll still be around, whining and throwing tantrums as always.

But in order to do that we need—a chance.

Vote for Obama.

The Man Behind the Curtain

As heartless as it may seem to say so, in the midst of financial crisis, I believe that there is a sense in which we are experiencing a privileged moment. There are very few times in which the official narrative of our politics, the story of capitalism presented day after day as the only truth, falls away to reveal, if only for an instant, the reality behind the façade.

This is that moment, if you will, when Toto pulls the curtain back and we can all see the con man pulling the levers and yelling into the mike.

Recall, if you have not succumbed to the peculiar strain of amnesia prevalent in America, decades of political blather concerning the “free market.” The corporatists railed incessantly against regulation, saying that if only the restraints were taken off our fine economic system, prosperity would come. Conservative or “centrist” (liberal was now a dirty word), Democrat or Republican, all agreed that greed was good. And when the wingnuts came to power, first in Congress under Clinton (who co-opted their message instead of fighting them) and then in the White House under the current torturer, stealer of elections, and all-around useful idiot, they went whole hog—or whatever porcine metaphor you prefer.

The rich got a lot richer. You and I were forced to endure downsizing, outsourcing, and other forms of economic rape—with the result that both members of a household now work full-time, and often have to take second jobs to pay the bills. And the debt piled up.

Meanwhile, the official narrative was that poor people were the problem. Welfare queens and other shiftless minorities needed to be weaned from the welfare tit. Social programs were a waste of our hard-earned tax dollars—money that could be better used for war toys like the Star Wars missile defense boondoggle.

There aren't enough funds for all these liberal programs. Where are you going to get the money for all that? Just tighten your belt, salute the flag, and watch Survivor on TV.

Politicians became our elected school marms and moral instructors—wagging their fingers at us as they bleated about personal responsibility. Don’t have children out of wedlock, people! Stop looking for handouts and get a job—like the decent hard working people who vote for us. We’re sick of hearing about sexism and racism from people who basically hate American values. Instead of protesting war and poverty, look at the true moral issues facing us today—women getting abortions and those filthy queers flaunting their depravity in public. Don’t forget flag burning. And those creepy artists getting funded by the NEA. This is important stuff, people. And while we’re at it, let’s impeach the President for having sex with an intern.

Your problems are the fault of the others. Not with us. Blame the immigrants. Declare holy war on Islam. And behind all of it, the crazy, wacky, moonbat left. Obama, Osama. Coincidence?

And the hockey mom joe six-packs said Amen.

But now, when the thieves and pirates who’ve been getting filthy rich while the rest of us languish in socioeconomic limbo—when these captains of industry who think nothing of moving their companies overseas while screaming “Country first!”—finally bring the whole stinking edifice down around our ears, what do you think happens?

Suddenly there is $700 billion available from the public treasury to save their asses. There wasn’t enough money for those liberal social programs, but when Wall Street needs a bailout, well lookee! We just happen to have $700 billion handy.

But the voters didn’t buy it. Even the American electorate, capable of voting en masse for an empty Texas suit for President (twice!)—wasn’t fooled. The public was overwhelmingly against this bailout, and they let the Congress know it.

If you’ve been watching the news channels during this time—the regular networks, the cable networks, PBS, NPR, whatever—you couldn’t fail to notice that the corporate media was in favor of this bill. Barely a whisper of an alternative ever made it to the airwaves. We were bombarded with fear—if the bill didn’t pass, disaster would ensue. Your jobs were threatened. Your way of life was threatened. The survival of America was at stake. And this was not confined to Fox or right-wing commentators—all of them toed the line, even the supposedly liberal ones.

And yet—the public still opposed the bill!

After the first try failed, and the Dow plunged, the politicos went into panic mode. The people just don’t understand economics. They don’t realize how crucial this is. Something has to be done—now.

Obama supported the bill. What the hell did you expect? He’s heavily funded by Wall Street. McCain stumbled around like the clueless senile bastard he is, not knowing which way to go, because the extreme right of the party was afraid of getting blamed and voted No. What isn’t talked about much are the Democrats that voted No—they were on the left-end of the spectrum, like Kucinich. No one mentioned their arguments on the news channels. That might call into question the whole system, which is based on greed, exploitation and class war.

The amazing thing is, none of this con-job worked. The public still hated the bill.

So here comes the moment when Toto pulled open the curtain. A month before Congressional elections, with the voters angry as hell, the House ended up passing the bill.

I can’t imagine how the actual structure of power in this country could have been more clearly or obviously revealed. The government doesn’t run the country. Wall Street does. All that Wall Street had to do was kick and whine and declare emergency, and then take a big dive when it didn’t get its way at first, and eventually the Congress bailed them out.

Hey, joe six-pack hockey mom—try to learn a lesson here, if you’re not brain-dead already. The people who own the country don’t give a shit about you or your family. When they use race and sex and homophobia to sway your mind, they’re not looking out for anything but their own bottom line. When they talk about cutting government spending, they mean for you, not for themselves. Hell, no. Government is there to cater to them. They tell it what to do, and it will do what they say even if every single one of you calls your Congressperson to complain.

The man behind the curtain is the wizard of Wall Street. That’s the truth. All this talk about freedom and democracy and the American dream—it’s a sham, and it has been for many years. This is one of those moments when that truth is naked for all to see. Imprint it on your mind and don’t forget it.

There will be no change until we refuse to believe the lies.

God: the crash course

Religious language is by nature metaphorical. It is metaphorical to a greater degree—and really in a different sense—than language in any other realm. Thought and language are limited because they deal of necessity in relations, i.e. events are comprehensible only in relation to other events. In everyday language, signs are made to correspond with phenomena. The word cat, to use a very simple example, stands for a particular kind of animal. The word is not the animal, so of course the language is metaphorical in a rudimentary sense. But the animal is limited and conditioned, just as language is, so the correspondence gives rise to what we usually call literal truth, or facts.

The basis of religious thought, on the other hand, is an intuition of reality as eternal and absolute. When we follow logic to its end, we realize that the limited and conditioned and finite, which describes all events, could not be so unless reality itself is unlimited, unconditioned, and infinite. However, the intuition which forms the basis of religious thought is not the result of logic. Rather, it springs from the fundamental ineffability of self, or what I prefer to call subjectivity. Subjectivity itself, the very fact of experience, seems ungraspable, only approximated in language, because it is the context or background of all knowledge. We intuitively connect this with an idea of the eternal and absolute.

All of our primary emotions become involved with this basic intuition. Experiencing reality nakedly, prior to the formulation of ideas, involves awe, wonder, love, and fear. The predicament of thought is to be newly alive, experiencing the world and struggling to gain knowledge of events in their relations. If subjectivity was immediately graspable, if we could pick it up and examine it like a rock, there would be no sense of wonder, nor would any knowledge be possible. The human being is limited and conditioned, yet intuits the unlimited and unconditioned—the mind exists at this meeting point between the contingent and the fixed.

Let us call this ineffable subjectivity soul—despite the misunderstandings and misconceptions that the word will occasion. Reality itself, the infinite and eternal, is of necessity impersonal. But when I say “reality itself” I am performing an abstraction, as language requires me to do in any explanation. This “reality itself” is in fact not separable from events (i.e. the finite and conditioned); indeed it is the very essence of the absolute to be not separable. The impersonal, so to speak, includes the personal.

