December 21, 2006

A cooperative commonwealth

Some things we might share

The following appears is from the Great American Political Repair Manual by Sam Smith

1. We seek to be good stewards of our earth, good citizens of our country, good members of our communities, and good neighbors of those who share these places with us.

2. We reject the immoderate tone of current politics, its appeal to hate and fear, its scorn for democracy, its preference for conflict over resolution, its servility to money and to those who possess it, and its deep indifference to the problems of ordinary Americans

3. We seek a cooperative commonwealth based on decency before profit, liberty before sterile order, justice before efficiency, happiness before uniformity, families before systems, communities before corporations, and people before institutions.

We believe that:

4. We should treat our politics, our country and each other with common decency, common sense and with a search for common ground.

5. When issues divide us deeply, we should seek ways to discuss them both honestly and with reason, out of the glare of the media and away from others who profit from our divisions.

6. We should tread gently upon the earth and leave it in better condition than we found it.

7. The physical and cultural variety of human beings is a gift and not a threat. We are glad that the world includes many who are different from ourselves by nature, principle, inclination or faith

8. We must protect the right of others to disagree with us so we shall be free to speak our own minds.

9. Our national economic goal is the self-sufficiency, well-being and stability of our communities and those living in them.

10. Ecological principles should determine economic policies and not vice versa.

11. The first source of expertise is the wisdom of the people.

12. Individuals possess fundamental rights that are inalienable and not contingent on responsibilities assigned by the state. These rights are to be restrained only by a due concern for the health, safety, and liberty of others and are not to be made subservient to the arbitrary and capricious dictates of the government.

13. Citizens should participate as directly as possible in our democracy

14. The media should inform citizens and provide a means by which citizens may address government rather than serving as a vehicle by which members of the government and elites tell citizens what to think.

15. Power should be devolved to the lowest practical level.

16. The Bill of Rights and other constitutional provisions have deep permanence and are not to be manipulated or abridged for political gain.

17. Politics dependent on corporate financing and lobbyist influence is corrupt, anti-democratic and unacceptable.

18. Simplicity, conservation, and recycling should be central to our economy, our politics and our lives.

19. Individual privacy is paramount and not to be subservient to the needs of the state.

20. Individual rights are manifestly superior to any granted corporations.

21. Our elected officials are servants and representatives, not rulers.

22. We need more community more than we need more things.

23. We are citizens and not merely taxpayers.

24. We own our government and are not merely its consumers.

Iatrogenic security threats

SAM SMITH

READER DAN
writes in response to our listing of American corporations tied to Israel: "Do you have a comparable list of corporations that remain silent when a Palestinian bomb explodes aboard an Israeli bus? The policies of the Israeli government are abhorrent, but the tactics of the Palestinians are inexcusable as well."

When I raised a similar argument as a kid, my mother's response was, "If Johnny were to jump off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff, too?" I never could come up with good answer to that and so eventually had to concede that somebody else's stupidity was not a good excuse for my own.

The underlying problem is that we are funding Israel's violence but not that of Palestine. We are not directly responsible for the bombs on Israeli busses but we are very much responsible for the wrongs that Israel does. Further, if you occupy and oppress a people long and hard enough they will do all sorts of things to fight back that don't fit the definition of civil discourse.

The "well, what about their violence?" argument was used against the North Vietnamese and in just about every war since. Implicit in this is the idea that what we do wrong is excusable because it has been matched - or allegedly so - by the other side. Of course, the other side doesn't see it that way so you end up with a perfect stalemate of violence.

In fact, Israel - as does America - largely faces a security threat that it has created by its own supposed remedies. Both America and Israel are far more in danger now than they were before 9/11 because an ever growing portion of the world doesn't like the vicious cure they are offering.

During a 1999 anti-war speech in Washington's Dupont Circle, I addressed a similar problem in the Balkans:

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There is a name for this sort of medicine. It is called iatrogenic - in which the disease is caused by the physician. Doctors who cause diseases or ruin the health of the patient through arrogance, incompetence, and mindless machismo have large insurance policies because people sue them for something we call malpractice. In medicine this is considered a bad thing.

We have just gone through yet another iatrogenic war, in which our elites have argued falsely that their stated intentions outweigh any actual consequences. The patient is in far worse shape than before this war began, the victim of arrogance, incompetence, and mindless machismo. . .

