Music and politics: the sound of change; the power of changes

Sam Smith

This was the chart used to riff some comments at a performance by the punk rock group Blowback on March 10,2006 at the Club Asylum in DC's Adams Morgan

WHEN he was 25, Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider, a book about those who see too deep and too much. I suspect some of you are here tonight.

Wilson tells of a Jean Paul Sartre character who lives alone in a hotel: "There is his ordinary life, with its assumptions of meaning, purpose, usefulness. And there are these revelations, or, rather, these attacks of nausea, that knock the bottom out of his ordinary life. The reason is not far to seek. He is too acute and honest an observer. . ."

"Of the café patron, he comments: 'When his place empties, his head empties too.' The lives of these people are contingent on events. If things stopped happening to them, they would stop being. Worse still are the . . . pictures he can look at in the town's art gallery, these eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is theirs and their existence is necessary to it. . .

A few days later he reflects that "the nausea is not inside me; I feel it out there, in the wall . . . everywhere around me."

Here is a metaphor for our own time, living as we do so near to all "these eminent public men, so sure of themselves, so sure that life is theirs and their existence is necessary to it." And finding the nausea out there in a war, an ecological crisis, and the collapse of constitutional government.

I feel it. . . like an exile in my native town, a town partly occupied by guards who demand I prove I am not a terrorist and partly filled with people who seem just to be passing through the place as if it were the world's largest Marriot Hotel lobby.

But then in Sartre's café somebody puts on a record, a woman singing 'Some of These Days'. The nausea disappears and Roquinten says: 'When the voice was heard in the silence I felt my body harden and the nausea vanish. . . I am in the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors, encircled by rings of smoke.'"

Wilson calls it art once again giving order and logic to chaos.

I have been a journalist and I have been a musician and one of the things I have learned is that there are times for words and then there are times when words fail (except the kind that are put to music), a time when music becomes the best politics.

For example, a few decades ago, a young boy named Andras was introduced to rock music while living in Denmark: " I didn't know what the underlying message was and I didn't care. I just thought this was something that I had to embrace."

Then he returned to his native Hungary to live with his aunt and uncle, who were conservative communists. And one night his uncle came in and took away the radio. Andras apologized for playing it so loud but the uncle said, ""The problem was not that it was loud. The problem was that you were listening to a Western radio station. . .

"Still, you had to keep going . . . It kept us sane. . . . As we listened to Radio Luxemburg, we were suddenly out of our bodies and our soul was part of the free world. . .

Someone would find a record in a shop and they would buy it and then make 500 copies. And Andras started a band. As he put it, "there was no way to stop . . . the message of freedom through rock and roll. . .

Andras told that story a few years ago at the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, but no longer as a young man, no longer a rocker but the Hungarian ambassador to the United States.

Similarly, when the Czech leader Vaclav Havel met Lou Reed in 1990 he told him, "Did you know that I am president because of you?" The Velvet Underground's first record had become so popular in Prague it had given the rebellion its name: "the Velvet Revolution."

In short, punk politics.

And then there was Rage Against the Machine: 1993. . . stands naked for 15 minutes without playing a note or singing in a protest against censorship. . . 1997. . . Well before most college students knew about the issue, Tom Morello is arrested during a protest against sweatshop labor. . . 2000: the LA police close down a Rage concert seen as a threat to the Democratic convention.

Or take traditional jazz, my music. During much of the 20th century jazz clubs were among the few places that whites and blacks shared socially. . . My own civil rights involvement had its roots in part in a music I loved. Among my records as a student in an all white high school was a Louis Armstrong song:

Even the mouse
Ran from your house
Laughed at you
And scorned you, too
What did I do
To be so black and blue?

Even earlier I had found a song in a book on my parents' piano:

I dreamt I saw Joe Hill last night
As live as you and me
But Joe, I said, you're ten years dead
I never died said he. I never died said he

The copper bosses shot you Joe,
The killed you Joe said I
What they forgot to kill, said Joe,
Went on to organize.

And years later, holding hands with those I knew only from their souls singing:

Deep in my heart
I do believe
'We shall overcome
Some day

Or standing with tens of thousands on the Mall singing:

All we are saying is give peace a chance

Try it yourself. . .

You'll be amazed how much is in the MP3 playlist of your brain that has been guiding and driving you forward.

But there's another side as well. . .

About two weeks ago Itunes downloaded its one billionth song. Its one billionth reason for someone not to notice anything for awhile but to walk indifferently down the streets of our collapsing republic. One billion tunes and things are just getting worse.

It's a reminder that music can be a trap as well as a remedy, another way the system can take our minds off what is happening. Like the café patron, we can become contingent on events and if things stop happening, we stop being. The police state can come through sedation as well as suppression.

But you can't stop playing. Billie Holiday could not have foreseen the civil rights revolution when she sang 'Strange Fruit' nor Joe Hill the modern labor movement. The human story gets better when people surrender their telepathic presumptions and simply do the right thing anyway.

In February 1960, four black college students sat down at a white-only Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states.

If that response had not occurred, would their sit-in have been without purpose? Or just not blessed?

We can not control the future but we can control how we react to every moment that passes by.

This is the lesson existentialism teaches us. We exist by our actions, our words, our art, and our music, whom and how we love. Existentialism has been called the philosophy that no one can take your shower for you. Or, for that matter, determine how you are going to respond to Iraq, to Bush, to the melting of the Antarctic. It is the philosophy that said that even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows. It is not a bad philosophy for our times.

Like a hit and run driver, America's elite has left the scene of the accident. They have become like those of whom Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together. . . and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

And through this all -- the unreal, the undemocratic, the cruel, the crowded, the rushed, and the uncritical -- the American outsider walks alone.

But it's always been like that. Behind every great social or political change has been the outsider -- those willing to seek to understand and alter what others just ward off with everything from religious sophistry to pop sophorifics, from IBelieve to ITunes. Those who find inspiration, globes of fire and rings of smoke in music rather than just a way to kill an hour. Those whose existence becomes the event rather than merely contingent upon the event. .

And if enough of us try hard enough and give our support to others who are doing likewise maybe one day we'll have our own Velvet Revolution, maybe we will find an asylum for our souls and our freedoms throughout the land rather than only in a few place like a club on 18th street.

Meanwhile thank those around you for what they have dared to think, thank the band for what it has dared to play, and thank yourself for what you have dared to be.

The movie 'Queen'

THE MOVIE 'QUEEN' IS REMARKABLE, one of the best depictions of the insides of power and politics I've ever seen. I expected as much from Helen Mirren, but was amazed at Michael Sheen's ability to blend the pragmatism, idealism and sliminess of Tony Blair.

When Blair was elected, I told a British friend that I was pretty sure I had once bought a used car from him out on Arlington Boulevard. But that was either a little unfair or, if you prefer, a little too complimentary. What halfway decent con man would let his life be ruined by the likes of George Bush? Only ideological excess or misguided idealism could have let a bright hustler like Blair get taken by a such a fifth-rate carnie peformer.

I will miss Blair, though, especially as I have learned how to use my Tivo zapper to speed through question time at Parliament. I set it at two-thirds fast forward, stopping only when I see someone laughing or when the Speaker arises to settle things down. Once, long ago, I caught a speaker pleading to his minions, "Order, order, I say order. Your deportment disfigures these proceedings."

AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING LIKE Simon Cowell, before we make Barak Obama the next American Idol, couldn't we at least check out some of the other thousands of recent or present state legislators with similar qualifications?

SOME IN THE MEDIA are getting a little overexcited about prospects for the Democrats in the Senate. The LA Times headlines "Three states could swing Senate control," which is a pretty good trick since the Democrats actually need six new seats. The Washington Post admitted this somewhat grudgingly in its second graf - "a trend that leaves the party looking for just two more seats to reclaim the majority" after throwing in Casey's sure bet in Pennsylvania. The Post, however, cited one of those imaginary trends that pops up near the end of campaigns: "Democrats in the past two weeks have significantly improved their chances of taking control of the Senate, according to polls and independent analysts." In fact, the states mentioned have had close races for some time. The one exception is a New Jersey poll released the same day as the Post article that finds Menendez with a comfortable lead for the first time. It is in the House that the trend has been noticeably towards the Democrats while the Senate races have so far failed to follow suit.

AS NOTED HERE BEFORE, the key unknowns are whether discouraged conservatives stay home, whether some usual non-participants get excited enough to vote, and how many votes the Republicans steal.

THE WASHINGTON POST is working overtime to try to keep Jane Fernandes' job as the new head of Gallaudet University including the gooey headline, "Fernandes Expresses Resolve to Lead" and a disparaging quote from a lawyer whose expertise is in higher education: 'It's very hard to have an orderly dialogue with a mob.' Sounds like he must do great for the administrators who hire him. . . THE PROBLEM is that the premier campus for the deaf doesn't need any more resolve on Fernandes' part, it needs her out of there. But to Fernandes this is a personal issue. Says the Post: "She went home Wednesday night for the first time in 10 days, she said. 'That's partly why I have this resolve,' she said. 'I talked to my parents, husband, family, and they are outraged at what's been done to me, and they will not let me take that.". . . And she added this touch with the sound of Bush speaking of Iraq: "I would really like to see this come to an end, for the good of Gallaudet. I'd do anything to make that happen."

WHAT ISN'T GENERALLY known is how close the relationship between Washington's universities and its daily paper is. When something like this happens, the Post pulls out all the stops to keep the students in line and the powers that be still being instead of having been. This has included, on the Post's part, spreading the story that the protest is about deep seated conflicts in deaf culture and particularly over the issue of signing. But the Post's ombudsman pointed out what the news stories hadn't: "Many protesters reject the idea that deaf culture has anything to do with their call for Fernandes to resign. David Rosenbaum, editor in chief of Signews, a national monthly publication for users of ASL, wrote in an e-mail: 'Deaf identity is not an issue. The President's Office and its Office of Public Relations at Gallaudet University have been playing the 'deaf card' but it has no bearing to the root of the matter. There are other deaf leaders who learned sign language later in life and who possess the leadership qualifications needed.'"