The word God (and its equivalents in other languages) can be used as a generic term for the absolute, unconditioned, infinite and eternal nature of reality. Philosophers and theologians have used it that way. However, it first arose as a symbol of the personal, the eternal as a person, in effect as the soul of the world. Every aspect of the human experience contributed to this—gods and spirits (and later, God) reflect every human capacity you could name.

Religious thought is important and valid because it allows access to meanings, to the soul’s understanding of itself, the world, humanity, life, and death. I’m not referring only to instrumental meanings such as “How does this work?” or “What is this made of?” but to meaningful expressions of the entire range of experience, especially including emotions. Religion became the basis for the social order because it was the primary access point for meaning, a sort of map of human life and all its purposes and feelings, including pains and enjoyments.

The boundary between metaphorical truth and literal truth was never completely clear. It was always determined by the necessities of the moment. We didn’t really become conscious of the distinction until the rise of scientific thought forced us into some kind of awareness. Religion in its social function—as the foundation of the social order—projected everything onto a “literal” reality conceived as external to the soul. God was believed to be an existing supernatural being, a creator external to the creation, and an authority to be obeyed. The mythology of religion—its symbols and narrative traditions—was believed to represent actual historical events.

But the curious thing about all this was that the meaning of religion and mythology, its significance for the soul, can only be metaphorical. Outside of practical instrumentalities, “literal” truth has no meaning. The struggle between science and religion in the West was, and is, a political struggle. Religious institutions relied on fixed belief systems in order to maintain an authoritarian social order. Scientific reasoning threatened that because it offered freedom from preconceived belief systems. When religion claimed literal truth for itself, it staked its fortunes on unfruitful ground. It committed the error of misplaced absoluteness—asserting that the limited (mythology, scriptures, symbols) was absolute, while at the same time proclaiming that the absolute (God) was limited (an external being).

An eternal and omnipotent God, a being who created the universe and is separate from it, is literally impossible. Any separate being exists in space and time, and is therefore limited. All the arguments have been demolished centuries ago. To argue about it with a “believer” today is to simply repeat what has already been proven.

But once you realize the metaphorical nature of all religious thought, its validity becomes apparent. Mythology is an imprint of the soul, inclusive of the entire range of experience. It presents contradictory symbols and narratives, just as human beings present them. Spirituality proper is the art of the soul’s apprehension of the eternal and infinite. It has many facets. In its intellectual aspects, it deals with infinity—the realization that all contingent events are ultimately obviated (or subsumed, as it were) in reality’s nature as eternal. In its emotional aspects, it deals with divinity—the transcendent nature of love, or as the Sanskrit perhaps more accurately characterizes it, ananda (joy, bliss).

God is a metaphor for the soul, for the ineffable character of subjectivity. It inspires devotion and worship because human beings desire and seek the personal, as they desire and seek their families and loved ones. The truth was frankly spoken already in the ancient Indian texts known as the Upanishads: Brahman (God) is Atman (Soul). Buddhist philosophy took things a step further by throwing out ontology altogether, a conclusion which is far more accurate and less prone to error than any theistic system, but too difficult for many people to understand. Buddhism ended up replacing the personal aspect of divinity with the Buddhas themselves, human objects of veneration that took on a supernatural aura while remaining benign. It would seem that the need for the personal aspect could not be denied.

This is the great secret of religion. It’s an open secret, but a secret all the same. It has been suppressed in the major Western religions (and to some degree in the Eastern ones as well) because it threatens the authoritarian social order. In the old days, the esoteric and the exoteric tried to co-exist, which in practical terms meant that the mystics had to be careful not to say certain things or they might get burned at the stake. Most religious institutions, at least in the West, have lost access to their own meanings, they’ve lost their power, as a native American might say, and increasingly rely on force.

Fundamentalists seem to think that they’re competing with science for the souls of men. Actually they’ve already surrendered the power of their own traditions—their literalism constitutes a confession that their “faith” is only a narrow set of beliefs about the world, beliefs that are contradicted by the free use of reason. In terms of the soul, in terms of the meaning and significance of life as apprehended by the soul, it is of no account whether the stories of Adam and Eve, or Noah, or any narrative, are historically true. Whatever significance these stories may have for someone, it would be in the nature of a symbol, of poetry that creates meaning. Religious institutions have elevated scriptures to the status of idols, calling them the “word” of God. If we rely on a book to tell us what to believe, then we are absolved (in truth, prevented) from engaging in the direct encounter which spirituality demands. This is very convenient for authoritarians. With book in hand, they can assume an infallibility that they ascribe to God while destructively practicing it on others.

What science has revealed concerning the nature and extent of the universe is astounding and, in a very real sense, inconceivable. We can say the words “billions of galaxies,” but we can’t form any real conception of it. In contrast, the covert mythologies of the literalists are generally small and tidy, with man at the center of things. It is not our awe or our wonder that is threatened by this new information—only our pride.

Those who seek to live a spiritual life today, and at the same time to honor their own ability to think freely, are faced with a necessity that is different, or at least more imperative, than in previous eras. We must see through religious symbolism and mythology; we need to explicitly acknowledge its metaphorical nature and its fundamental connection to self, to what I have been calling soul. We will always need spirituality and mythology. Religion is not going away. But we need to recognize its metaphorical nature if we are to continue to experience meaning in our lives.

The political history of humanity, which is intimately entwined with the history of religious institutions, is a tragic one because it is marked with oppression. This reflects an inner struggle. Humanity has continually subtracted itself from its understanding of reality. We have refused to honor, or even acknowledge, the unity of experience and nature, mind and world, soul and reality. Listening to our fear, we have maintained a wall between an imagined divine “other” and our finite and limited being. But this is the very wall that our intuition of the eternal, the very basis of our religious yearnings, is meant to break through.

9/11 Nostalgia

As Republicans across the country gather to celebrate September 11, a feeling of wistful nostalgia pervades the air. The terrorist attacks in which close to 3,000 people died have proven very advantageous to Republicans seeking to gain political dominance in the U.S., but the gains have been unexpectedly short-lived.

It hardly seems to be seven years since George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and other administration officials were thrilled and excited by the devastating attacks in New York and Washington. This was an opportunity crying out to be exploited, and they wasted no time in using fear to cement their political power and to gear the nation up for an attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Their gratitude to the terrorists has been deep and enduring, evidenced by the constant tribute paid to Osama bin-Laden and Al Qaida in the years since—Republicans citing the terrorists as support for whatever policy or initiative they might be pushing at the time. It was all part of an important campaign against the real enemy: liberals, Democrats, and other components of the “angry left.”

The voiceless victims of the 9/11 attacks became the perfect cheerleaders for the Republican cause. Photos and videos of the burning twin towers provided wonderful imagery for Republican campaign commercials and promotions. Whenever liberals or Democrats would seek to talk about issues, Republicans could threaten another terrorist attack if voters failed to continue supporting Republican candidates. Those who expressed doubts about the direction we were going in were obviously supporters of terrorism. Anyone who protested the war, or the use of torture, or the suspension of Constitutional rights, was suspect, a potential enemy.