[Latest research puts the Balkan military and civilian deaths in the range of 100,000 with 1.8 million displaced]

We, of course, have had other iatrogenic wars. This is what happened in Vietnam when we declared that it was necessary to destroy villages in order to save them. This is what happened in Iraq when in the name defeating a modern Hitler we caused the post-war death by disease and malnutrition of far more people than Hussein himself had killed. And it is what happened when NATO declared that Slobadon Milosevic's crimes against humanity were such that they justified the brutal destruction of a country and the pain and death and the very ethnic cleansing we said we sought to avoid.

In fact, every moral act in the face of mental or physical injury carries twin responsibilities: to mend the injury and to avoid replacing it with another. This twin burden is faced every day by doctors. Every police officer faces it. Every firefighter. It was what I was taught as a Coast Guard officer. It's well past time for our politicians do so as well.

The point of speaking of the evils of a Milosovec or a Hussein is to raise the alarm. But once that has been successfully done, this alarm may not rightfully be used as a perpetual excuse for our own misdeeds. From the moment we commence a moral intervention we become a part of the story, and part of the good and evil. We are no longer the innocent bystander but a full participant whose acts will either help or make things worse. Our intentions become irrelevant; they are overwhelmed by the character of our response to them. The morality of the disease is supplanted by the morality of the cure. Any other course amounts to reckless and negligent political malpractice.

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The security threat that both America and Israel now face is, in no small part, iatrogenic. The first step towards a cure rather than continued harm is to take responsibility for our own actions and not hide behind the violence of those who oppose us.

This means doing things that are an anathema to the politicians and media in this country such as actually talking - even seemingly forever - with those with whom we disagree. It means an end to showboating and the beginning of endless tiny steps towards accommodation. It means saying you're sorry when you have done wrong. It means finding things - like economic projects and programs - that benefit both sides and that  make their former quarrels less important. It means giving dollars instead of shooting bullets. It means helping both sides choose to be survivors of their past rather than its perpetual victims. And it means putting away the guns, the threats and the bombast and looking for, in Benjamin Franklin's phrase, "the little felicities of every day."

Above all, it means taking constant and self-critical responsibility for our own acts and for those of our allies and not finding false moral shelter in the violent reactions they provoke. As Gandhi put it, "We must be the change we wish to see in the world."

December 14, 2006

Dealing with myths

Sam Smith

Having been an anthropology major, I don't get as riled up about mythology in public life as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign, sad, or deadly but mostly they're there to fill the empty places in reality.

Sometimes myths are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality isn't powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.

It is widely told that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.

But the Annals of American Survey notes:

"The authoritative work by historian Spencie Love entitled, One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles Drew, described how the myth has been cultivated because of the time and place of Dr. Drew's death and serves as an unfortunate filler between living memory and written history. True enough, a 23-year-old black World War II veteran by the name Maltheus Avery was critically injured in an auto crash on December 1, 1950, exactly 8 months after Dr. Drew's death. He was a student at North Carolina A&T, a husband, and a father of a small child. Like Dr. Drew, he was treated initially at Alamance General Hospital. He was transferred to Duke University Hospital and subsequently turned away because they had exhausted their supply of beds for black patients. Mr. Avery would die shortly after arrival at Lincoln Hospital, Durham, North Carolina's black facility. Spencie Love's book discusses how the story of the lesser-known Maltheus Avery confronted the circumstances of the death of the more prominent Dr. Drew, and thus a myth was born."

Something similar was at work in the black response to the OJ Simpson case. To many blacks, Simpson was carrying the mythic weight of decades of ethnic abuse under the justice system. In a column at the time for Pacific News Service, a black journalist, Dennis Schatzman, outlined some of the black context for the Simpson trial:

Just last year, Olympic long jumper and track coach Al Joyner was handcuffed and harassed in a LAPD traffic incident. He has settled out of court for $250,000.

A few years earlier, former baseball Hall of Famer Joe Morgan was "handcuffed and arrested at the Los Angeles airport because police believed that Morgan 'fit the profile of a drug dealer.'" He also got a settlement of $250,000.

Before that, former LA Laker forward Jamal Wilkes was stopped by the police, handcuffed and thrown to the pavement.