America's extremist center

By Sam Smith

Washington has become a city of barricades, a place where agents on rooftops scan the sky for missiles, and where metal detectors are turned so high they can find a nail in your shoe. It is a city of clearances, closed doors, need to know, a city that believes even Alice Rivlin should take a drug test.

Washington is a town that will host an August conference on "Special Tactics and Security" featuring "personal, tactical, and corrections body armor, hand-held shields, blankets, helmets, face shields, soft armor" and so forth.

Washington is where the idea developed that the rap of Sister Souljah might undermine our most precious values and that messages on the Internet were going to eat our children alive.

And Washington is the town that won't speak to you unless it knows "what it is in reference to," assumes you have a hidden agenda and demands to know "who you are with."

It is a bit odd that a place of such premonitions, predilections and obsessive precautions should come to believe that much of the rest of the country suffers from paranoia. But such is the eccentricity of the disordered mind that it sometimes assigns to others its own defects.

A psychiatrist has suggested that one useful way to judge such claims in individual cases is to count the bodies. Which is to say that healthy people don't leave a trail of victims as they go through life. On the other hand, the disordered, no matter how convincing their claim to normalcy, produce a wake that tells a different story.

A similar principle can be applied to politics. And when it is, a simple, stunning fact stands out: With few exceptions, the major threats to American democracy have come from neither right nor left but from the center.

From that internecine struggle of two factions of the American middle known as the Civil War to FBI assaults on activist organizations in the 60s and 70s, from the Palmer raids to Bill Clinton's anti-terrorism legislation, Americans have traditionally had more to fear from people they have elected than from those on the fringes of politics. In fact, the latter have often served largely as an excuse for the American center to tighten its grip on the political and economic system. This is not to say that the left and the right would not enjoy being just as violent and repressive given the chance, but the American center has rarely allowed that.

Even the KKK, so often cited as an example of the sort of threat the contemporary right poses, was powerful primarily because it was at the center, holding political and judicial and law enforcement office as well as hiding beneath its robes. In some towns, lynching parties were even announced in the local paper. And in the 1920s, both the Colorado governor and mayor of Denver were members of the Klan, the latter well enough regarded to have had Stapleton airport named after him.

If we were going to worry, therefore, let's at least worry about the right thing. Let's, for example, count the bodies. The Vietnam War is a good place to start: nearly 60,000 Americans killed to test the conspiracy theory that if one country fell in Southeast Asia they all would. Or the paranoia about the civil rights and peace movement in this country during the 1960s that led the FBI to place tens of thousands of citizens under surveillance, including Caesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Or the 1969 memo from the agency's San Francisco field office that suggested the FBI use the women's movement as a wedge against the left. Or the 1970 memo that proposed to "disrupt and confuse" Black Panther activities. Or 1977 -- when the CIA told some 80 academic institutions that they had been unwittingly involved in the mind control research.

Meanwhile, what was happening on the fringes of American politics? One study of civil violence in the tumultuous years between 1963 and 1968 found just 220 deaths -- an overall rate due to civil strife less than one half that in Europe during the same period. Most of the victims, by the way, were inner city residents.

Are the days of state-sponsored violence gone forever? Not at all. Let's, for example, count the bodies in the War on Drugs -- a decade of violence dedicated to the proposition that human nature can be effectively outlawed. It is a fantasy as wild as anything contrived by the Michigan Militia, but empirically far more deadly. The Drug Policy Foundation estimates that drug war has cost five to six thousand deaths a year, enough over the past decade to equal American fatalities in Vietnam.

Now let's count the bodies wasted in order to combat another conspiracy theory, namely, that smoking a weed considerably milder than tobacco is a major threat to our society. This summer America celebrated its 10 millionth arrest on marijuana charges. Bill Clinton is even afraid to let pot be used for medical purposes.

What about arms stockpiles and the like? According to a Defense Department report last December, America's share of worldwide arms shipments has risen from slightly over 20% during the last years of the Cold War to more than 50% today. During the last decade of the 20th century -- as the nation occupies itself with Oklahoma City, Randy Weaver and Waco -- the US will sell over $150 billion worth of arms to other lands. Some undoubtedly will become part of what the US government will refer to as the international terrorist threat.

Hate groups? Name those that pose anywhere near the threat to American minorities as does the 104th Congress. And what about the "wanted" poster published by congressional Republicans that showed 28 targeted Democratic incumbents -- 80% of them black, latino, women or Jewish? Or the Good O'Boys Roundup, a festival for law enforcement personnel sponsored by agents of the BATF, which has included such things as signs saying NIGGER CHECKPOINT, T-shirts with a target superimposed over Martin Luther King's face, others showing DC police officers with a black man stretched across a car hood above the caption BOYZ ON THE HOOD, and cards labeled NIGGER HUNTING LICENSE?

Random acts of terror? They are a growing part of the police repertoire as domestic law enforcement and military tactics blend. The raids shown on TV programs like Cops are not designed merely to intimidate the criminal, but to convince whole communities -- whole ethnic and age groups -- of police invulnerability. They also teach police officers bad habits by providing dubious role models. Meanwhile, the centrist media shows minimal interest in whether such practices as jump-out squads, random roadblocks, arbitrary traffic stops and curfews are constitutional.

Garden variety paranoia? How about US Postal inspector Don Davis who was quoted in the San Francisco Examiner as saying of the Unabomber's questioning of technological society: "There are groups that adhere to a lot of these thoughts, expecially out of Berkeley." As Hank Chapot, a Green who ran for Berkeley city office, asked, "Is Mr. Davis talking about me?"

Good data on home-grown terrorism, meanwhile, is hard to come by. We do know that only 171 people were indicted in the US for "terrorism and related activities" during the 1980s. We find (using the BATF's own figures) that there were just 328 bombing deaths between 1989 and 1993. These bombings include everything from Mafia retribution, insurance cover-ups, apolitical acts of madness, to right-wing sabotage such as that directed against abortion clinics. In sum, fewer deaths in five years than the city of Washington loses to murder annually. Even the Oklahoma City incident barely undermines the comparison.

Three hundred people is, of course, too many to die for any reason. But it is also far too weak an argument for the end of democracy.


Hysteria hustling

The media could give some sense of scale to this business. But because it doesn't -- because, for example, it insists that we treat the Oklahoma City bombing as a pivotal event of our time -- we find ourselves bouncing from crisis wave to crisis wave, unable to gain an understanding of the underlying currents of history.

The media is more than willing to pump up the hysteria. The results, as in the Oklahoma City case, can be atrocious. The media watchdog, FAIR, recently cited a long list of those who leaped to the conclusion that the bombing might be the work of Arabs. Among them were the New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Also ABC, CBS, and CNN. Also columnists Georgie Anne Geyer, A.M. Rosenthal, Mike Royko, Jim Hoagland, as well as such predictable sources of anti-Arab sentiment as Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes. Royko, for example, wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

I would have no objection if we picked out a country that is a likely suspect and bombed some oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes . . If it happens to be the wrong country, well, too bad, but it's likely it did something to deserve it anyway.

When the first suspects turned out to come from the Mid-West rather than from the Mid-East, the Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper responded, "Does that mean we conduct overnight bombings of Arizona and Kansas and Michigan now?"

After the anti-Arab paranoia was deflated by none other than the FBI, the demon vacuum for the center was quickly filled by the citizen militias. Even such normally sane voices as FAIR and the Nation began to crack with alarm. So agitated did the Nation become that several readers had to write and urge some perspective. Here are excerpts from two letters:

Actually, but for the [militia's] confusion over the distinctions between socialism and fascism . . . many of their fears regarding the multinational corporations running the world are valid.

Though we disagree on many issues, we as working people must still view the members and supporters of militias as working people who are victims of government repression merely reacting to this repression in their own way. To focus your fire on this right-wing fringe element and advocate government repression against them is to invite this same repression against ourselves somewhere down the road.

The most remarkable piece of hysteria-hustling, though, came in a June New Yorker article, by Michael Kelly. The article was called THE ROAD TO PARANOIA. Its subtitle: There have always been radical fringes on both the left and the right which believe that the government conspires against the people. But lately the two have formed a strange alliance -- fusion paranoia -- that is reaching millions of disaffected Americans.

Telling the tale of the confluence of a liberal and a Montanan right-winger, Kelly outdid Newt Gingrich in reliance on argument by anecdote, spinning for the New Yorker's chaise lounge potatoes a delicious conspiracy theory of mischief and paranoia among the hoi poloi.

Along the way, Kelly managed to extrapolate some conclusions that some might regard as, well, extreme. He implied, for example, that there isn't all that much difference between the "wise use" movement and radical environmentalists who "see the same corrupt conspiracy as the Wise Users, but in mirror image." Implicit in such an argument, of course, is the assumption that the sort of ad hoc and erratic environmental policies pursued by the Clinton administration represent a rational center from which fringes diverge. Another way to look at the matter, however, is that the Clinton approach is so intellectually vapid, that anyone -- whether on the right or left -- who actually has a view about such issues (rather than merely being interested in their immediate political impact) will find it wanting.

Kelly's grasp of such matters leaves much to be desired. For example, he seems to imply that the Wise Users are well represented by something called The Sahara Club USA, which believes in a conspiracy consisting of:

New Age nuts, militant vegetarians, anti-gun pukes, animal rights goofballs, tree worshipers, new world order pushers, human haters, pro-socialists, doom-sayers, homosexual rights activists, radical eco-Nazis, slobbering political correctness advocates, militant feminists and land closure fascists.