But as the Iraq War turned into a quagmire, and various scandals exposed an inability on the part of the Bush administration to actually govern, Republican terrorism began to lose its luster. Most leading GOP figures remember 9/11 with fondness for the good times now gone, and wish that somehow the terrorists could strike again.

Rudy Giuliani, the ex-mayor of New York City, recalls with delight the day that events sunk to his level, so that he actually appeared as a leader rather than a psychotic prick. Ann Coulter stares at the poster of Bin Laden in her bedroom, dreaming of the day her idol will return and show the liberals who was right after all. Karl Rove chuckles to himself as he remembers the lovely sight of people jumping out of the flaming windows of the World Trade Center on that wonderful day. Why shouldn’t it happen again? he wonders. Well, there’s always hope.

On election eve of 2006, when the Democrats were taking back the House and Senate, Fox News’s Shepard Smith looked into the camera with a sad puppy-dog expression and said that he was worried. Even though the public was turning towards the Democratic Party, Shepard hoped that we wouldn’t forget the War on Terror and how important it was. Without the War on Terror, you see, Shepard Smith would be doing commercials for hair gel.

Dennis Milligan, the chair of the Arkansas Republican Party, was speaking for Republicans everywhere when he mused in June of ’07: “All we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on 9/11, and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country." Without more attacks, the naysayers continue to gain ground. If only our terrorist friends could come through again and help us prove them wrong.

Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton said that a terrorist attack would help Republicans. Some Democrats reacted with outrage, but she was only stating the obvious. Republicans love terrorism. The more terrorism, the better it is for Republicans. John McCain’s chief strategist Charlie Black later said that another attack on America would certainly be a big advantage to McCain. At the time, with public disapproval of Republicans at record lows, one could hardly blame the McCain campaign for indulging in some wishful thinking. Ah, if only there were some more burning bodies, panic in a major city, mayhem and destruction by fanatic Muslims, wouldn’t that be great for us? Why, we’d win in a landslide!

Although it’s clear to all the wise pundits and talk show experts that terrorism is good for Republicans, there’s another aspect that is rarely mentioned. Absence of terrorism is inherently bad for Republicans. Therefore, it would be a grave error for Republicans to actually try to reduce terrorism. That would be working against themselves. Instead, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have demonstrated time and again, the correct strategy is to strengthen and support terrorism as much as possible. We must do everything in our power to make America hated in the Muslim world so as to create as many new terrorists as we can. If these policies result in an eventual follow-up attack on America, so much the better. Republicans love 9/11 and they love terrorists. Although it’s politically incorrect for them to say it too loudly, Republicans hope and pray for a terrorist attack on the United States that will return the Republican Party to the popularity and prestige it briefly enjoyed seven years ago. Hopefully the attack will take place on a big liberal city such as San Francisco, so that a bunch of homosexuals will get killed for their sins into the bargain. That would be best. But whatever—they’ll take what they can get.

A losing game

So John McCain picked a female evangelical, a virtual unknown, for his running mate. And I’ve been hearing some hand-wringing from liberal and progressive friends to the effect that this could actually help McCain win. A lot of people were surprised by the move, and I’m one of them—but on reflection I realize that a lot of us still cling to “reality based” notions of politics. And that includes some folks on the “right” as well. Who can blame us? The idea that politics involves a certain degree of serious consideration of issues and consequences helps give a sense of comfort and normalcy to our outlook. Unfortunately, events have proven this idea to be an obstruction to clarity.

The Republican Party does not really care about governing. And it doesn’t care about issues or ideas, except insofar as they facilitate corporate profits. Everything is about hidden messages, code words, imagery, personality, in short—electoral hypnotism. Previous cynical Repug candidates chose Spiro Agnew and Dan Quayle to be a “heartbeat away.” Those guys may have had a little more “experience” than Sarah Palin, but weren’t any more thoughtful, or competent. The fact is that the Repugs proved with George W. Bush that they could install an empty suit in the White House and still run things—sort of. “Yeah, they ran things into the ground,” you might say, but the rich cronies made lots of money, and that’s all that counts to these people. Their true motto is: “We don’t care.” Power is all that matters. That’s Karl Rove 101, and the man himself pronounced the Palin pick a stroke of genius.

Confronted with the never-ending antics of insane wingnut freaks, the people who dominate the political discourse in the United States, I find myself most distressed at their pathetic Democratic enablers. Instead of an opposition party, what I saw displayed at the Democratic Party was the same old fantasy that somehow they could win by being nice and positive and reasonable. These people just don’t seem to learn.

In all the hot air blowing about in Denver, I don’t recall anyone talking about Alberto Gonzales and the attempt to turn the Justice Department into a machine for voter suppression. I don’t recall mention of the Plame affair and the Nigerian forgeries. Did anyone talk about the rampant war profiteering by KBR and other Bush-Cheney cronies in Iraq which constitutes looting of the Treasury on an unprecedented scale? Or the simple disappearance of $12 billion in Iraq, along with untold amounts of weaponry and explosives? What about the Downing Street memo? Signing statements? Refusing to allow aides to testify? Domestic spying? Abramoff? Patriot Act? Abu Ghraib? The Terry Schiavo circus? Tom DeLay? False linking of 9/11 to Saddam? All the lying, lying, lying?

Why, I don’t even have the space to list all the examples of corruption. This administration is such a cesspool of criminality that it’s difficult to know where to begin. Maybe that’s part of the problem. We’ve been so bombarded with lies and hate and murder that it simply befuddles the mind. Of course there’s the huge issue of torture, which the Democrats have decided not to touch because their polling says that Americans are sadists and approve of barbarism. The evisceration of the Bill of Rights is a matter of concern, don’t you think? But if all you watched was the Democratic Convention, you wouldn’t know that was happening.

No, the Democrats didn’t hammer against the corruption of the vicious criminal regime that has made such a mess of the country in the last years. Instead they talked about the economy. Obama’s overrated speech focused almost exclusively on economic issues, appealing to people’s selfishness while dressing it all up in idealistic-sounding rhetoric. When it came to foreign policy, the message was that Iraq was a distraction from the true goal of getting Osama Bin Laden. Hey, John Kerry tried that last time. You remember how well that worked. At one point Obama actually mentioned “Russian aggression.” You know, I understand that a black candidate for President is in a difficult position. I don’t expect the Democrats to advocate an end to imperialism. But to not even attack the endemic corruption, the criminality, of Republican rule, is in my view, foolish strategy.

The Democrats pay lip service to the reality of our degraded condition, albeit mostly in economic terms. But the basic assumption is that this is all still “business as usual.” If they simply present a better and more positive choice than the Republicans present, they should win. This amounts to seeing our extraordinary situation, a time or peril, as part of an ordinary political process. It is a losing strategy.

By refusing to hold the Republicans accountable for lying, stealing, spying, and betraying the country, the Democrats surrender whatever moral ground they pretend to occupy. The election then becomes just a choice between two valid alternatives. The popular perception is that the Democrats are frightened wimps, and I do think they’re so used to being bullied by the hard right that they’ve lost the ability to fight back, but the underlying reason for all this is that they’re trying to please the same corporate forces that the Republicans are. They fear that impeachment, or even an aggressive campaign against Republican corruption, will dry up the corporate money.

