Sam Smith
IF nothing happens to change things, it looks as if Hillary Clinton will be running against Rudy Giuliani in 2008. Let's hope something happens to change things because it is hard to imagine a more depressing choice, the final triumph of money and media over democracy and sanity.
Yet, even on the left, one doesn't get much sense that we seem to be moving from frying pan to fire. Six years bitter experience has left many liberals and progressives convinced that exorcising the demon in the White House and finding a Democratic replacement is all we need for happiness.
It doesn't work like that. It is a reasonable bet that after eight years of the next administration - of whatever party - the overwhelming majority of the sins of the Bush years will remain, quietly institutionalized either because of lack of will, lack of votes or an excess of inertia.
The primary reason for this is that in politics we get the presidents we deserve and a Clinton-Giuliani race would reflect the fact that in neither party is there sufficient will to do things differently - to rebel against the corrupt, cynical anti-democratic spirit that these two power-obsessed leaders represent.
As the right has demonstrated over the past quarter century, the creation of a new popular paradigm is a complex, expensive and lengthy business. One can argue that the right had a grossly unfair advantage by controlling the hearts of corporations, mass media and evangelicals who happily and mindlessly spread its message to an unwitting electorate.
This is true, but there is another factor that hardly ever gets discussed. The left has blown it.
In fact, since the beginning of the Reagan administration there has not been a single mass movement on the part of the left that has made any significant impact on the country.
Part of this has been a matter of priorities. Under Reagan and the Bushes, the left was happy to do what it seems to like best: protest. Under Clinton it switched gears and quietly and obediently complied. In either case - dissenter or drone - the left did little to offer Americans an alternative vision, platform or movement.
Twenty years ago, as a member of the board of a national liberal organization, I found words for my concern as we discussed the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. Defeating Bork, I noted, was a necessity but it was not a policy. And we needed more policies.
I could tell from the room that I had said something alien. Who are we, I sensed around me, if we are not in opposition?
As recently as the last presidential campaign, I suggested a national progressive confab at which a list of major priorities would be compiled so everyone would know what we wanted, instead of leaving it to Fox News and David Broder to define for us. Again, it fell flat.
I suspect a part of the problem is that liberals behave much like many abused children; they view themselves more as victims than as survivors. This is not surprising given that two of their major constituencies - blacks and Jews - place particular emphasis on victimhood in their political rhetoric. But in the end, it is a choice that even the worst treated make in different ways, which is why some of the most impressive survivors are found in some of America's worst neighborhoods.
Rather than exhibiting the will to rewrite the story of themselves and America, too often liberals wallow in the mud pits into which their opponents have driven them and, when they can't take any more, willingly grab the hand of whatever hustler comes their way.
In this way, 2008 already reminds one of 1992 when liberals lined up for Clinton because he looked like he would win and might throw them a few bones along the way. In fact, in different ways, both Hillary Clinton and Brack Obama are modeling their efforts on Bill Clinton.
With HRC it's a quality that the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette found in her husband: "It is not the compromises [Clinton] has made that trouble so much as the unavoidable suspicion that he has no great principles to compromise." With Obama it's the cynical use of hope - or, as Clinton put it, Hope - treated as though it was the candidate's personal gift to provide. In fact, in the last days of his campaign, Clinton ran a television commercial filmed from the window of a moving bus. The voice-over said: "Something's happening out there. A feeling. Call it hope. That a country can move in a new direction. That the future is something to look forward to. Not fear. If that's what you're feeling, you may have noticed something else. You are not alone." Obama before his time.
In either case there is a quality that Christopher Hitchens found in early Clinton Washington as being like that in Peter Pan, in which the children are told that if they stop clapping, Tinker Belle will die.
That pretty well sums up today's liberalism: you either oppose or you clap.
There are at least three other reasons beyond the psychological why this is so.
First: Major liberal organizations function much like all lobbying groups. Not only are they too far removed from the grassroots and too close to power, they are extremely protective of their own position in among the elite. Thus the mere notion of an effective coalition is troubling.