In fact, far from being representative of the corporatist "wise use" movement, the Sahara Club USA, as journalist Husayn Al-Kurdi recently reported, consists of "a bunch of bikers who are mad because they can't have unrestricted access to the desert to practice their crudities."

Kelly, even as he speaks of paranoia, manages to lump together not only corporate suits and bikers, but Noam Chomsky and the John Birch Society, Ramsey Clark and Bo Gritz, and Timothy Leary and Lyndon LaRouche.

Here are some others that Kelly believes suffer from conspiratorial fantasies: moderate conservatives, liberals, feminists and African-Americans. Who then, besides Kelly himself, is finally left on the side of reason?

In the next paragraph, Kelly gives another list, this one a compilation of charges that have been made against the president, which he cites as an example of "the degree to which political paranoia has worked its way into the culture at large." These charges include the drug and gun smuggling activities at Mena, the murder of Vincent Foster; the murder or beatings of those threatening to expose his illegal activities as governor; the BCCI scandal; and the retention of an incompetent medical examiner to cover up a death caused by Clinton's mother.

By deftly blending the highly probable (a cover-up of CIA-assisted drug running at Mena) with the bizarre and unlikely (the incompetent medical examiner story) Kelly attempts, in best centrist fashion, to discredit all suspicions of the president. Such a technique eliminates the need to argue substantive questions such as: if it is all a paranoiac fantasy, what are more than fifty FBI agents doing in Little Rock? In the 1950s, there was a name for such skillfully sloppy associations. It was called McCarthyism.

In the end, Kelly's story is about the center and not about the left or right. It is one of the center's most notable defenses to date against the growing clamor of non-elite America for a share of power. It is about the paranoiac obsession of the American establishment to make sure (in its own phraseology) that the "center holds."

Kelly understands the stakes in all this; he describes fusion paranoids as believing that the government "is controlled by people acting in concert against the common good and at the bidding of powerful interests working behind the scenes." This elite is comprised of "the money-political-legal class, and the producers of news and entertainment in the mass media." In short the sort of people that Kelly and other Washington journalists hang out with and have come to accept as the model of normalcy.

As Kelly himself notes, the center's concern is not new. He quotes Richard Hofstadter's chestnut about the "paranoid style" of American politics, which Alexander Cockburn, in the Nation, describes as one

in which the American lower orders -- including unions -- were dangerous, potential brownshirts restrained only by educated elites of mature judgment.

In the fifties it was the elites of mature judgment who were prompting the CIA to destroy labor movements in the Third World and dislodge populist tribunes of the poor, by murder if necessary. In the nineties the elite increasingly detour democratic process by means of 'bipartisan commissions,' international 'agreements' fast-tracked through Congress, and the crude disenfranchisement of the poor, with 'law enforcement officials' turning growing numbers of them into felons denied the vote.

Ironically, if Kelly had only waited a week he might have had a better perspective on the sources of American violence and the cultural distribution of sanity. In the same issue as his article was a review of the life of General Curtis LeMay, written by Richard Rhodes. LeMay ran the air war against both Japan and North Korea, became head of the sacrosanct Strategic Air Command and was one of the military heroes of his time.

Here are just a few of his accomplishments:

- The destruction of nearly 17 square miles of Tokyo with the loss of at least 100,000 civilian lives. The US Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that "probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any time in the history of man."

- The destruction of 62 other Japanese cities. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spared -- reserved for a different sort of horror. In sum, more than a million Japanese civilians were killed. LeMay himself would admit years later, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side."

- The bombing of North Korean cities, dams, villages and rice paddies. Civilian deaths: more than two million.

In short, with the enthusiastic blessing of the American center, LeMay was directly responsible for the slaughter of about half as many civilians as died in the Holocaust. To this day, establishment Washington won't even face what happened at Nagasaki or Hiroshima, let alone the far larger massacres occurring under the command of LeMay.

And LeMay had even grander schemes. His plan for defeating the Soviet Union included the obliteration of 70 Soviet cities in thirty days with thirty-three atomic bombs and the deaths of 2.7 million citizens.

To be sure, those vocally uneasy back then with the presumptions and power of SAC were not called paranoids. They were just called Commies and dupes.


Wannabes

Let's pause for another body count. From the time I first began looking into citizen militias, I have watched assiduously for certifiable acts of violence. Not talk, not war-games, not uniforms. But action. What I've found is a few threats, beatings and hair-brained schemes like stealing tanks from an army base. There's some bad stuff, to be sure, but in aggregate the sort of thing that wouldn't even make a daily's front page if instigated by one of the urban militias, that is to say a gang.

Not even the Oklahoma bombing, from what has been revealed to date, can be pinned on the militias. So far, the worst the militias can be accused of in this case is guilt by attendance.

Tim McVeigh seems to have met those of his ilk mainly at gun shows. And if there is any violent link among the suspects it is with a military organization called the US Army, which teaches men such unmarketable skills as how to kill large numbers of people quickly and then returns them to a civilian world in which they can't find a job. Despite the ads on television, the unemployment rate of veterans 20-24 years old is twice that of those who have not had the benefit of Army training.

Besides, the militias seem largely manned by wannabes. Former Green Beret Gregory Walker, who is writing a book about terrorism and anti-terrorism, told Pacific News Service:

Today, the militia movement rates about 1.5 on a scale of 1 to ten in which one is completely benign . . . It's made up primarily of law-abiding citizens who make no attempt to conceal their identities or [ideology] and who are so desperate for real military training they put want-ads in the newspaper . . . Eighty percent of militia members have no military experience, and just an infinitesimally small percentage have any kind of combat experience. The rest are the butchers, the bakers and the candlestick makers, the guys who ran the computers and fixed truck tires. . . . That's why the militia's are so desperate to hire trainers -- and why they end up hiring bunko artists in a lot of cases because very few real-deal military would get involved.


The narrow window of normalcy

Let's pause now for some argument by anecdote. To understand the establishment's fear of the rest of the country, it helps to understand how narrow is its definition of normalcy. A minor, but telling example, came earlier this year when I was bounced from the lineup for a TV show about the DC fiscal crisis after the host, Derik McGinty, found that I still supported DC statehood. In some pique, McGinty said, "Don't you know, Sam, that puts you out of the loop?"

I replied that I had been out of the loop for about 30 years, but that I did try to do right. I didn't mention that probably a majority of DC voters agreed with me, but that wouldn't have mattered much anyway. The loop is not for voters, but for those who decide things.

It's not hard to bump up against the Washington consensus. During 1992 primary season. I was walking down 15th Street when I ran into Don Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. Graham asked whom I was supporting for president. I said I was backing Jerry Brown. Graham immediately grabbed my arm and started waving it in the air as he shouted something to the effect of "Look, everyone, I've found a real, live Jerry Brown supporter! Look!"

Brown, at the time, was the second choice of the country's Democratic voters. That, in Washington, wasn't good enough. No one in Washington who mattered supported Jerry Brown.

Such anecdotes may help to explain how the New York Times can write a front-page story -- headlined CONSPIRACY THEORIES' IMPACT REVERBERATES IN LEGISLATURES -- that treated an historic debate over the Tenth Amendment (guaranteeing the rights of the states and the people) as some sort of right wing plot.

The historic and constitutional ignorance displayed by the "paper of record" produced a piece as bizarre as if it were to be suggested that the separation of church and state was a scheme dreamed up by President Assad.

As with Kelly and his taxonomy of paranoids, the Times even went so far as to link those concerned about the Tenth Amendment with those who think the numbers painted on the back of Indiana highway signs are signals to invading UN troops.

Similarly, CBS News ran a piece attacking the fully informed jury movement (of which your editor is a supporter) as evidence of a right wing assault on the judiciary. In fact, the idea that a jury has the right to judge both the law and the facts goes back to the trials of William Penn and Peter Zenger, was supported by a number of the country's founders and early judges, and has been most recently applied to the benefit of the likes of Marion Barry and Abbie Hoffman.


Black helicopters

We now pause for the really good stuff: black helicopters. You see, we are told, not only does the paranoid right believe in the Tenth Amendment and jury rights: it believes in black helicopters.

The greatest power of the mass media is the power to ignore. As angst mounts in the heartland, however, and as alternative mass media like the Internet gain significance, the elites are losing their ability to decide what exists and what is merely a fiction of our imagination. Implicit in the mass media ridicule is a rising anger over its loss of control of the agenda. In the old days, issues like proportional representation, the fully informed jury movement, or the shorter work-week would never see the light of day. Now, however, whole movements can arise without the assistance of the Post or the Times, something that is regarded in establishment circles as truly aggravating. I suspect, in fact, that much of the media's angst about sex on the Internet is really little more than a foil for a far deeper concern: massive competition.

The black helicopters are a trivial but interesting case in point. It is standard fare for journalists to make fun of the idea of unmarked black helicopters. Yet there is evidence -- newspaper accounts, intelligence sources and so forth -- that such craft do exist. In all probability their ubiquity -- although not necessarily details of color and markings -- can be explained by this country's growing assumption that it can conduct surveillance on anyone it pleases, especially those who might be engaged in growing marijuana. Certainly a federal judge in California thought so; he found helicopter surveillance so intrusive and harassing that he enjoined its continued routine use.

And just one day after I had been jousting on such matters at lunch with a British journalist, and while engaged in giving him a tour of the city, he suddenly cried, "Look, a black helicopter!" To be sure, flying low above us was a dark whirlybird. Given the direction of the sun, I couldn't swear the craft was not dark green but it certainly was unmarked. I might, perhaps incorrectly (but without an iota of paranoia), have described it as black.