With Nancy Pelosi and Stoney Hoyer and Rahm Emanuel and all these other clever people running things, there’s a good chance of McCain actually winning. Then what will all their caution have gotten them? Another arrogant Republican president who can defy the rule of law at will. What will it take for them to learn the simple fact that you have to fight these crooks with everything you’ve got? You don’t win by being nice and civilized and reasonable. Go for the throat, for chrissake!

On a simple practical level, the Obama campaign needs to attack the Republican party, not just McCain. “Republican” is a bad brand right now, so you need to say that word a lot if you’re a Democrat. McCain positions himself as being somehow different from Bush, something new, something not exactly Republican. If all you do is talk about McCain and not the Republicans and their horrible record, you reinforce the McCain narrative. If I were Obama, I’d be slamming the Republicans every chance I got. Yeah, throw in your change and your hope rhetoric too, but at this point just about everyone who can be swayed by that call has been swayed. Does negative campaigning work? Of course it does. Why do you think we’ve had twenty years of Reagan-Bush misery?

Obama may win anyway, I suppose. I hope so, just so there’s a chance for even a little bit of sanity to seep into Washington. Anyone who isn’t ignorant should have already decided to kick the Republicans out by now. The ignorant vote is all that’s left, but unfortunately that’s a large group. After eight years of this shit, if people can be swayed by some “hockey mom” nutjob, or another Swift Boat smear campaign, then there were no brains in their heads in the first place.

The Barnum Identity

In this election year, with all the talk about voting blocs and demographics, there is one group that is rarely mentioned. Yet it is one of the largest segments of the U.S. population, if not the largest, and it has become an increasingly powerful force to be reckoned with on the political, economic, and social landscape.

I’m referring, of course, to suckers.

It’s not as if this is a completely new social group—certainly the advertising industry has long focused on this huge and fertile consumer base. And the emergence and eventual dominance of movies and (especially) television as purveyors of entertainment and information has expanded the economic influence of suckers to the point where they have become arguably the most influential segment of the American audience. But public and popular discourse has been very slow in acknowledging this all-important group.

“There’s a definite social stigma still attached to being a sucker,” explains Dr. Herbert Dietrich, a sociologist and author of the upcoming book The Gullible Majority. “People associate the label with ignorance and stupidity, so suckers are understandably wary of identifying as such, while business and government tend to allude to suckers without being explicit enough to offend. It’s a problem because the shame and secrecy makes it more difficult for suckers to fully participate in public life.”

But there are signs of change. The Bush administration inaugurated a novel approach that has surprised veteran political insiders. Abandoning old notions of apparent adherence to empirical facts, the Bush team has made explicit overtures to the sucker demographic through an ingenious, “fluid” concept of reality that conforms to whatever is required by the authorities at a given time. Voters are therefore encouraged to affirm rather than conceal their sucker identity, a bold strategy that has had interesting but mixed results to this date.

Researches indicate that suckers constitute close to 80% of consumers of pharmaceuticals, beauty products, video games, alcoholic beverages, and family-size vehicles. The percentages are high for many other sectors of the economy as well. The Fox News channel is famed for aiming its programming exclusively at this group, but the other television networks are gaining ground, especially among those who remain ambivalent about their sucker identity.

Suckers are repelled by the cold abstractions of intellectuals and social engineers. Their concerns are centered more in matters of the heart, such as prayer in schools, gay marriage, or the sufferings of celebrities. Values matter to them, not ideas.

Despite the ugly stereotypes, suckers come from all walks of life and every level of education. College-educated suckers are in fact eagerly sought after by companies because of their generally greater spending power. Of course we’re used to seeing those people sitting behind a political candidate holding signs and clapping, but this is only a small segment of this dynamic group—in fact, suckers are all around us, in our homes, schools, and places of employment. Soon they will be tired of the secrecy surrounding their extraordinary dominance in American life.

Already there are sucker clubs and support groups springing up around the nation. Therapists and self-improvement coaches are helping people acknowledge their inner suckers and become proud of their malleability and openness to suggestion. What used to be scorned as naivete is now being affirmed as vulnerability.

If indeed there is a sucker born every minute, we can look forward to a better future in America. The conflict and divisiveness that has torn our country apart will gradually subside as suckers discover their solidarity and unite behind our leaders. As long as there are suckers, Wall Street and the economy will prosper, our troops will continue to defend freedom, and the nuclear family will endure. Here is the real center, the mainstream of society, the backbone of our country, the greatest on earth. All they need is to be told what to do, and all they ask is to be given an even break.

A break

I'm going on vacation, kids. Going where it's cool. No computers, no TV, no phones. I'll be back around the 27th of August. Meanwhile, would somebody please arrest Richard Cheney? Thank you.

See you in China

China has enjoyed “favored trade status” with the U.S. for a long time now. American leaders claimed that a policy of engagement would eventually lead to a liberalization of China’s human rights record. That hasn’t happened, but you don’t hear the American politicians making much noise about it. We’re still regularly prompted to hate Cuba and North Korea, not to mention Iran, Syria, and Venezuela—but China is our buddy now.

It’s fairly obvious why this is so. China represents a huge new market for business, as well as a source of cheap labor. If there’s a lot of money to be made, you can just forget all that “human rights” talk. And that’s just what the global corporate interests have done—not that our owners ever cared much in the first place.

“President” Bush will be at the Olympics, along with NBC, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Adidas, and many other benevolent sponsors of our way of life. And even though China supports thuggery in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Burma, and vetoes any attempts by the U.N. to help the people in those countries, it won’t be labeled a state sponsor of terrorism. It's too big and powerful to be in the axis of evil—the Chinese own too many assets, and the U.S. owes them too much money. The axis of evil is only for weaker countries that can be bullied on the world stage.

But I think there’s still more to it. I’ve said it before, but I’m not averse to some reiteration now and then: the neocons and their Repug enablers are passionate secret admirers of the Chinese government. They look at the American tradition and they see weakness and anarchy, a lot of rubbish about self-evident truths and inalienable rights. Then they look at China and wish that we could be more like them.

China has an aggressive, fast-growing "state capitalist" economy. Their pool of workers is huge and easily exploitable—labor unions are not allowed. Industry can pollute to its heart’s content, without interference from environmentalists. There is only one political party, and it controls everything. The members of that party enjoy the privileges of an elite with little restraint or regulation. It is against the law to criticize the government. So-called freedom of speech, which always disturbs the function of the state, is non-existent and irrelevant. The party can lock up anybody it wants to, and there are no significant protests or consequences. Although the government routinely denies it, torture is allowed and regularly practiced. All important decisions are made in secret, and the operations of government are successfully concealed from the public. A vast police apparatus keeps the population under surveillance. The military conducts its operations without public oversight.