Second: Since they don't have as much money as the right, it would seem logical that liberal groups became expert as grass root organizing. They're not. One explanation for this is that since the advent of television, everyone has played by the rules of virtual communication and part of this reduces the voter to a viewer, petition signer, or contributor. One rarely finds anymore the sort of organizing spirit of, say, Saul Alinsky or the anti-poverty era and - on the left - scarcely ever does one see the multi-faceted organizing of the Christian right. If the left only uses the tools of mass media, they will have their Move Ons to be sure, but the right will just keep moving on.
Third: Much of the power and the money in liberal organizations comes from a new liberal elite - including large numbers of successful urbanites, women, gays, blacks etc. This elite has its own agenda which - regardless of its virtues - tends to ignore or deemphasize agendas of the less powerful and less well off who, incidentally, vote in much larger numbers. This is not an incurable problem but it at least has to be faced.
One big exception to all this is the Democratic populist wing, an ill-formed amalgam that believes Democrats are here to do the most good for the most people. But it, too, has yet to find good footings for a new movement. Even the efforts of John Edwards in this regard will ultimately fail unless people rally to his cause and not just to his candidacy.
Another major exception is the Green Party which, good as its heart is, has yet to tie its platform into a small and neat enough package that the media, let alone America, can grasp.
In short, the American left has a choice. Either it remains the victim of alternative predators - the right on one hand, the Clintons and Obamas on the other. Or it takes charge of its own future and that of the country by agreeing within itself on a clear program and then - in the manner of the abolitionists, populists, socialists, suffragettes and civil rights activists - takes this message to every little corner of the land it is trying to change for the better.
February 15, 2007
February 14, 2007
THE CAPITAL'S FAVORITE SORT OF CRISIS
IN ANOTHER OF ITS wonderfully fusty headlines, the Washington Post woke up readers today with the banner: Bracing for an Unwelcome Glaze. What with 28 reporters on the sleet story, that seemed a little timid even for the Post so it at least livened things up a bit on its web page.
Meanwhile, Matt Drudge was thrilled to report that a House hearing on global warming - like just about everything else in town - had been cancelled because of the storm. Just to avoid such joy, we have long argued that 'climate change' was a better term than 'global warming.' In any case, it certainly is fortunate that we're not suffering from global cooling or Washington would have shut down long ago.
What the Post had actually sent out 28 reporters to cover was, according to Accuweather, exactly .92 inches of precipitation. But the Post takes such things quite seriously as your editor discovered two decades ago when he was still in the publication's good graces. He had been asked to write a piece on the latest storm and sat in an office for half an hour as the editor of the Outlook section and the op ed page editor argued over who would get to run it. The amazing thing was that neither had read the actual article. What they were really arguing about was who was in charge of snow.
Washington has never handled snow well. The most tragic example occurred in 1922 and a January storm brought 28 inches. On January 28 the roof collapsed on the Knickerbocker Theater, occupied by 900 persons. 98 were crushed to death and another 158 were injured.
Not long after Marion Barry took office in the 1970s, the Post's Milton Coleman rode the streets with the mayor and gleaned some disturbing information. As I described it, "Wrote Coleman: 'The mayor is not dealing with this snow problem personally. He said he is confident that the chore is being capably handled by his two right-hand men -- city administrator Elijah B. Rogers and general assistant Ivanhoe Donaldson. It is not a job for the city's elected leader."
"Barry, who had just returned from a four-day vacation in Miami, told Coleman: 'There are more important things for me to worry about than snow. . .' He was asked how people should get to work. Barry said they should take the bus. It was pointed out that the buses weren't running. Said Barry: 'They can walk.' He added: 'There must be 5000 streets in the District of Columbia. You can't clean them all.'"
Barry had equaled in indifference - if not in eloquence - the earlier thoughts of Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston: "The Lord brought it; let the Lord take it away."
SAM SMITH, WASHINGTON POST, FEB 1, 1987 - Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about 1 percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.
Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.
How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.
To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. . .
Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours.