The whole business reminds me of James Thurber's fable about the unicorn in the garden. Upon informing his wife that he had seen a unicorn in the garden, his spouse calls the police to have her husband dispatched to the booby hatch. When the cops arrive, however, the husband denies ever having seen a unicorn in the garden and has his wife locked up instead. And lives happily thereafter. Thurber's moral could well apply to today's discussions of black helicopters and political paranoia. "Don't," he warned, "count your boobies until they are hatched."

To be sure there are those who see more than black helicopters, who believe that these craft are the advance troops of a UN invasion. But what service is provided to reason by the media pretending that they don't exist at all? Why not determine their function, color and so forth and point out that the UN is unlikely to invade with a staff and budget only slightly larger than that of the DC government? What's really going on here? Paranoiac co-dependence? Or are we seeing a more generic version of what often happens when government or defense contractor whistle-blowers speak out -- namely that they are sent to see a psychiatrist?


The myth-killers

One of the greatest myths of America's elite is that it functions by logic and reason and that it is devoid of myth. In truth, elites function like other people; they choose their gods and worship them. The gods, to be sure, are different. For example, many in Washington believe fervently in the sanctity of data, the Ivy League, the New York Times op pages and the Calvinist notion that their power is a outer, visible sign of an inner, invisible grace.

And some, even while professing to be without myth, spend their lives creating myths for others. We call them political consultants and ghostwriters.

There is no consistency to all this. The Pope's disastrous myths concerning birth control are treated with deference while domestic fundamentalism is ridiculed. Similarly, politicians and media created an instant mythology around the deaths of 15 children in Oklahoma City, but tend -- as did the Washington Post recently -- to lump the 22 children who died in Waco as among "80 group members," apparently as deserving of their end as was David Koresch.

What makes those in power different from other Americans is not the absence of myth but their denial of it. In refusing to allow room for the unknown, for faith, for those temporary fillers called theories that slip into the empty spaces of our knowledge, those in charge of America ultimately separate themselves from such natural human phenomena as myth.

As less of what should be known in our society is allowed to be known, the distance widens between those who have the knowledge and those who do not. To have any sort of decent relations with those Americans not professionally trained to suppress belief and imagination, we would need an elite with more poets and fewer economists. The poet understands that a myth is not a lie but the soul's version of the truth. One of the reasons so many stories are mangled by the media these days is because journalists have become unable to deal with the non-literal.

Consider the mythic underpinnings of the OJ Simpson saga. The average white lawyer or reporter sees it only as a murder case. But to many blacks, Simpson is carrying the mythic weight of decades of ethnic abuse under the justice system. In a column 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 in New York or Washington. What do they have to do with Simpson?

Only this. OJ Simpson's case serves as the mythic translation of stories never allowed to be told. The stories that should have been on CNN but weren't. Everything is 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 takes place when a militia member imagines that the Bloods & Crips are being armed by the US government or when blacks believe the same thing about the militias. Or when the UN is thought to on the verge of invasion.

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

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

The tragedy is that the American center has not responded to these myths by confronting their causes but rather with ridicule and repression. And by creating its own myths. In fact, to the American center, the militias serve much the same purposes as the United Nations and the Council on Foreign Relations do for the right. Just as once the establishment tried to define the civil rights movement by the Symbionese Liberation Army and the cause of North Ireland by the IRA, so Americans' concern over the usurpation of sovereignty at every level is being defined primarily by its most exaggerated manifestations. There is no wisdom and much danger in this.

As author Gregory Walker puts it, "We've haven't seen a great peacemaker step forward to quell the fears and uncertainties. Instead we've seen a strong effort demonize people and polarize thought. Where is the person who can rise up and say, 'My fellow Americans' and truly be including all Americans. He's not out there, and she's not out there, and that's who we need to hear from."

In the meantime, when someone tells you about some Americans who are paranoid or crazy, be sure to count the bodies. -- July 1995

The case for public campaign financing

SPEECH BY SAM SMITH
AT US CAPITOL RALLY,
OCTOBER 26, 1999

I have three objections to our current system of campaign financing.

The first is literary. Being a writer I try to show respect for words, to leave their meanings untwisted and unobscured.

This is alien to much of official Washington which daily engages in an activity well described by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe said, "By ringing small changes on the words leg-of-mutton and turnip, .... I could 'demonstrate' that a turnip was, is, and of right ought to be, a leg-of-mutton."

For example, for centuries ordinary people have known exactly what a bribe was. The Oxford English Dictionary found it described in 1528 as meaning to "to influence corruptly, by a consideration." Another 16th century definition describes bribery as "a reward given to pervert the judgment or corrupt the conduct" of someone.

In more modern times, the Meat Inspection Act of 1917 prohibits giving "money or other thing of value, with intent to influence" to a government official. Simple and wise.

But that was before the lawyers and the politicians got around to rewriting the meaning of bribery. And so we came to a time not so many months ago when the Supreme Court actually ruled that a law prohibiting the giving of gifts to a public official "for or because of an official act" didn't mean anything unless you knew exactly what the official act was. In other words, bribery was only illegal if the bribee was dumb enough to give you a receipt.

The media has gone along with the scam, virtually dropping the word from its vocabulary in favor of phrases like "inappropriate gift," "the appearance of a conflict of interest," or the phrase which brings us here today: "campaign contribution."

Another example is the remarkable redefinition of money to mean speech. You can test this one out by making a deal with a prostitute and if a cop comes along, simply say, "Officer, I wasn't giving her money, I was just giving her a speech." If that doesn't work you can try giving more of that speech to the cop. Or try telling the IRS next April that "I have the right to remain silent." And so forth. I wouldn't advise it.

As George Orwell rightly warned, "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

My second objection to our system of campaign financing is economic. It's just too damn expensive for the taxpayer. The real cost is not the campaign contributions themselves. The real cost is what is paid in return out of public funds.

A case in point: Public Campaign reported that in 1996, when Congress voted to lift the minimum wage 90 cents an hour, business interests extracted $21 billion in custom-designed tax benefits. These business interests gave only about $36 million in campaign contributions so they got out of the public treasury nearly 600 times what they put in. And you helped pay for it.

Looked at another way, that was enough money to give 11 million workers a 90 cent an hour wage increase for a whole year -- or, to be more 1990s about it, to give 21,000 CEOs a million dollar bonus.

This is repeated over and over. For example, the oil industry in one recent year gave $23 million in campaign contributions and got nearly $9 billion in tax breaks.

The bottom line is this: if you want to save public money, support public campaign financing.

My final objection is biologic. Elections are for and between human beings. How do you tell when you're dealing with a person? Well, they bleed, burp, wiggle their toes and have sex. They register for the draft. They register to vote. They watch MTV. They go to prison and they have babies and cancer. Eventually they die and are buried or cremated.

Now this may seem obvious to you, but there are tens of thousands of lawyers and judges and politicians who simply don't believe it. They will tell you that a corporation is a person, based on a corrupt Supreme Court interpretation of the 14th Amendment from back in the robber baron era of the late 19th century -- a time in many ways not unlike our own.

Before this ruling, everyone knew what a person was just as everyone knew what a bribe was. States regulated corporations because they were legal fictions lacking not only blood and bones, but conscience, morality, and free will. But then the leg of mutton became a turnip in the eyes of the law.

Corporations say they just want to be treated like people, but that's not true. Test it out. Try to exercise your free speech on the property of a corporation just like they exercise theirs in your election. You'll find out quickly who is more of a person. We can take care of this biologic problem by applying a simple literary solution: tell the truth. A corporation is not a person and should not be allowed to be called one under the law.

I close with this thought. The people who work in the building behind us have learned to count money ahead of votes. It is time to chase the money changers out of the temple. But how? After all, getting Congress to adopt publicly funded campaigns is like trying to get the Mafia to adopt the Ten Commandments as its mission statement. I would suggest that while fighting this difficult battle there is something we can do starting tomorrow. We can pull together every decent organization and individual in communities all over America -- the churches, activist organizations, social service groups, moral business people, concerned citizens -- and begin drafting a code of conduct for politicians. We do not have to wait for any legislature.

If we do this right, if we form true broad-based coalitions of decency, then the politicians will ignore us only at their peril.

At root, dear friends, our problem is that politicians have come to have more fear of their campaign contributors than they have of the voters. We have to teach politicians to be afraid of us again. And nothing will do it better than a coming together of a righteously outraged and unified constituency demanding an end to bribery of politicians, whether it occurs before, during, or after a campaign.

Making cities black and poor: the hidden story

From the Progressive Review, January 2000

The review recently cited a column by Dick Case of the Syracuse Herald American which revealed that the practice of redlining mortgage loans for American cities began in the Roosevelt administration, far earlier than is generally realized. A former Syracuse city planner, Emanual Carter, who had come across the practice while reading "A Prayer for the City" by Buzz Bissinger, told Case, "I think this program almost guaranteed the demise of our cities."

Now, Jane Levey, editor of Washington History magazine, points out to us stunning corroboration contained in a lecture delivered 23 years ago to the Columbia Historical Society by historian Kenneth T. Jackson. Jackson, in his address to an organization that is now the Historical Society of Washington, outlined what was, in effect, a federally-organized program of urban residential apartheid.

One of the New Deal's reforms had been the creation of the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which provided federal guarantees for home mortgages. Jackson reported that between 1933 and 1936 alone, the HOLC supplied funds for one tenth of all owner-occupied, non-farm residences in the country. The FHA, and later the VA, took over the task.

There was a huge need. Before the FHA and VA, first mortgages usually covered no more than one-half to two-thirds of the appraised value and the term was typically only between five and ten years. By the end of 1958, the FHA had enabled nearly five million families to own homes and helped more than 22 million to improve their properties.