The fact that the party controlling China calls itself Communist is really beside the point. No one really believes all that talk about “the people” anymore, least of all the Chinese themselves. The businessmen and the generals and the politicians get rich, while millions remain poor. Their foreign policy is naked realpolitik—you don’t think they support Sudan or Burma out of principle, do you? What about women’s rights? Take a look at the photos of party leaders meeting together. See any women there? Gay rights? You’ve got to be kidding.

So the only difference, really, is that the Chinese government gets to have its way without interference from left liberal ACLU feminist moonbat journalists or other troop haters. They can just lock up their enemies, or kill them, and make lots of money. This is Dick Cheney’s wet dream. With a few minor cultural alterations, it sounds like the Fox News vision for America. All this stuff with FISA, the Patriot Act, rendition and torture, the militarization of our culture—it’s all just the Bush rats playing catch-up. We’re behind, don’t you see? You’ve heard of the arms race; this is the repression race. Freedom is holding us back from our potential as a world power.

This neocon push to turn the U.S. into a Chinese-style national security state has not been so simple, or as easy as the deep thinkers on the right were hoping it would be. Granted, slavish obedience has a long historical pedigree. Humans are primarily social, subject to the legitimate need for custom and authority. China has a very spotty history of intellectual freedom, and even less experience with democracy. With the 20^th century came totalitarianism under Mao, and the effects of subjugation are still evident today.

In the United States, it’s not so simple. I think it’s inaccurate to characterize Americans as either brave lovers of liberty or ignorant docile sheep. The truth is more complicated—we’re really a diffuse mixture of both, with many shades in between. Our history has always displayed a tension between the belief in obedience to the status quo and a striving for individuality and justice. The status quo has almost always had the upper hand, but the other aspect hasn’t died out yet, either. The curious thing is that, leaving aside the voicing of political views, Americans are generally accustomed to saying whatever they want. Some form of rebellion seems to always take shape in the culture. When we think of free speech, however, we tend to conceive of it in high-minded terms, as a sort of noble ideal of liberty. We underestimate the simple pleasure of just speaking one’s mind without fear. We’ve become used to making jokes about everything, accustomed to looking at the situation with a bit of cynicism.

If these visionaries, these crackpot neocons, think that Americans are going to easily suppress that pleasure in favor of an austere, Chinese-style cultural hypnosis, they’re going to be disappointed. It’s not that Americans are rising up en masse against the pigs or anything like that—we all know that’s not happening. But there’s a very basic resistance to losing the pleasure of saying what we want, and doing pretty much what we want, without being stopped and frisked, or arrested for making statements detrimental to the welfare and unity of the American people. Don't get me wrong. I don’t think it’s impossible for us to become like China. Certainly, China’s secret admirers in Washington will keep trying to achieve that goal. But it’s an uphill climb.

Miasma of the True Believers

Lately we’ve been hearing from conservatives who are disaffected with the Bush Administration. The general complaint is that the Republican Party, along with the conservative movement, has lost its way, and that Bush represents a betrayal of true conservative ideals.

Bill Moyers had a couple of them on his show a few weeks ago (here is the transcript): Mickey Edwards, one of the old-guard Goldwater conservatives who has written a book called Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost, and How It Can Find Its Way Again; and Ross Douthat, whose recent tome is titled Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (all political books seem to use similar strategies in their titles these days). Since this was Moyers, the conversation was stimulating, and I ended up watching the whole thing. I can’t deny that there are pleasing aspects of hearing conservatives decry Bush’s notions of untrammeled executive power, and these two were more intelligent than most conservative intellectuals. And god knows one needs to be welcoming to whatever allies one can find in what is essentially a fight to the death for our liberty. Nevertheless, the assumptions of these conservatives are wrong, and almost touchingly naïve.

One of these assumptions is that conservatives have traditionally believed in “limited government.” Reagan came to power saying that government was the problem, and this was essentially the conservative mantra. So thinkers like Edwards and Douthat look at what’s happened under Bush and think it’s an anomaly, a case of a movement going astray. They are in the pathetic position of true believers who take the rhetoric at face value without recognizing the social and economic powers behind it.

“Limited government” in practice, rather than in the vague nobility of conservative rhetoric, means essentially that the government’s function is to stand guard while business makes money. The one idea, if you can call it that, of the Republican Party has been to make sure nobody interferes with profits. Deregulation and so-called “privatization” were the projects begun under Reagan and continued without pause ever since.

Greasing the wheels for the corporations necessarily involves corporations greasing the wheels of government. To think that it doesn’t is simply naïve. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours—that was the inevitable result of the “limited government” philosophy. And it should be to no one’s surprise that the desire for ever-greater profits will always cancel out any and all concerns for the public good. Therefore, environmental regulations were eroded and ignored, with dire consequences for public health. Therefore, health care became less and less responsive to public needs and increasingly dependent on the profit margins of insurance companies. Therefore, the banking industry was deregulated, regardless of possible consequences for the average person. Therefore, the corporations and the rich were relieved of their responsibility to pay taxes and the burden was shifted to middle-class citizens. The list could go on endlessly.

The point is that conservatives refused to guard against a basic human tendency, or even acknowledge it—I’m talking about greed. With untrammeled greed in control of the government, the power and scope of the state will only be limited in terms of how it can help ordinary people—but its literal power and scope, physically measurable in terms of its ability to control our lives and inflict damage on other countries, that power and scope will inevitably expand. Conservative intellectuals, installed in their think-tanks in order to provide rhetorical support for the movement, are unable to perceive the simplest facts of human nature, facts which have been acknowledged even by the traditional religions and philosophies of the West. Greed was traditionally considered a vice. Not for the American conservatives, though.

Furthermore, there has been no application of these notions of limited government to foreign policy or military expenditure. On the contrary, the Republicans have always clamored to increase defense spending. While Reagan slashed as many social programs as he could, swelling the ranks of the underclass and the homeless and forcing millions of people to take multiple jobs just to survive, he vastly increased the Pentagon budget. And it’s been increasing ever since. Now, what kind of a fool would expect a blank-check policy to the military to result in “limited government”? With the imperial project and the increasing militarization of America comes greater executive power. Yet these conservative purists act surprised that Bush/Cheney would take this path.

Of the two guests on Moyer’s show, I found Douthat the most unintentionally amusing. Fussily clarifying and equivocating while he strained to make conservatism look intellectually respectable, he distanced himself from Tom DeLay and Rush Limbaugh while claiming that Republican economic policies have helped workers by lowering prices. He really believes what he’s saying, which tempts one to lend him the sympathy traditionally accorded to the self-deluded. While so-called “free market” policies have outsourced the American worker to irrelevance, Douthat sees sunshine and lollipops. Indeed, if corporate interests are identified with conservative values, how could he see it any other way?

Over and over, not just on this Moyers show but in general, we hear these conservatives talking about how wonderful Reagan was, and then saying that Bush represents some kind of betrayal of the Reagan legacy. Really? I’m old enough to remember that Reagan appointed as Secretary of the Interior a man who believed that it was unnecessary to protect the environment because Jesus would soon be bringing the end of the world anyway. And he stood behind this man (his name was James Watt) in the face of all criticism, and it was only some stupid incident involving Watt putting down The Beach Boys (of all things) that ended his tenure. Now what does this remind you of? It is redolent of the very wingnuttery we have experienced time and again under Bush.