A black man was recently given a 25-year to life sentence for stealing a slice of pizza from a young white boy.

In 1992, a mentally troubled black man was shot and killed by LA sheriff's deputies while causing a disturbance in front of his mother's house. Neighbors say they saw a deputy plant a weapon by the body.


Simpson case detective Mark Fuhrman was accused of planting a weapon at the side of a robbery suspect back in 1988. The LAPD recently settled for an undisclosed amount.

In North Carolina, Daryl Hunt still languishes in jail for the 1984 rape and murder of a white newspaper reporter, even though DNA tests say it was not possible.

These examples would be rejected as irrelevant by the average lawyer or journalist but in fact OJ Simpson's case served as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on CNN but weren't. Everything was true except the names, times and places. In Washington, they do something similar when stories can't be told; they write a novel.

Something parallel took place around the same time when militia members imagined that the Bloods & Crips were being armed by the US government or when blacks believed the same thing about the militias. Or when the UN was thought to on the verge of invading the U.S.

Like urban blacks considering the justice system, the rural right saw things the elite would prefer to ignore. It observed correctly phenomena indicating loss of sovereignty for themselves, their states and their country. They saw treaties replaced by fast-track agreements and national powers surrendered to remote and unaccountable trade tribunals. And they saw a multi-decade assault by the federal government on the powers of states and localities.

Like urban blacks, they were not paranoid in these observations, merely perceptive. But because the story could not be told, could not become part of the national agenda, they turned, as people in trouble often do, to a myth -- and, yes, sometimes a violent myth -- that would carry the story.

We tend to get very self-righteous when dealing with other people's myths but very tolerant about our own. Thus a conference dedicated to spreading doubt about the Holocaust is an outrage but a generation of teaching Americans fabrications about the economy in the name of robber baron capitalism is perfectly fine even if it has done infinitely more damage than an anti-Holocaust conference.

The Holocaust conference was a mythological alternative to doing what many participants would like to do but can't: invade and destroy Israel. Defeat is a prime breeding ground of myth.

But even as the Washington Post was attacking the conference, it was slipping in its own myth, witness this report:

Even by the standards of Neturei Karta, these most ultra of ultra-orthodox Jewish Hasids took a step into the world of the very strange, if not the meshuga, or crazy, when they showed up as honored guests at a conference of Holocaust skeptics and deniers in Tehran. With a hug and a smile for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Rabbi Aharon Cohen walked into a conference room with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, discredited academics, and more than a few white supremacists and served up a rousing welcome speech. . .

Neturei Karta is best understood within the confines and context of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which harbors the world's largest ultra-orthodox Jewish shtetl, or community. Here the garb -- black coats and hats for the men, wigs and demure dresses for the women -- is that of the 18th century, Yiddish is the lingua franca and there is no deviation from the teachings of Torah and Talmud. The Satmar sect dominates this ghetto, and anti-Zionism is central to their identity. . .

Neturei Karta acknowledged never before having gone to a Holocaust deniers meeting but offered no apologies; they are practiced practitioners of the outrageous. Chaim Freimann used to hang around hotels in Washington during the 1992 Mideast peace talks, wearing a Palestinian flag in his lapel and giving old-comrade greetings to Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian spokeswoman.

The Post thus declared as outrageous the idea of a Jew being on friendly terms with a Palestinian. And what is a Jew doing at Mideast peace talks anyway?

Once again, proof that it's a lot easier to explode the other guy's myth than to examine one's own.

America's view of the Holocaust, for example, is filled with its own myths. Such as the one that redefines Nazism and the European conflict primarily by its anti-Semitic manifestations, safely exempting us from considering the changes in German governance that led to these manifestations, changes that are becoming uncomfortably familiar in America.

And it is missing important stories, stories like the one Richard Rubenstein tells in the Cunning of History about a Hungarian Jewish emissary meeting with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt in 1944 and suggesting that the Nazis might be willing to save one million Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne's reply: "What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?" Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to the 'final solution' as long as the Germans did most of the work. " For both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that Rubenstein suggests we understand "as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century."