At the same time, however, the legislation discouraged the construction of multi-family units and provided only small short-term loans for repair of existing homes. This meant, Jackson noted, that "families of modest circumstances could more easily finance the purchase of a new home than the modernization of an old one."

While such restrictions are well known, other aspects of the program have been long hidden, such as the FHA weighting system by which underwriters would judge a neighborhood by such standards as "protection from adverse influences," "freedom from special hazards," and "appeal." The FHA Underwriting Manual warned that "older properties in a neighborhood have a tendency to accelerate the rate of transition to lower class occupancy" and suggested that apartment owners should look to the suburbs, preferably a site "set in what amounts to a privately owned and privately controlled park area."

Jackson continued:

"The greatest fears of the Federal Housing Administration were reserved for 'unharmonious racial or nationality groups.' The alleged danger was that an entire area could lose its investment value if rigid white-black segregation was not maintained. To protect itself against such eventualities, the Underwriting Manual openly recommended 'enforced zoning, subdivision regulations, and suitable restrictive covenants. In addition, the FHA's Division of Economics and Statistics compiled detailed reports and maps charting the present and most likely future residential locations of black families." In a March, 1939, map of Brooklyn, for example, the presence of a single non-white family on any block was sufficient to result in that entire block being marked black. Similarly, very extensive maps of the District of Columbia depicted the spread of the black population and the percentage of dwelling units occupied by persons other than white."

Beginning in 1936, an inventory was created, largely by those in the real estate industry, and color coded maps were drawn with neighborhoods rated A through D.Case described the system:

"* Grade A neighborhood: Up and coming. In demand. Well planned. Color it green.

"* Grade B: Completely developed. Still good but not what people who can afford more are buying. Blue.

"* Grade C: Buildings aged and obsolete. "Infiltration of lower grade populations." Experts say "lower grade',' citizens were blacks (called 'Negroes' by surveyors), Jews and foreign born whites. C neighborhoods 'lack homogeneity.' Color them yellow.

"* Grade D: Detrimental influences. Undesirable population. Mostly rented homes with poor maintenance, vandalism, unstable families. This is the red area."

Jackson noted that "black neighborhoods were invariably rated 'D.'" These were neighborhoods described with such phrases as "the only hope is for demolition of these buildings and transition of the are into a business district" or "this particular spot is a blight on the surrounding area."

Secret "residential security maps" were drawn up for every block of a city. These maps were available to lenders and realtors but were kept secret from the general public. Some of these maps, including those for DC, Jackson found to be missing from government archives.

The suburban bias of the FHA was extraordinary. For example, 91% of the homes insured by the agency in metropolitan St. Louis between 1935 and 1939 were in the suburbs. This practice would continue into the 60s and even the 70s. Jackson found that in 1976 the federal government had supplied three dollars in loans for suburban St. Louis for every one dollar to the city itself. Between 1934 and 1960, $559 million was loaned for suburban construction in the St. Louis suburbs but only $94 million for the city itself, a suburban per capita loan in 1961 of $794 vs. an urban one of only $126.

While the housing programs of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations helped to create America's huge middle class, it also secretly created extraordinary victims, primarily black citizens and the American city. As Jane Jacobs would put it, "Credit blacklisting maps are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies."

The autistic confederacy

The French students who drew a connection between contemporary economics and autism have made one of the more profound observations of our time. Technically, the kind of autism exhibited by leading economists - and (although the students did not note it) leaders in politics and media - is called higher functioning autism or Asperger's Syndrome. Here are some professional descriptions:

"Asperger's Syndrome, also known as Asperger's Disorder or Autistic Psychopathy, is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder characterized by severe and sustained impairment in social interaction, development of restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. These characteristics result in clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. In contrast to Autistic disorder (Autism), there are no clinically significant delays in language or cognition or self help skills or in adaptive behavior, other than social interaction. Prevalence is limited but it appears to be more common in males . . . Adults with Asperger's have trouble with empathy and modulation of social interaction - the disorder follows a continuous course and is usually lifelong . . . "

"There is a general impression that Asperger's syndrome carries with it superior intelligence and a tendency to become very interested in and preoccupied with a particular subject. Often this preoccupation leads to a specific career at which the adult is very successful . . . "

Nothing so well describes the monocular mania over "free markets" and related clichés that has characterized the thoughts and words of our elite since the days of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. What better description of our typical political or media leader than: "Has an average or above average intelligence. Has highly developed language skills. Lacks social interaction skills. Exhibits inappropriate behavioral response to social situations. Lacks understanding of humor or irony . . ."

There has never been the slightest logical reason for believing that all of life's mysteries could be explained by reference to quarterly reports, yet over the past couple of decades this has become a wildly held assumption of those in charge of running our country, from the think tanks to the White House to NPR.

Critics have struggled vainly to suggest the contrary with a notable lack of success. The reason is now obvious: they have attempted to defeat pathology with logic. It doesn't work, not because the single-factor obsessives are idiots or even evil, but because they are mad.

And it's far from just a matter of Reaganomics. Politics have come to be characterized by the serial introduction of small ideas of even smaller rationality but which soon find themselves elevated to iconographic status in everything from op ed pages to the federal budget.
Among them: the fictional huge federal surplus, the even more fictional Bush tax cut, the false depiction of the status of Social Security, the enormously expensive capture and imprisonment those who prefer marijuana to vodka, the very autistic assumption that counting student test scores is the same as educating students, and, most recently, an obsession with anti-terrorism to the detriment of every other aspect of American existence.

Key to the Asperger style of politics and media is the constant repetition of thought patterns and the imperviousness of the practitioners' thinking to outside fact or argument. The technical name for this is perseveration which has been defined as "the persistent repetition of a response after cessation of the causative stimuli; for example, the repetition of a correct answer to one question as the answer to succeeding questions," an almost perfect description of what regularly occurs on your average Sunday talk show. A less technical but even more generally apt definition is "continuation of something usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."

How did it happen that we have become cursed with a perseverating elite that endlessly repeats the same thoughts to whatever is said to it, and which insists on pursuing ideas well past any possible usefulness? Well, one theory is that the SAT has played a role, helping to choose an establishment that, while seemingly diverse, is actually disproportionately comprised of those of above average intelligence but who think life consists mainly of coming up with the right answers. In their own ways, both Clinton and Bush (not to mention Ted Koppel and Jim Lehrer) have manifested this disconnect between "policy," i.e. the right answer, and something called life which is in the end an imaginative and moral creation and not merely a technical problem.

This is a matter of no little concern. Those of us still willing to let the empirical, the non-quantifiable, and the creative into our lives are being bullied, twisted, and threatened by a politically autistic confederacy at every level from the obdurate local bureaucrat to CNN with its propagandistic mantras parading as news to a president who doesn't know when to stop saying "terrorist." At its worst, the privatized and gated logic of our leaders is of the same ilk that once created a nation of good Germans willing to follow the pathology of a few.

Silently, without argument or recognition, the logic of our nation has drastically changed - from "show me" to "tell me," from experience to propaganda, from the empirical to the virtual, and from debate and discussion to addictive perseveration. Our major choice at the moment is whether we, too, shall join the madness.

The role of respect in peace

If you deconstruct the language of those who Bush would have us believe form the axis of evil, one finds not so much megalomania as insecurity, hurt feelings, and bitterness over their global inferiority.

This has become particularly apparent with the rise of Chavez and Ahmadinejad, two national leaders who have proved unusually adept at using contemporary media to make their case. They represent, perhaps, a new generation of national figures who - all politics aside - make the staid habits and behavior of the Council on Foreign Relations genre of diplomacy seem pointless, lifeless and antiquated. In other words, while Bush is still stuck in the politics of a Masterpiece Theatre plot, Ahmadinejad, despite the pull of his traditional culture, is working overtime to join the hip hop generation.

At the core, the language and behavior of a Bush or Blair is based on notions of purportedly deserved power and how the less powerful are supposed to behave towards their betters. The language and behavior of Ahmadinejad and Chavez is popular, populist and evangelical and directed at winning the very hearts and minds of which Bush speaks repeatedly but doesn't have the faintest idea how to reach.

Thus we find the Islamic Republic News Agency reporting that Ahmadinejad plans to come to the UN and speak the same day as Bush and a day before Chavez. Both and Chavez will fly from Havana after meeting with the longest plank holder of power of our era: Fidel Castro. This isn't diplomacy; this is show business.

Castro, in his early days, also spoke at the UN. But, just as Mitt Romney recently refused state police protection for the ex-president of Iran, so the hotels of New York refused space for Castro. The result: Malcolm X found him a hotel in Harlem and a key step was taken in the alienation of a man who, with just a little respect and effort, might not have tormented every American president since by refusing to die or fade away.

The U.S. is in a similar stage with Chavez and Ahmadinejad. It is slamming every door that possibly opens between our country and theirs, gratuitously shunning and dissing them along the way - with the media helping on the ridicule end. But, as Castro proved, it doesn't work.

What can work is respect.

A letter from Ahmadinejad to German prime minister Merkel is remarkable not only in its words of respect expressed towards her and her country but in the clear longing for a similar respect for himself and his own land. This guy is smart and articulate and desperately wants the bigger guys to admit it. You don't have to agree with a single political point he makes to note this.

For example, even if one fully supports the creation of Israel, there is still room for empathy for those displaced to make way for it. Those who mediate for a living will tell you that you must hear the pain of both sides. Not just the threats felt by Israelis, but those felt by its neighbors.

And you might even find yourself faintly nodding your head as you read: "You are familiar with the pains and sufferings currently afflicting our world. Today, the pain and suffering of the people of Iraq that come from occupation, absence of security and daily acts of terrorism are tormenting the entire humanity. Relentless interferences of some bullying powers in the internal affairs of other nations, antagonism toward the inalienable rights of nations to have access to more advanced technologies, subjecting nations to permanent threats by relying on arsenals of chemical and nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, opposition to popular governments in Latin America, supporting coup d'etat and dictatorial regimes, absence of due attention to Africa and taking advantage of the power vacuum there to plunder their wealth are among the problems facing our world today."