I asked if he could explain the logic of a not-uncommon Washington scene: two snow plows working directly behind each other, sometimes with a Department of Public Works pickup truck in the lead. He just laughed and said, "No." . . .
And you don't wait until four inches have piled up before you start plowing. You start when you've got an inch and a half, and you stay ahead of the storm. And you don't leave it to the Almighty once ice-covered streets become mushy. You run the plows through and get the stuff off. Here, even downtown, we let the streets freeze again so the morning traffic reporters will have something to talk about. . .
It will be argued that northern cities are willing to pay a high premium for clearing their streets because they get so much snow. But this year Portland budgeted, like most cities, for the best of all possible worlds: 25 inches, a winter roughly comparable to ours so far. With one-third the street mileage of D.C., Portland still planned to spend one-third more.
Why? Maybe because they know what bringing a city to a halt really costs. Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.
Meanwhile, Matt Drudge was thrilled to report that a House hearing on global warming - like just about everything else in town - had been cancelled because of the storm. Just to avoid such joy, we have long argued that 'climate change' was a better term than 'global warming.' In any case, it certainly is fortunate that we're not suffering from global cooling or Washington would have shut down long ago.
What the Post had actually sent out 28 reporters to cover was, according to Accuweather, exactly .92 inches of precipitation. But the Post takes such things quite seriously as your editor discovered two decades ago when he was still in the publication's good graces. He had been asked to write a piece on the latest storm and sat in an office for half an hour as the editor of the Outlook section and the op ed page editor argued over who would get to run it. The amazing thing was that neither had read the actual article. What they were really arguing about was who was in charge of snow.
Washington has never handled snow well. The most tragic example occurred in 1922 and a January storm brought 28 inches. On January 28 the roof collapsed on the Knickerbocker Theater, occupied by 900 persons. 98 were crushed to death and another 158 were injured.
Not long after Marion Barry took office in the 1970s, the Post's Milton Coleman rode the streets with the mayor and gleaned some disturbing information. As I described it, "Wrote Coleman: 'The mayor is not dealing with this snow problem personally. He said he is confident that the chore is being capably handled by his two right-hand men -- city administrator Elijah B. Rogers and general assistant Ivanhoe Donaldson. It is not a job for the city's elected leader."
"Barry, who had just returned from a four-day vacation in Miami, told Coleman: 'There are more important things for me to worry about than snow. . .' He was asked how people should get to work. Barry said they should take the bus. It was pointed out that the buses weren't running. Said Barry: 'They can walk.' He added: 'There must be 5000 streets in the District of Columbia. You can't clean them all.'"
Barry had equaled in indifference - if not in eloquence - the earlier thoughts of Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston: "The Lord brought it; let the Lord take it away."
SAM SMITH, WASHINGTON POST, FEB 1, 1987 - Al Thompson is superintendent of roads in Freeport, Maine, with a population about 1 percent of that of the District. But what Maine lacks in people, it makes up in roads, so Al Thompson has about 12 percent of Washington's asphalt mileage to look after.
Now Al doesn't have anything like the equivalent of Connecticut and Wisconsin avenues in his charge, and the local politicians tend to realize that nature often is impervious to memos, directives and policy guidelines. On the other hand, he works without the benefit of Snow Command Centers, Computerized Cancellation Centers and Codes Yellow. What he does have is five trucks with 12-foot dustpans and 11-foot wings.
How long does it take his trucks to cover 130 miles? Says Al: "An hour and a half, an hour and three-quarters." Then it takes another three hours for a second "cleanup" trip.
To put it in D.C. terms, that would mean, with the number of vehicles we've got (if properly equipped), you theoretically could sweep through the city in a couple of hours. . .
Now, before someone at the District Building picks up the phone to tell The Post about "complex urban problems," let me tell you about George Flaherty. He's director of parks and public works for Portland, Maine. Portland is about one-tenth the size of D.C. but has nearly 30 percent of its street mileage. He uses about a quarter of D.C.'s equipment and expects to have the job done in 8 to 10 hours.