And this one from the Village Voice:

The infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number. And now it's been revealed that IBM machines were actually based at the infamous concentration-camp complex. . . The new revelation of IBM technology in the Auschwitz area constitutes a final link in the chain of documentation surrounding Big Blue's vast enterprise in Nazi-occupied Poland, supervised at first directly from its New York headquarters, and later through its Geneva office. . . IBM spokesman Carol Makovich didn't respond to repeated telephone calls. In the past, when asked about IBM's Polish subsidiary's involvement with the Nazis, Makovich has said, "IBM does not have much information about this period." When a Reuters reporter asked about Poland, Makovich said, "We are a technology company, we are not historians."

Similarly, in a mythology obsessed with Israel, the American story of secular Judaism has all but disappeared. Last century's great immigration of European Jews brought with it many rebels who had rejected Zionism if not religion. As I wrote in Why Bother: "They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists. It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on 20th century modern American politics."

These stories make the Holocaust more complex than we would like it to be.

Elsewhere in Why Bother, I discussed a less contentious example of myths at work:

Consider, for example, the Ojibwa, described by Brian Morris in Anthropology of the Self. These Indians, a group of nomadic hunters and fishers living east of Lake Winnipeg, "do not make any categorical or sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality, or between dreaming and the waking state; neither can any hard or fast line be drawn between humans and animals. . . . A bear is an animal which unlike humans hibernates during the winter, but in specific circumstances it may be interpreted as a human sorcerer. . . . The four winds are thought of not only as animate by the Ojibwa, but are categorized as persons."

Not only may a culture define the four winds as persons under certain circumstances, it may also define a slave or someone from another tribe as not a person at all. Nonetheless the slave or the outsider really exist so at some level are treated as a person anyway. Hence people in such societies may trade goods with the stranger or attempt to convert the slave to Christianity even though they are not considered human. Or the society may try to quantify such anomalies as Americans did when they declared a black legally equal to three-fifths of a white person. Or it may create a hierarchy as Aristotle did when he confidently declared that "the deliberative faculty in the soul is not present at all in a slave: in a female is present but ineffective, in a child present but undeveloped." Or it may declare that "all men are created equal" but really mean only white male property owners. Or it may fight a revolution for liberty but leave women as chattel. Or the culture can painfully change such values over two centuries and still have to go repeatedly to court to fight over what was really meant by the change. . .

Here is how anthropologist Morris describes his own western culture: "It is individualistic, and has a relatively inflated concern with the self which in extremes gives rise to anxiety, to a sense that there is a loss of meaning in contemporary life, to a state of narcissism, and to an emphasis in popular psychology on 'self actualization.' "

Bad as this sounds, though, you will probably get along better in New York or Chicago with a loss of meaning, state of narcissism, or overflowing self-actualization than if you try to escape your angst by acting like the Ojibwa. In the Big Apple, to lack a sharply defined differentiation between myth and reality, between dreaming and the waking state; or between humans and animals, risks not only ridicule but actual legal sanctions. Even in a culture that celebrates the power of the individual, the restraints on that individualism are substantial and we, like peoples everywhere, go about our daily business regarding them as largely normal."

Mythology soars when a culture is under threat or in great isolation. Might the fact that the U.S. hasn't talked with Iran for 27 years have anything to do with the latter's current treatment of the Holocaust?

And what changes this? I have argued that if you want to bring peace in the Israeli-Palestine conflict you just put a few Wal-Marts. Thus you would rid the area of both feuding cultures and replace them with Wal-Mart customers.

The theory behind this is more serious than it appears. People get on better when there is something more important going on than what it is that divides them. Thus, despite all the talk about cultural diversity in liberal circles and on campuses, the places where you are most likely to find people of different ethnic backgrounds mixing well include shopping malls, the military, sports teams and ethnic restaurants. Key to the relationship is the fact that everyone thinks they're getting something out of the deal.

The same principle would work in foreign policy. The best way to deal with a harmful myth is to eliminate the anger, isolation and other problems that caused it to thrive in the first place. You replace them with a deal that works well for everyone.

These myths are not the problem; they are just good warning signs of the problem. Solve the problem and you'll get much better myths.

December 08, 2006

An Unreasonable Man

Sam Smith

A FORTHCOMING documentary on the life of Ralph Nader - An Unreasonable Man - includes many critics as well as supporters and reminds me of how despicable the Democrats' attacks on Nader have been. It isn't that Nader can't drive you a bit crazy with his waverless path. I know. I wrote to urge him not to run in 2004 for a number of tactical reasons and it wasn't well received. My basic thought was that even if you have the best message in the world, standing in the middle of Route 95 at rush hour may not be the best way to present it.