Respect is important because it is one of the few doors wide enough for peace to enter. It is the antithesis of the bullying, bombastic, holier-than-thou approach of the Bush regime. It is also futile to speak only to one's friends or to establish impenetrable concessions one's opponents must make before you sit down with them. Now that we have seen how pointless such approaches have been, it is perhaps time to try something else.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad are leaders of weak countries with a strong need for respect. It does not hurt our oil supplies, our military strength or our economy to grant them this. Our continued refusal will, just as it did with Castro, only makes the times harder and the hard times longer.

The hazards of estivation

A reader - and Democratic candidate for a New England state legislature - writes: "I have been a subscriber to both Progressive Review as well as Undernews for some time now. Recently the issues have become sporadic and now nothing. As a convert to SHAFARism I feel my 'faith' has abandoned me. Woe is I." [1]

There are two explanations, neither particularly satisfactory. The first is that the Review has been in its normal estivation mode. [2]

We usually announce this but what with 40% of Americans not even able to take a vacation this summer - some because they are running for state legislature - and with that ubiquitous excuse, a war or terror, your editor thought it better to pretend that he was still hard at work in the steamy capital rather than enjoying the pleasures of the Review's New England regional headquarters, overlooking beautiful northwest Casco Bay.

At odds once again with mainstream culture, your editor prefers the values expressed by Paul LaFarguein 1907 in The Right to be Lazy & Other Studies: "Jehovah, the bearded and angry god, gave his worshipers the supreme example of ideal laziness: after six days of work, he rests for all eternity."

The other explanation forces me to reveal one of the deepest secrets of journalism, which is that news is largely the artificial creation of reporters, editors and other media hacktoids. I discovered this years ago when I found I could date the seasonal end of news by an abrupt drop off in press releases arriving in our office after June 15. Now, with the Internet, I sense the same phenomena marked by the sudden paltry flow of RSS headlines and a large number of journalist-readers announcing by e-mail that they are out of the office until a date certain. Something similar happens every Thanksgiving and Christmas, which are probably the safest times to be alive, since no terrorist would waste a bomb knowing that so much of the media was off visiting relatives and not caring about what happened.

I will, however, say in my defense that - as is usual in rural and waterfront communities - it has been impossible to be inert for long. For example, this summer we have had two power outages of more than 8 hours. Standard practice is to call Central Maine Power and punch in your account number. This allows CMP to aggregate the reports and narrow down the possible wire malefactors under its control. It also wins you a phone call when the lights come back on. One night the call came at 2 am. I tried a switch but it didn't work, so said to hell with it and went back to bed.

But as I lay there, visions of melting ice cream in the fridge ballooned in my brain until sleep became impossible. I arose and messed with the Gen Tran switches from my portable generator to no avail. I then got in my car to find the wires I knew had fallen in the nearby woods and as I turned out of the drive the woods became alive with an orange glow.

With the power restored further up the line, our fallen wire had apparently done its mischief and started a fire accompanied by a strange electric moaning sound. It's not the sort of thing the brain - especially one previously only filled with visions of melted ice cream - can deal with easily alone at two am.

But I pulled myself together, called the local volunteer fire department, assured them that the blaze was only about three fireplaces large, and waited. Within minutes a small truck was there, the fire had almost burned itself out, and CMP was on the way.

At 4:30 am I got another call. Still half asleep I said in full greeting, "Thank you very much." The woman at the other end laughed and replied, "I guess you were expecting me."

I have also been deep into a locally hot and totally unanticipated issue during which I have spent two and half hours at the state attorney general's office, written one op ed for the Portland Press Herald, two letters to the editor and come up with a pull-out quote used by another newspaper. I have also testified before the Freeport planning commission citing James Madison among other things.

Unlike easy federal issues like Iraq, gay marriage and abortion, local matters are far too complex to sum up in a few sentences. Suffice it to say that it involved some residents of a development being unhappy with a semester program in coastal studies for 32 high school girls being planned for a small corner of what was formerly my parents' organic beef farm, which they started in the 1950s. The farm is now a non-profit (that I once headed), struggling to stay alive and burdened by too many decrepit but historic rural structures. The coastal studies program would result in one of these burdens being lifted from the farm as well as some additional income. But some of the increasingly suburban neighbors thought it would be a travesty of rural life.

The issue has made me realize how far rural reality has drifted from urban consciousness. There is a romantic notion that farms simply exist when, in fact, some 90% of farm family income these days comes from non-farm sources.

My investigations also reminded me of how important rural education has always been to rural America - from one room school houses to land grant colleges.

As I noted in a letter to the Falmouth Forecaster: "According to Freeport's zoning ordinance, uses within the RRII Zone are 'limited to those which are compatible with its historic and rural qualities.'

"Well, schools were a prolific part of the rural landscape including several in the area such as the Litchfield School, one near Flying Point, and one within easy walking distance of the proposed coastal studies program. . .

"One town in Maine had 14 schools in the 19th century. Typically such schools were placed about three miles apart, hardly an oddity in the rural landscape.

"You could not have had American agriculture without rural schools. They were inseparable. One study reports, 'During the 1930s about one-half of all children went to school in rural areas, where the proportion of children to adults was higher than in the cities.' . . . In short, if you really want to be true to the landscape's 'historic and rural qualities' we would need more and not fewer schools."

I concluded my talk to the planning commission by saying that "Finally, if you wish to preserve historic buildings, farmland, and open space, you must constantly be educating a new constituency. You can not have the things you value yet fail to teach our children their value. If we had been blessed with many more coastal studies programs over the years we might well not be in the ecological danger we now face."

And, I might have added, we might have fewer power outages as well.

So there are several weak excuses for the seasonal entropy of the Review. Shortly after Labor Day, I hope to ease myself back into hyperactivity - unproductive as it seems to be these days. Meanwhile, gentle reader, I appreciate your constant patience and forbearance.

[1] SHAFARS are comprised of - according to a Review article some time back - skeptics, humanists, agnostics, free thinkers, atheists and rationalists.

[2] Estivation is the same as hibernation except it occurs during summer.

The hazards of cleaning the attic

I'M A LITTLE LEARY of the planes to renovate the National Museum of American History. There seems to be a notion abroad that the problem with museums is the space they're in when, in fact, it's often more a matter of what's on the walls and on the floor.

I recently spent some time in the recently renovated Museum of Modern Art, which is full of new space. I suddenly had a subversive idea. I walked into a large gallery and stood in the middle of the room, about as far from the works as they would have typically been had I purchased them for a new McMansion on the California coast.

I found myself alone. Close to 90% of the others in the gallery stood about one to five feet away from the paintings, reading the labels, examining the brush strokes and looking thoughtful. I had positioned myself where I assumed many artists would prefer me to gaze at their work, but I felt like a philistine. I also had a hard time seeing the paintings behind all the people crowded around them.

The point is that people often behave differently than how others - such as artists and museum directors - think they should. In fact, the crowd in MOMA would have been perfectly happy viewing the art had it been hung inside a railroad car. I stood there and gloated about the millions that had been spent to make me happy in my "space."

Here's how Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Post describes the plans for NMAH:

"After four decades of sending visitors through a maze of hallways and galleries, the museum is planning to redo the core of the building, adding 10-foot-high 'artifact walls' on the first and second floors -- glass cases that will display hundreds of items from the museum's vast collections. The center of the 750,000-square-foot building will have an atrium with a new skylight and a glass staircase that will allow visitors at the entrance from the Mall to see all the way through the building to the entrance on Constitution Avenue. . .

"The announcement of the new plan for the building comes four years after a blue-ribbon commission issued a report sharply critical of the museum's layout and organization. The report said the museum didn't meet any obvious test of comprehensibility or coherence," adding that even its employees got lost in the building. It suggested old-fashioned timelines, directories of the events of American history and a more coherent narrative.

"The panel was most concerned that the museum was claustrophobic, uninspired and cluttered. 'Now it has opened up the lines of sight horizontally and brought in light vertically,' [commission chairman Richard] Darman said."

In fact, the museum as it now exists is one of the most popular in the world. It is indeed cluttered, just like an enticing attic or basement; and it is sometimes uninspired but never claustrophobic or incoherent. It represents, with surprising honesty, the anarchistic chaos of American virtues.

Now, I admit I'm biased. The museum is filled with things I like, starting when you first walk in the door and ahead of you are the chairs, tables and counters from the ice cream parlor down the street from where I lived as a kid. Then there's the steam engine that is so big they had to build the museum around it and the upright transposing piano made for Irving Berlin. Berlin was self taught and preferred to play on the black keys, just like Mr. Platt, my anthropology teacher, who also gave me pop piano lessons in high school. In another room, there's a big navigational buoy sitting like a Roman statue to warm the heart of ex-coastguardmen like myself and an actual piece of Route 66 as well as a mid 1980s minivan just like the one I used to have.

Yes, I'm biased, but approximately three million people each year find similar icons with which they can recall, relax, reflect, and bore their families talking about.

But planners prefer things neat, comprehensive and with a coherent narrative. Not to mention timelines, even if nothing much happened in 1837 and even if time lines are not a particular useful way to organized as multifaceted a culture as America's.

And they love that space. Says Trescott, "The museum is planning to redo the core of the building, adding 10-foot-high 'artifact walls' on the first and second floors -- glass cases that will display hundreds of items from the museum's vast collections. The center of the 750,000-square-foot building will have an atrium with a new skylight and a glass staircase that will allow visitors at the entrance from the Mall to see all the way through the building to the entrance on Constitution Avenue."