Reagan’s HUD secretary ended up looting what he was supposed to protect. The collapse of the safety & loans happened because of “Reaganomics,” and it resulted in thousands of average people getting screwed. Prior to the current occupant, it was Reagan’s regime that held the record for indictments among its employees: political cronies who served corporate interests and opposed accountability.

Douthat framed his social conservative brand as “a defense of the particular habits and mores of American life.” And this is consistent with the perennial conservative position of “moral values.” But what does this amount to? Conservatives have never opposed the killings that have advanced American imperial interests. They supported the war in Vietnam. They supported terrorist tactics against Nicaragua. They supported terror regimes across the globe, from Indonesia to Argentina. If a regime was socialist or communist, they got all moralistic. But if it was a right-wing dictatorship, they made excuses, even if the right-wing government was guilty of the same crimes as the socialist one. They made excuses when Reagan subverted the law in order to trade arms with Iran.

Conservatives have used race-baiting as a political tool since the early twentieth century. And from Nixon’s “southern strategy” to Reagan’s welfare queens, to Lee Atwater doing the Willie Horton ad for Papa Bush, Republicans have been whispering in code to racist voters for decades. Did conservative intellectuals protest? For that matter, did any of them speak out for civil rights? They did not. They were silent at best, and at worst they colluded in attempts to suppress civil rights.

The moral values of conservatism are pure emptiness. Conservatives are amoral because their values are merely reactions. The “habits and mores of American life” are defined in reactionary terms, as against progressive ideas—therefore against women’s rights, against abortion rights, against civil rights, against the peace movement, against any ideas of corporate accountability or responsibility. The sham of conservative values naturally resulted in the travesty that is George W. Bush. He is not an anomaly—far from it. George W. Bush is the natural and predictable result of the conservative movement. He is the legitimate heir to Reagan, not a mistake or a bastard child. One could even say that George W. Bush is an almost perfect example of the way conservative ideology eventually merges into pure selfishness and stupidity. In his simplistic way, he tears the fig leaf off of right-wing ideology: “limited government” is revealed as “I just want mine” and “Who cares what you think?”

The conservatives who now claim that Bush doesn’t speak for them, who are trying to tell us that “true” conservatism is something different from what we’re seeing now, are like Dr. Frankenstein claiming that he didn’t mean to create a monster. The conservative project has resulted in such disaster for America, has become such an ugly, repellent, oppressive cluster-fuck of insanity, that the conservative intellectual, clinging to his delusional ideas, recoils from the image in the mirror and tries to explain that the reflection is not really him, it’s something else, something different than what we’ve been seeing for the past thirty years and more. I almost feel sorry for them. But I am not fooled.

The Change We Need (Part Two)

For the United States to make the transition from a war society to a peace society, many old ways of thinking will need to be abandoned, ways that have determined public policy for a long time. It may seem as if completely new ways of thinking will have to replace them, but in fact the change we need would in many ways constitute a return to humanist values that have been part of our heritage as a republic, but ignored and shoved aside in favor of empire.

In politics there are assumptions that tend to lead to certain kinds of policies. Assumptions reflect interests. The powerful interests in our society have of course been those of big business, and it is usually assumed that it is in the self-interests of big business to take the directions it has taken, towards greater expansion worldwide, greater hegemony for corporations, and ever-greater profits for the same. But what kind of self-interest is this, really? When a system only considers short-term advantages, and those only within the narrow scope of personal profit, imperial policies seem to make sense. But if we look realistically at the long term, given a finite planet, what advantage is there in wasting and polluting our natural resources to the point where the future of the human race is in peril? In the long view, does the hoarding of wealth by a small minority, with the gradual increasing impoverishment of the majority world-wide, lead to a stable situation or to a dangerous one, even for the wealthy? The same considerations are valid regarding the escalation of weapons production, especially of nuclear weapons. How long can we expect human imperfection to get away with this kind of behavior without eventually producing disastrous consequences? And at the risk of sounding facetious, wouldn’t a wise businessperson seek to preserve future real estate, future business, the economic inheritance of the next generations, against its destruction, either from environmental or nuclear destruction?

Those who persist in thinking short-term about such matters can only resort, in the end, to denial. Thus we witness, for instance, the absurd spectacle of so-called conservatives saying that global warming is a plot by liberals to undermine the economy. We would hope that saner heads prevail, but it’s unsure how many saner heads there actually are.

So the first change in thinking is this: The good of society must be recognized as legitimate self-interest. Most CEOs will be the first to admit that financial profit is the overriding purpose of business. So it won’t do to turn around and say we need to privatize hospitals, schools, or other social services because it’s more efficient. It won’t be, because there are other important values besides profit. These values have to have a place in public policy, with no apologies. And that includes rigorous regulation of business practices that affect the public good.

The next change in thinking is an important corollary to this: War is not good for society. Or in the short form coined by General Sherman, “War is hell.” Now this may seem obvious to many readers. But this simple fact is covered with a shroud of denial, both in the corridors of power and in the culture. Stating the seemingly obvious, over and over, is necessary in order to break through the denial.

War kills, wounds, and maims human beings. It also damages minds and spirits, families and homes. Anyone who has been in combat or has witnessed the effects of war will tell you that it is a ghastly, horrifying experience. Do you think it was fun being at Anzio? Or Okinawa? Or Khe Sahn? Do you think seeing somebody’s guts fall out of his body, or his head blown off, is a fulfilling experience?

Yes, this all seems obvious, but we are inundated with the myth of glory. Politicians get all idealistic when they talk about war—it’s always about honor and freedom and bravery. They mention sacrifice too, but in that moist reverential way that people who don’t know about sacrifice talk about. In movies and TV, war is often made to look exciting. We have ads for the Marine Corps that show Arthurian knights fighting nobly in some phony Dungeons n’ Dragons conflict, morphing finally into that proud figure, the Marine. On Memorial Day we supposedly honor and mourn the dead, but there’s an air of celebration about it all as well.

It’s a lie. We must refute the glory myth. And no, this doesn’t mean pacifism. War may be necessary if the country is truly in peril, under attack by enemies, which means that we fight in self-defense. But this necessity isn’t glorious or fun or even right. If it’s necessary in certain cases, it’s still a rotten dirty business that should be gotten through as soon as possible so that we can enjoy peace again. Peace is the value that society aims for, not war. Warmongers, most of whom never fight themselves but pay or force others to fight, have turned this upside down and made war into a value, which it is not. Conversely, they have denigrated peace and ridiculed those who work for it as if they were somehow weak or bad citizens. But in the end, would anyone except the most rabid ideologue refuse to value peace, or to teach their kids the value of peace? Our most natural impulses have been undermined by a false upholding of war as a positive value. Peace must be reinstated as a primary goal and value of society.