But I have also offered some the most detailed factual reasons why Nader was not to blame for the 2000 Bush victory including the lack of correlation between the polls results of Gore and Nader, the importance of normally non-voters in the Nader tally, the drag of the Clinton scandals and the defection of normally Democratic voters to Bush as revealed by exit polling. And, as the film points out, during the campaign, Nader spent all of two and a half days in Florida. If he did all that alleged damage to Gore in that short a time, the Democrats are avoiding an inconvenient truth.

Democrats can't imagine why anyone left of center would not want to align themselves with a party that is corrupt, politically dishonest, and doesn't come close to living up to its stated purposes. It is a presumption that is almost Bushian in its narcissistic arrogance and delusion. The film includes a number of clips of an obnoxous, whining Eric Alterman of the Nation that typify this self-serving denial. Alterman is good reminder of why I'm glad to be a Green even if people like him are rude to you.

As I tell my Democratic friends, if you want me to vote for you, you have to treat me at least as nice as a soccer mom and not blame me for all your faults. Instead, I have found myself, albeit at far less cost than Nader has paid, being sent to Coventry for not following the party line of a party I don't even belong to.

Ironically, the Democrats not only blamed Nader for their failure in 2000 but then, as Phil Donohue notes in the film, spent the next four years proving that Nader was right about the lack of difference between Democrats and Republicans.

The film goes over this issue at length and in a particularly telling segment covers Nader's attempt to join the audience - not the platform - of a presidential debate in Massachusetts. He had a ticket but the bipartisan thuggery of debate organizers resulted in Massachusetts state troopers keeping Nader from even watching the debate from a Fox News truck inside the event perimeter. Nader's handling of the state trooper is Ralph at his best.

The film also looks at the many non-political reasons why people should be grateful to Nader including seat belts, air bags, and safer food as it depicts an American who has repeatedly stood up for what he believed was right, did an immense amount of good as a result, yet found himself under a vicious attack for failing to be as cynical and manipulative as those criticizing him. What they won't admit is that his real fault in their eyes was that he blew their cover.

Pocket paradigms

A CHRONIC PART of the problems in the Middle East has been the notion that you can't talk to people such as Hamas or Iran until they recognize Israel. This is like putting the icing on before you bake the cake. Recognition is a symbolic act that will follow the resolution of real problems between the groups involved. To refuse to talk until there is recognition is not a condition; it is total rejection. - Sam Smith

December 07, 2006

Potomac playground

Sam Smith

Phil Hart said the Senate was a place that did things 20 years after it should have. The same could be said of much of the rest of Washington. In fact the yet-to-be accomplished U.S.-Iranian negotiations are now at 27 years and still counting.

The common presumption is that such tardiness is a function of politics. In fact, it is more a product of culture, a culture founded on infantile presumptions about the proper image one should present. Thus you find grown men walking around the Pentagon with rows of ribbons on their uniformed chests to remind everyone of their purported accomplishments. You have ex-preppies plotting invasions against small countries to prove their machismo. You have graduates of Yale and Princeton, whose daddies - as LBJ said - wouldn't let them into the stock brokerage firm - figuring out the best way to torture people for the CIA. You have drones from business and law schools trained to think that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence. You have journalists getting big bucks for the privilege of sitting through endless, newsless White House briefings and flying off with the president to his ranch. And you have experts at think tanks trading arcane knowledge apparently unaware that their resulting decisions might affect real people.

Although there are far more women engaged in this charade than was formerly the case, the culture is primarily based on childish male notions of strength and prowess. The women who get to the top in such a culture often do so because they emulate its values rather than offering an alternative, witness the cruel capitalism of Margaret Thatcher, the indifference of Madeleine Albright to the deaths caused by Iraqi sanctions, or the heartless aggression of Condoleezza Rice.

We don't read about this or hear about it because the mass media is a fulltime participant in this never consummated ritual of manhood that our politics have become. In tribal times, the ritual would have been followed by manhood. In Washington, the ritual never ends.