The problem here is a combination of too little and too much. Once I've spent ten seconds seeing all the way through the building to the entrance on Constitution Avenue, what will I do next? Probably ask a guard where they've put the trains. On the other hand, ten foot artifact walls with hundreds of items - based on other such exhibits I've seen - will quickly wear me out. Such things remind me of the back room of shoe stores and I'll probably soon ask a guard whether they still have Irving Berlin's piano.

There is a tendency in the museum world these days, as elsewhere in America, to use design as a substitute for evidence, style as a substitute for reality, empty space as a substitute for substance, and abstract words as a substitute for specific knowledge. Ironically, it all costs a lot of money that could better be spent on creating the sort of alternate realities that actually draws people to such places.

The sad thing is that the Museum of American History already understood this. Now it seems to want to forget it all.

MORE MUZIM MUSIN'

The Attica that wasn't

On September 13, 1971, 500 New York state troopers stormed Attica Correctional Facility on orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller to end a four-day standoff following a prisoner revolt that included the taking of hostages. The police fired 2,200 bullets in nine minutes and before it was over 29 inmates and ten guards were dead and at least 86 others were wounded. One year later, there was a prisoner revolt at the Washington, DC Jail during which the director of DC Corrections and a number of guards were taken hostage. But, unlike Attica, no one was killed. Perhaps this is why so few remember what happened on a night when judges, politicians, U.S. Marshals, prisoners, and hostages all gathered in Courtroom 16 to see what could be done - brought together by a single judge who wasn't afraid to talk when others wanted to shoot. The peaceful resolution of the DC Jail uprising was one of the most extraordinary stories I ever covered and my contemporary account follows. I was planning to tell this story anyway, but the events of September 11 let it serve a new purpose - as a parable about the alternatives that are available to us even in the worst of times.

THE CAST

Marion and Mary Treadwell Barry are civil rights leaders. Marion serves on the School Board and is one of the most popular leaders in the city. He will later serve on the City Council and as mayor.

Walter Fauntroy is the city's non-voting delegate to Congress.

Tedson Meyers, who is white, and Willie Hardy, who is black, serve on the DC City Council, a body appointed by President Richard Nixon.

Luke Moore is a popular local black figure, later U.S. Marshall for the city.

Charles Halleck is a white judge in the Superior Court, the son of a former Republican Speaker of the House.

Del Lewis is a black civic leader, later head of the local telephone company and then president of NPR.

Petey Greene is a black activist.

Judge William Bryant is a highly respected black judge.

Kenneth Hardy is the DC Corrections chief, being held hostage by the rebellious prisoners.

Walter Washington is the appointed mayor-commissioner. Four years earlier he had avoided bloodshed in the 1968 disturbances by refusing orders from the White House to shoot rioters.

Sterling Tucker is the city council chair.

Joe Yeldell is a member of the city council.

The courtroom, number 16, is crowded. Prisoners, lawyers, Marion and Mary Barry, Walter Fauntroy, Tedson Meyers, Willie Hardy, Luke Moore, Charles Halleck, Del Lewis, Petey Greene. People talking during the hearing, witnesses saying things seldom heard in court . . . When Judge William Bryant recesses court, people smoke in the courtroom . . . Ken Hardy, DC Corrections chief, hostage, is there, but you don't notice him at first. . . . William Brown, facing an armed robbery charge, gets up before the judge and tells him of the inequities in his case:

Judge Bryant: The moving finger having writ, I can't erase it.

Brown: I knew there was nothing that could be done for it. I'm thinking of the others - the little baby brothers of mine.

Bryant: The problem is that so many baby brothers have put people at the end of a pistol and shot them.

Brown: Then the alternative is to ruin them for life (Turns to audience, voice rising) You say nothing can be done about it. Our little babies are over at the jail and it's really pitiful. You say they put a gun in their hand. No. Y'all put a gun in his hand. 'Cause all you do is talkin', talkin' talkin'. You gonna put a gun in a 15 year old's hand and the police will kill him like that boy with the bicycle. We're tired over at that jail. A rat will get tired and come out of his hole knowing that death awaits him. We don't want to harm Mr. Hardy. We love Mr. Hardy. We don't want to kill nobody. We don't want to hurt nobody. We are tired of people putting us in positions where we act like animals . . . Fauntroy, it was the first time we seen him. Walter Washington wasn't concerned. Marion Barry came right away - he always comes but he doesn't have the power . . . We're going to keep on, and keep on, and keep on until somebody die. Then they gonna say, 'Wow , they were serious.'

Applause, right-ons, a warning from the judge. Another prisoner: "What we came here for and what we're getting is two different things. Nobody thinks this is real. We didn't come down here to rap with you on your high pedestal. This was like a dry run." . . . Hardy is leaving the courtroom, looks awful. Petey Greene is helping him. Outside a TV man tries for an interview. Greene screams at him: "The inmates let him go. That's how good he is. Man's up all night and you talk about motherfucking cameras." Greene is crying. Hardy is on his way to a hospital with what seems to be a heart attack . . . Back at the jail, prisoners and other hostages await word of the emergency court hearing that had been called following the rebellion early that morning. Recess. Everyone is tired. Eyes seem to stare without seeing. Jail guard hostages sit at counsel table glum and silent . . . Judge Halleck starts to rap with some of the prisoners: "The first man who gets a hose on them, you get a habeas corpus and come into my court and I'll stop it." Says a prisoner: "They don't pay any attention to courts. They're ignorant over there." Halleck to prisoner waiting eight months for trial: "Sixth Amendment guarantees right of speedy trial." To another: "Last Friday I had fifty felony cases." Learn later that Halleck offered to go down to jail to speed up processing of complaints . . . Sterling Tucker comes over, "The guards are talking about going out. Nobody is listening to them" . . . Reporter says there's word of a disturbance over at the Women's Detention Center. Prisoner comes up to reporter:

"Did you say they had another riot?" "Over at the Women's Detention Center." "Oh yeah, right on!"

Mother of youth in jail opens up. She has six children 22 to 16. She was separated from her husband when the baby was one year old. Now the baby is in D.C. Jail, swept up in the trouble. The mother works two jobs, one twelve hours a day, another on weekends. The kid is locked up on a charge of having raped and strangled a 7-year-old girl. Been over at the jail 2 months waiting trial. Kid was run over by a car when he was little. Never seemed quite right since. Only child to get into serious trouble. "If he didn't do it, they should find the one who did ," the mother says. "If he did it, I want him to be punished but I want him to get help." . . . A few days later the Post would interview the mother of the victim. She has eight children, twenty down to ten. "I tried to raise them right. Many times I told them how easy it is to get in trouble and how hard it is to get out. And then I tell them, if you do get in trouble don't call momma, 'cause there's nothing I can do."

The prisoners have their say. Judge Bryant offers to fix things up a bit. Just a bit. Segregate the juveniles. Do something about food and temperature. Hurry up the suit against the jail now pending In his court. Is it enough to save the hostages?

Back to the jail. The prisoners go in a white bus. The crowd outside the jail is smaller than it had been earlier in the day. Wait. Rumor that cellblock #2 has been seized. Wait to hear that denied. Joe Yeldell shows up with a psychiatrist to begin screening inmates to see who belongs at St. E's [the mental hospital] . . . That's about 10:33 p.m. . . Ken Kennedy, Northeast factotum, waits along the police line. Earlier he'd been inside. "Congresswoman Chisholm played a great role," he says. Kennedy had brought six inmates from Lorton to the jail to help in the negotiations.

11:35 p.m. Mary Treadwell Barry comes out from the jail. "They want two brothers from the black press." "What does that mean?" asks a white reporter.

Decide on one black reporter from print media and one from TV. Problem with TV crews. Union rules call for three men and at best only one is black. WTTG recruits a black minister behind the police line to serve as light man. Others follow suit. Union technicians are getting uptight. Crowd gathers around Mary Barry. Union man returns to police lines: "They've agreed to pay one day's pay to a sound man and electrician at NBC and WTTG." Susan Truitt of WTTG covers herself: "If I don't get sound on film [from the amateur operator], I'm not paying for a soundman. " . . . Nine hostages and a frigging union dispute is going on outside . . . Deputy Chief Owen Davis is playing out his role of being the top bully on the force, threatening a reporter who stood in the wrong place. But this is a sensitive situation, requiring subtlety, and they're keeping Davis out of the foreground.

Now here's Marion Barry. They're going to let all the reporters in. "Show your press passes and go in quietly. Nothing is happening in there. Don't rush in."

Into an anteroom behind the front door. The door locks behind us. A dozen CDU men with tear gas are lounging in the room. The door to the visitors' rotunda opens and there are the prisoners; the lawyers rushed down by Judge Bryant - 30 or 40 of them including James Heller and Ralph Temple of the ACLU; District Building types like Dugas, Duncan and Yeldell; Walter Fauntroy and Sterling Tucker; negotiators Ron Goldfarb and Julian Tepper; guards; cops; all milling around a cavernous room under huge, bad 1940's murals including one of raising the flag at Iwo Jima. The echo is jamming out the voice of the prisoner who is on a table trying to explain that the man beside him had been beaten by a prison guard while the court hearing was in progress. They're mad. What is happening? A turn for the worse? Why are we in there? Why are some of the most powerful and some of the weakest men in the city wandering around this towering hall listening to each other, shouting at each other? It's like one of Fellini's movies. And there's nobody around to explain. Why have the prisoners seemed to be talking sense and the unjailed seemed bound and gagged? There's a news conference going on, but you have to be at mike's length to catch the words. There's a prisoner yelling at jail head Anderson McGruder, who's not saying anything back . . .