To make the transition to a peace society, we must ultimately change basic assumptions about who we are as a nation. For a long time, and especially for the last sixty years, we’ve been poisoned by the notion of being the most powerful nation on earth, an empire responsible for the maintenance of world stability. America has assumed the right to determine what leaders other nations should elect, what policies they should have, and what their economies should look like. It has assumed the right to force its political will on the world, overtly and covertly. We have a world-wide military presence. In short-term thinking, this benefits the corporations, who thereby gain control of markets and resources. The official line is that it also provides us with security, but this has proven to be false, time and again. A lot of mental contortions are necessary in order for it to seem as if the Israeli-Arab conflict makes us safer, or escalating missile systems in Europe. The diversion of our resources, human and material, into foreign adventures leaves our own country, our own children and schools and neighborhoods, neglected.

In cultural terms, this translates into idiotic chants of “We’re number one!” and other kinds of jingoism. It translates into a mind-set that reacts to any criticism of U.S. policy as attacks on the prestige of the country. Empire as an idea is inherently autocratic; it encourages the most anti-democratic elements, submission to authority rather than freedom of ideas.

Part and parcel of this is the elevation of the military to a place beyond criticism. Every military dictatorship does this, but it’s relatively new on the American landscape. There is no democracy in the military—it’s a hierarchical organization based on obedience, which is fine in its place, but dangerous if taken as a principle of civil society. The military should always be a servant of the people, supervised by a civilian authority. When it becomes a power unto itself, with its own political motives, it erodes basic values.

The change of thinking here will perhaps be the most difficult of all, yet the most necessary: Abandon the false dream of empire, and return to the ideals of a free republic. The founders of this country did not envision us becoming just another big shot imperial power entangled in games of world domination. Quite the opposite—they wanted the U.S. to avoid that fate, and they were quite explicit about it. To enjoy the liberty of a free people, sustaining institutions that promote life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that was the American vision, not being the most powerful nation on earth, which is an essentially corrupt idea no different from the delusions of ancient Rome or the decrepit traditions of European powers from which the founders deliberately broke.

In practical terms, this means gradually reducing the American global military presence. It means respecting the sovereignty of other countries, even if we don’t agree with their policies. It means rejecting the idea of policing the world, and turning instead to our own country, focusing on what we can do to improve conditions here.

Inevitably someone will call this isolationist. But we don’t need to be isolated. We can still be engaged in world affairs, in the business of addressing common needs and discussing solutions to common problems. But narrow self-interest can no longer determine our foreign relations. Once again, I believe that true self-interest, one that recognizes the good of society and not just profit, coincides with doing the right thing in the world, even with altruism as part of foreign policy. We need to take responsibility for doing good. With all our talk about how great we are, for instance, we contribute a much smaller percentage of our GNP to disaster relief than Sweden. We blithely accept the degradation of the Third World as if it didn't concern us . Such ignorance cannot last long without bad consequences.

Influence is a much more subtle affair than the militarists imagine. The attempt to bend the world to our will through force has actually weakened American influence. Imagine the immense influence that this country would wield internationally if it led the way in promoting economic equality, human rights, environmentalism, peace, and justice. For people who can only think of themselves and their personal profit, such ideas seem like nonsense. But the time is coming when we will have to see that empire is not only bad for society, but bad for business as well.

By the same token, we must recognize that equality is more beneficial than disparity. If wealth and services are distributed more evenly, prosperity actually increases. Poverty, on the other hand, promotes instability and crime. This applies in foreign affairs as well. To complain about illegal immigration when at the same time we’re sucking the wealth out of the Third World is nothing but mendacity. Self-determination and self-sufficiency in foreign countries improves overall trade. The only thing that suffers is greed. Greed needs to be reimagined as an antisocial and anti-spiritual force.

Promoting peace will also mean affirming human rights. The U.S. has heretofore backed the most repressive regimes in the belief that this kind of authority benefits U.S. businesses. Such strategies have proven ephemeral. When subject peoples finally throw off their yoke, they’re less likely to trust in good American intentions. This process started long before Bush; it’s only been accelerating faster. Now we’re seeing a drastic erosion of respect for human rights at home as well as abroad. As long as we take that stance, war will be in our future. Not only do we need to validate human rights as an American ideal, we also need to stop encouraging violators in other countries. We need to realize that it’s against our interests to do business with countries that employ slavery and torture, because it damages our own credibility.

We need to take the lead in disarmament. The official position at this point is that other countries shouldn’t have nukes, but we should. This is obvious hypocrisy that convinces no one. If the U.S. gradually reduces its nuclear forces, and its top-heavy military might in general, that gives us more authority to work towards the same goals world-wide. There’s no magic solution to this; progress will be incremental, but what’s the alternative? Being endlessly poised on the brink of annihilation is to surrender to a kind of global mental illness. We are the only country so far to use nukes. It makes sense that we would be the country leading the way towards their abolition.

This may all seem overwhelming. But it’s not as if we have much of a choice. We either take charge of events, with peace as the primary idea and goal, or events will surely take charge of us. The first step is changing our own minds. The war society is not just “out there.” We’ve internalized it in our own assumptions about what is valuable, and what is possible. The greatest obstacle is fear. Make no mistake, those who push for a peace society will continue to be demonized and attacked. But our persistence and resolve will improve if we have a clear vision of where we need to go. Saying “no” to war and injustice will continue to be important. But if we’re just an “antiwar movement,” then the movement will fade whenever a particular war ends. We need to be truly a peace movement. Peace is the necessary precondition for all the other changes we need in order to survive as a species, and (as Faulkner said) to prevail. There is no passing event, conflict, or petty political difference that can outweigh that.

We tend to underestimate the power of ideas. To reorient a society towards peace is largely a matter of ideas. Speaking out in whatever way we can, through whatever communication or political action, inside or outside the system, liberates others who want to speak out as well. We can create the change we need by proclaiming peace with energy and tenacity, again and again—and what has always been a human value will be acknowledged openly and gain a decisive power of its own.

The Change We Need (Part One)

There’s nothing like a crisis to get people moving towards change. The crisis commonly known as “Bush-Cheney” naturally tends to focus our energies on the immediate goal of breaking the far right’s grip on power. But this is also a time to evaluate the changes we need to make in the long term. For this particular crisis did not emerge from a vacuum, or erupt like a fever from an otherwise healthy body politic. One might more accurately characterize Bush-Cheney, to extend the disease metaphor, as a catastrophic, life-threatening symptom of a sickness that has long threatened the well-being of the country and the world. For the greatest challenge we face, I believe, is the challenge of peace. This applies to all the countries and peoples of the world, but I here apply it especially to the United States, by far the world’s leader in military spending. It is absolutely necessary that the U.S. change from a war society to a peace society.

I don’t just say “a war economy,” because the pervasive influence of war and militarism on our country goes beyond economic affairs—it permeates our political, social, and cultural fabric as well. However, the economic reality is of great enough importance to examine first. Realistically speaking, about 54% of the budget consists of military or military-related spending (the government tries to make this percentage seem smaller by including trust funds, not paid for by the income tax, in its budget). All the smoke and mirrors make it hard to find reliable numbers, but most objective analyses range between one to one-and-a-half trillion dollars a year on “defense.”

Now, there’s a lot of Pentagon money not being reported. There’s a so-called “black budget” for classified programs, and there is virtually no oversight of this money because, of course, it’s classified and the military can’t trust our elected representatives to peek at it. Not so coincidentally, this “black budget” has been subject to mismanagement, influence-peddling, and outright theft of hundreds of billions of dollars.