The costs can be enormous. The Vietnam War, for example, was driven in part by Harvard faculty members trying to prove their virility. Over the last fifty years, a narcissistic establishment absorbed in its self-image and indifferent to its consequences, has destroyed constitutional government, made the United States hated around the world and done so much damage to the environment that two major scientists recently suggested that we better plan to find ourselves another planet.

The immediate problem is Iraq, now so much a mess that they had to call in a commission, which is to say some adults. As Representative Frank Wolfe put it, "there's almost a biblical thing about wise elderly people. . . I mean, Sandra Day O'Connor is not looking for another job. So they can speak truth."

In other words, to do in Washington what you're supposed to do, you have to be retired.

What's missing here is rational adulthood. What's lacking is a town that attracts those still full of energy but mature enough to put away childish things and moral enough to serve their land ahead of themselves. Instead we have a city overflowing with those whose egos and ambitions are trapped in almost teenage garb.

And so we have to wait 27 years for anyone to dare to suggest that it might be wise to talk with Iran. That's not a thoughtful issue for discussion on NPR or the News Hour. That's a matter for a therapist.

If George Bush has done one service he has brought the capital's destructive childishness out of the closet. What has still to be recognized, however, is that he is not an exception but merely a sadly extreme example how the place really works.

December 03, 2006

Ritual of the words

Sam Smith

My view has long been that news is something that has happened, something that is happening or something that is going to happen. News is not what someone said about what is happening nor what someone perceived was going to happen nor what the editors thought the impact of something happening would be on its readership.

Once again, I find myself in the minority. It turns out that by current media standards about the only thing that matters any more is what someone said about something.

Thus we find ourselves being forced marched through the semiotic swamp left by the Dixie Chicks, Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, newly elected senator Jim Webb, Jimmy Carter and others who have said things some thought they shouldn't have. In some cases, such as Richards, it was instantly clear that the words were stupid and wrong, a fact that could have been covered in less than one column inch. In other cases, such as Webb, the comments were refreshing enough to merit passing praise but hardly in the category of hard news. In a few instances, such as the Dixie Chicks, the words had such clear economic effects and social implications that they were worthy of further examination.

But together with numerous other examples - such as Tim Russert playing a decades old video tape to Jimmy Carter to find out whether he still agreed with what he said when he was governor - the media is teaching public figures that it's not what you do that matters; it's what you say about it.

The obsession seems to stem from the boomer blarney that life is all about branding. Act wrong and you can easily cover it up with the right words, but use the wrong words and you've had it. The fact that the words may be the product of inebriation, the apology for them the product of hypocrisy, and the discussion of them the product of mass cultural insincerity is of no import. It is the Ritual of the Words that matters, the closest many in America's elite come these days to a religious practice.

The key factor is that the certain words are unacceptable. It doesn't make much difference if the words are truly offensive - as in the case of Richards - or only out of step with conventional thinking as in the case of Jimmy Carter speaking of Israel's apartheid or the Dixie Chicks being embarrassed about Bush coming from Texas. When deportment is the issue, and the media is the judge, you don't get time off for being right.

On the other hand, some figures do get immunity. For example, I'm still waiting for the mainstream media to point out the irony of Jesse Jackson - who once referred to New York as 'Hymietown' - serving as an arbitrator in the Richards matter. I have yet to see a conventional journalist tackle the several reports of Hillary Clinton's past anti-Jewish remarks. And, of course, the mainstream media has been a leading participant in the most vehement display of ethnic prejudice since the days of the old south: the current campaign against Muslims and Arabs.

Further, as it has been demonstrated in the Richards case, the media can take a bad incident and help make it far worse, in this case including the unprecedented damper on free speech of a prospective financial settlement by a comedian who annoyed members of his audience. Will comedy nightclubs now require signed releases from their customers?

Finally there is the hypocrisy of a society that treats blacks as badly as ours getting so much more easily upset about an ethnic slur than it does about continued discrimination in all its tangible forms. This is not accidental. One of the ways a society maintains invidious distinctions is by creating an aura of politesse about it all with the repeated inference that the problem is really just a few Michael Richards.

In the end, we're not going to be able to talk our way out of climate change, find the right spin to end the Iraq war, brand ourselves into a decent diversity, or find the phrases to bring more economic fairness. It would be nice if the media recognized this and went back to covering more of the reality of life and less of what someone said about it.