No it's not a movie. But the set of a movie, maybe about Attica, during a break. In real life, congressmen, councilmen and newsmen don't mill around a jail hall with two hundred prisoners. Prisoners don't go up to the jailer like at some reception and tell him off . . .

The press has regrouped. Standing on a table, you can see a guard talking to the mikes: "I feel okay. They treated me all right." The hostages are being released. It is real, after all. Julian Tepper says the inmates lived up to every commitment. They released the hostages because "we promised to stay until their problems were dealt with." Earlier that day Charles Rodgers, deputy chief of corrections, had said, "If there's one shot, we're going in there and shoot all 182 of them [inmates in the rebellious cellblock]. Now negotiator Tepper is hugging Rodgers.

Time to go home . . . What had happened? Was it a real event - or just a commercial from the dispossessed - "We'll be back after this brief reminder from the prisoners at the D.C. Jail." Was it a victory for the jailed or a successful exercise in crisis management . . . Shirley Chisholm was beautiful. Marion and Mary were. So were Tepper, Hardy, Goldfarb, Petey Greene. "Judge Bryant, handled it beautifully," said a civil rights lawyer. Beautiful. Beautiful. Unless you are still in cellblock I. . . .What's beautiful about bailing out bureaucrats or a Congress too scared or mean to introduce simple decency to the city jail? It was just a dirty business compelled by the need to save ten lives. Ms. Chisholm, the Barrys, Tepper, Petey Greene don't want cheers; they want something done about the jail.

The rise of a liberal aristocracy and the fall of America

Future historians seeking to discover why America so easily surrendered its democratic traditions and constitutional government in 2001 will find plenty to study in the rise of a liberal aristocracy that became increasingly disinterested in such values. Like all aristocracies, it existed primarily to protect itself, had an impermeable faith in its own virtue, and held in contempt those who did not share its values or accept its hegemony.

For many years, 20th century liberalism was saved from becoming an aristocracy because of the dominance of such constituencies as labor, recent immigrants, and ethnic minorities. By the 1960s, however, these constituencies - thanks in part to successful liberal policies - had advanced socially and economically to the point that they no longer functioned as a massive reminder of what liberalism was meant to be about.

With the end of the Great Society, liberal Democrats began a steady retreat from liberalism climaxing in the Clinton's administration's systematic dismantling of liberal programs and paradigms.

The two greatest victims of this retreat were social democracy and civil liberties. It was not that the new liberal aristocrats actually opposed either; it just didn't matter much to them. Liberalism was no longer a matter of masses yearning to breathe free, but of boomers yearning for an SUV.

While there were still repeated expressions of faith in a declining number of icons such as diversity, abortion, and the environment, the fact was that the liberal elite had become far more characterized by its capacity for self-defense than by its concern for others. After all, although seldom mentioned, the stereotypical boomer or yuppie was, in fact, were liberals. So were the rising elites of entertainment and journalism.

Most striking among these elites was the disappearing concern for those at the bottom. Liberal city councils went after the homeless and engaged in other forms of socio-economic cleansing; the Clinton administration attacked welfare in a manner once limited to the Republican right; prison populations soared without a murmur from the liberals; Democrats supported without question a cruel and unconstitutional war on drugs; the liberal media aristocrats prided themselves in faux realpolitik and patronizing prescriptions for the masses. And if you went to church or carried a gun you were a fool or worse.

The trend produced remarkable betrayals of liberal values. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus backed the war on drugs; the leaders of NOW repeatedly defended a serial sexual predator in the White House. And liberal academia provided all purpose justification through the magic of postmodern rationalization.

Meanwhile, for all the talk of diversity, the percentage of blacks in colleges actually peaked in the late 1970s. The gap between the percentage of young whites and blacks in college likewise actually grew over the past thirty years. And meanwhile, the prison population - disproportionately minority - soared from under 400,000 in 1970 to about two million today.

Through it all, the liberal aristocracy was the dog that didn't bark. Just as Sherlock Holmes' creature failed to warn of an intruder, so America's liberal leadership failed repeatedly to warn of infringements of civil liberties, of unconstitutional acts and legislation, or to rise to the defense of people beyond its own class.

When the liberal aristocracy backed the war on drugs, happily sacrificed national and local sovereignty to multinational corporations, yawned as the Clintons disassembled their own purported cause and became incensed when Ralph Nader dared to stand up for it, it was clear that this atrophied elite would not handle a real crisis.

And now it has happened - and only one liberal Democrat in the Senate opposes vast new police powers and hardly a liberal voice on TV or the op ed pages speaks for sanity. The irony is that the public will not reward the liberal aristocracy for its cowardice but will listen even more devotedly to those before whom the liberals have cowered. In the end, the liberal elite will not only have betrayed its own constituency, it won't even have saved itself.

-2001

An apology to younger Americans

In observance of the approaching 66th anniversary of my arrival on this planet I would like to apologize to you on behalf of my generation. Even members of Confederacy had the grace to secede from the union; my generation has remained within like a deadly virus, subverting it, shaming it, screwing it, stealing from it, and finally strangling it. It will likely be known as the worst generation - the one that brought the First American Republic down - unmatched in the damage it has done to the Constitution, the environment, and a two century struggle to create a society democratic and decent in its politics, economics, and social concourse.

To be sure, when we were young we were, as we said then, somethin' else. We launched the civil rights, women's, gay, and environmental movements, not to mention creating some memorable music before descending into disco. Soon other things started to go downhill rapidly. We became not only the generation that invented the phrase, 'never trust anyone over thirty,' we proved it.

My lawyer assures me that my personal liability in all this is limited to a few missteps including energy inefficiency, chronic ineffectiveness, owning a minivan, and occasionally listening to Don Imus. But he agrees that a public apology would be helpful in the event of a war crimes tribunal or in determining reparations owed by my heirs to future generations.

Besides, it is unlikely that any of my cohorts will apologize as it is against their principles to do so absent pending court action or especially poor media. And as my attorney notes, there are plenty of things worthy of contrition, such as the New York Times' publishing Tom Friedman, which do not actually constitute a criminal offense.

For purposes of public remorse, incidentally, I define my generation as consisting of anyone who reached 40 after Watergate and who was at least 40 on September 11, 2001. I choose these dates because the resignation of Nixon was about the last good thing to happen to America and September 11 ended most hope that anything good would happen soon again.

And so, on behalf of all my fellow members of America's crummiest generation, I make this humble confession, begging forgiveness from those who follow:

I apologize for Bhopal and Three Mile Island and, in advance, for all the biological, chemical or nuclear disasters that will occur thanks to economic rapaciousness and without the slightest help from a terrorist.

I am truly sorry for Martha Stewart, the Washington Post, Howard Stern, the Brookings Institution, and Bill O'Reilly,

I regret any lasting infirmities - such as the loss of the republic - that occurred unnoticed while the country's elite was sedated by "Morning Edition," C-SPAN, Jim Lehrer, and Ted Koppel.

I am profoundly embarrassed by the way we destroyed the public school system of our country.

I regret that we got the Muslim world so mad at us and that we couldn't come up with any better solution than to get it madder.

I am sorry about all the extra hurricanes, tornados, and heat waves that have occurred while we continued to debate whether there was anything called global warming.

I apologize for any inconvenience, such as prison time, that may have occurred as a result of criminalizing the use of marijuana while keeping legal the far more dangerous drugs we enjoyed such as vodka and Marlboros.

I also regret that the war on drugs helped lay the groundwork for the end of constitutional government and proved more deadly to young black urban males than serving in Vietnam was to their fathers.

I am sorry that the so many leading graduates of our leading universities seem mainly to have learned an arrogance that gives theory invulnerability to fact.

I apologize for those scientists who thought coming up with new ways to destroy humanity was a good use of their time.

I am sorry about increasing crowding on the roads, at events, and while getting services, but overpopulation was one subject we just didn't want to talk about.

I regret that we helped to redefine 'cool' from being an inner state of grace and rebellion to being an outward display of consumption and compliance.

I would like to say how sad I am about your increased likelihood of getting skin cancer because of the environmental changes we created in the atmosphere.

I am really sorry that we inflicted upon you the likes of George Bush and Bill Clinton.

I apologize for the Council on Foreign Relations and the ten percent of its members who pretend to be objective journalists. And I apologize for any other 'objective journalists' moonlighting for the CIA.

My deepest apologies for paying more attention to our Humvees on the Tigris and Euphrates than to our levees on the Mississippi.

I really feel remorse for having replaced movie plots with multiple explosions, and for using sexual attractiveness as a substitute for all other forms of talent.

I apologize for the Harvard Business School and the Yale Law School and all the deplorable effluvia from the same, including the transformation of the Organization Man into a sex symbol.

I apologize for managerial revolutions, mission statements, synergy, cutting edges, proactive and world class entrepreneurs, strategic planning, bottom lines, and exit interviews.

I am truly sorry we could make no greater contribution to philosophy than the justification of greed in the guise of free market economics, the sanctification of imperialism in the name of nation building, and the notion that it takes only 12 steps to solve all your problems.

I apologize for the damage we have done to the English language including the use of nouns as verbs, abstractions as replacement for facts, the pointless compoundingofwords, and placing CapiTaLs wherever we feel like it.

I regret our having passed more new laws in the past three decades than during the first two hundred years of the American nation.

I regret that you are now regarded as a potential terrorist, addict, or sexual predator more often than you are considered a valued citizen.

I am truly sorry for what we have done to childhood, including over-scheduling it, replacing Kermit with Barney, teaching children excessive fear and absurd competitiveness, diagnosing them into drug dependency, and punishing them for drawing 'inappropriate' pictures in the margins of their textbooks.

And now that we've gotten all that out of the way, it is time to move on and put it all behind us. After all, while we may have created this mess, it is your task to clean it up. Of course, if you need any advice, don't hesitate to ask.

2003