If there were a real housecleaning, the recovery of misused funds alone could pay for a huge number of infrastructure improvements, schools, hospitals, programs, and other benefits for ordinary citizens. Furthermore, if the defense budget were cut by only a third, the budget deficit would be easily eliminated. In addition, the national debt could be paid off within our lifetime.

Politicians never propose cutting the defense budget, at least none of them who seek real power and influence in Washington. If anyone proposes such a thing, he or she is denounced as weak on defense, putting our nation at risk, anti-military and so forth. The entire Pentagon budget, regardless of the merits of any of its various elements, has become a sacred cow. The Congress writes a blank check for the military, or else risks the wrath of the war party, which is composed (may I remind you) of both Republicans and Democrats.

The war party makes it seem as if attacking the sacred cow is attacking the troops. But in fact, only about a fourth of the defense budget (I’m being conservative here; the percentage is probably smaller) goes to pay, feed, and house the troops, as well as provide benefits for veterans. Everything else goes for ships, planes, weapons, spying, R&D, etc. And every Congressional inquiry of the last thirty years has shown that these areas are monumentally wasteful and driven by profit and self-interest rather than by need. The defense industries—corporations such as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, etc.—need to keep cranking the stuff out in order to make their huge profits, and the more weapons they crank out, the more profit. They have an economic interest in war. The Pentagon shares this interest. It is inherent in the Pentagon’s self-interest that there should always be great threats to national security, which require more money to ward off. Defense analysts over-estimated the Soviet Union’s military capacity for years, which justified huge outlays of funds. Now the threat of terrorism is being grossly overrated for the same reason.

The truth is that the defense budget could be cut significantly, and all the fraud and waste cleaned up, while increasing the wages and benefits for the troops. The military structure treats the troops like garbage now—they’re way down on the list of priorities. The war party cares about the dollars flowing in from defense industry contributors, not the poor grunts out there doing the work. We could actually have superior armed forces with more people willing to serve and better morale, at half the total cost.

We always hear the lie that war is good for the economy. World War II was a fluke because it mobilized a citizenry that had suffered during the Great Depression. It organized resources, under a real foreign threat, that we didn’t know we had. None of the imperial wars have helped the economy since then. Vietnam ruined the promise of LBJ’s “Great Society.” Iraq is an unprecedented economic disaster. The recession that we’re seeing the beginning of now is in large part a consequence of the outlandish waste of our money on the so-called “war on terror” and the looting of the treasury by Bush-friendly corporations and contractors.

The U.S. is of course the largest exporter of weapons and military technology in the world. But the military industry doesn’t add real value to an economic and social structure, the way industries based upon human needs (such as agriculture, housing, or health) adds value. Countries in which a greater percentage of spending is for such human needs, with an accompanying modest percentage of spending on national defense, have a better distribution of wealth and a more prosperous economic life for the average citizen. The rise of the defense industry in the U.S., powered by its own self-serving political interest, has contributed to a top-heavy economy with a few very rich individuals benefiting from war profits, while the standard of living for the vast majority gradually declines.

I’ve taken the time to outline these monetary aspects of the war society so as to clarify how economically disadvantageous it is for the country to be dominated by the Pentagon and the defense industry. Economics is often the first argument one hears against cutting defense—old myths die hard, and many people still assume that war products are vital to the economy. Sooner or later, this issue will need to be addressed. We need to challenge the war budget in public, over and over, and the public officials we seek to elect and influence will have to take a risk and speak out against this waste of our resources. Events are already overtaking us. The consequences of our neglect of vital infrastructure are becoming more evident—the failure of the New Orleans levees and the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge are portents of what is to come if we continue to squander our wealth on the bloated American military. Some leader, or leaders, is going to have say “enough,” and that won’t happen unless we make them say it.

But the economic argument, as important as it is, leads to the recognition of a larger political reality. The war party is driven by a world view, a set of beliefs about America that have turned us into a war-based society. These beliefs can be boiled down to one central idea: the necessity for American preeminence on the world stage, or to put it bluntly—empire. This set of beliefs has virtually owned the field in Washington for the last sixty-three years. And for all that time it has filtered down into public discourse through indoctrination of one sort or another. Therefore, in order to make the difficult transition from a war society to a peace society, it will not be enough for us to merely urge a new economic direction. An entire way of thinking about ourselves will need to be challenged, and a new vision, with peace at its center, will need to be offered in its place.

(This is the first part of a two-part article.)

Thoughts on the death of a friend

“I scarcely know where to begin, but love is always a safe place.” Dickinson—that poet the world still considers a bit crazy—said that. Her thought was never careless. Truth was hard won for her, as anything worthwhile is on this earth. So I say, with her, that love is the one safe place.

With love I place kindness, mercy, gentleness, and everything tender in human life. And when in this moment we face death, for of course it will be this moment when it comes, nothing else will matter. That is the truth, simple yet difficult of attainment, that must burn like a coal within. Not the pretty little slogans aiming to inspire us, either—but a real possession in the face of all that may threaten, even that which may call us to give everything. Genuine courage springs only from love, I tell you.

And if you have a religion, or a god, or a teacher, or a belief system, or an ideology, or a creed, that requires you to be unloving and unkind, or justifies cruelty and harm, then know that your religion or teacher or creed is absolutely false. So much is certain.

And if your love consists of a fellow-feeling for people like you, the ones who look like you, live near you, and agree with you, but your heart is closed to the stranger on the other side of the world, then it is nothing but tribal custom, even if you dignify it with the name of religion. Every tribe believes that it is the greatest tribe on earth, and all the other tribes are enemies and inferior—so what? There’s nothing virtuous or intelligent in that.

The angry god of power, the volcano god, is a lie. And everyone secretly knows this. The public voice of the accusing moral god is the voice of fear and limitation, a pathetic human voice. His real names are Power and Money. When in this moment we face death, there will be no Power or Money.

Blake saw it. The angels have switched sides, and their platform now calls for war and executions. A rich man asked Jesus what else he could do and was told to sell what he had and give to the poor. And the man “went away sorrowful.” Yeah, I’ll bet he did.

Okay, Mr. Jesus. That’s enough. Go back up on Jehovah’s throne. Here’s a nice crown for you, and a scepter. That’s good. Now stay there, and we’ll get back to business.

And love means saying No, too. Joel Osteen can grin the whole day through and talk about love, but I’d like to know what he thinks of the war. And torture. And racism. And if he won’t say, then his grin is emptier than the Cheshire cat’s.

No amount of money, or power, or oil, or political advantage, or anything else I hear from the media megaphone, is worth one single life, one innocent life, one Iraqi child, one homeless person who can’t afford food or a doctor, one inmate in a prison—or for that matter, one stray cat. Not all the flags and the uniforms and the guns, all the military and their endless salutes, all the big phrases like freedom and honor and glory, are worth a single life. I know that now, and I am not afraid.

When we die, what will we leave behind? Everything. Regret will bring nothing back. The one thing needed: wake up now and begin. Start from the safe place that crazy poet talked about, and fear will leave you.

All this I learned from you, my dear friend. One simple look taught me everything I needed to know. Shantih.