I asked if he could explain the logic of a not-uncommon Washington scene: two snow plows working directly behind each other, sometimes with a Department of Public Works pickup truck in the lead. He just laughed and said, "No." . . .
And you don't wait until four inches have piled up before you start plowing. You start when you've got an inch and a half, and you stay ahead of the storm. And you don't leave it to the Almighty once ice-covered streets become mushy. You run the plows through and get the stuff off. Here, even downtown, we let the streets freeze again so the morning traffic reporters will have something to talk about. . .
It will be argued that northern cities are willing to pay a high premium for clearing their streets because they get so much snow. But this year Portland budgeted, like most cities, for the best of all possible worlds: 25 inches, a winter roughly comparable to ours so far. With one-third the street mileage of D.C., Portland still planned to spend one-third more.
Why? Maybe because they know what bringing a city to a halt really costs. Here are some figures that will give you a rough idea of the costs of closing down D.C. for a day: the D.C. government spends $3 million a day on its payroll; the federal government spends close to $20 million a day for its D.C. payroll; private businesses spend another $30 million. What did D.C. budget for snow removal? Just under $1 million. Calculate the odds yourself.
The crash of America
From the March 1995 Progressive Review
The premise here is simple: when the plane crashes, find out why.
Simple it may be, but few in federal Washington even seem to notice that the country they came to rule has crumbled around them and fewer still would accept the notion that it might be useful to inquire as to the cause of this disaster. The disaster, of course, is that of the country -- not that of its elite, which still floats like a hovercraft above the roiled waters of America.
To be sure, the more traditional faction of this elite has suffered a significant political blow in recent months, but now there is a new elite, headed by a man who hails from the richest county in Georgia, represents some of the wealthiest interests in the country, and still manages to call other people "elitist." This particular form of demagoguery is far from novel. Nixon and Wallace used it freely but then socio-economically they had better credentials for doing so. By 1978, says William Safire, elitism had already "become a standard blast at anyone with an undue regard for excellence as a criterion for the receipt of money or power."
The old elite, in its purest form, went to Ivy schools, practiced law or investments, and belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The new elite has been raised in the groves of advertising, marketing and focus groups, and is representative not of its legislative districts but of the largest trade associations. Its members speak not American but postmodern Orwellian. Listening to their rhetoric is like being trapped at table 129 -- with a bursting bladder and all the doors locked -- during a never-endng congressional dinner of the Asbestos Manufacturers Association. The members of this new elite may be different, yet by income, attitude and isolation, they are every bit as elitist as those they have expelled.
Thus the recent transfer of power was not from elitism to populism, but rather from one elite to another. And it did not happen, contrary to what one might glean from the elite media, as a result of some stunning sagacity on the part of the new crowd, but mostly due to the compounding ignorance, insularity and ineffectiveness of the old.
This old elite particularly prided itself in its wisdom and intelligence, but its greatest true skill was the successful circumnavigation of collective guilt. No embarrassment was too great, no crisis too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too unjustified, that it became ashamed. Instead, its members would rise as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future. Everyone would nod their heads and the foxes would renovate the chicken house once more.
Psychologically impervious to either misfortune or fact, this elite never felt any need for rigorous self-examination. When things got truly out of hand, as when a president was assassinated, a blue ribbon investigation would be called, producing a ritual of introspection that, almost without exception, came to conclusions that were faulty, incomplete or deliberately deceptive.
When members of the elite faltered -- a Kissinger, Helms, McNamara, Abrams and so forth -- their peers moved quickly to protect, rehabilitate and restore them to the pantheon of the wise. Given that more than ten percent of the Council on Foreign Relations -- a sort of Elks Club for the tenured elite -- is composed of journalists, it is not surprising to find the latter often serving as EMTs, reviving some beloved source suffering a momentary attack of imperfection. This service was not, of course, provided to all. For example, surgeons general from the lesser ethnic groups could not expect rehabilitation, nor could individuals whose misdeeds were personal rather than merely an abrogation of the Constitution.
All this was carried out with a numbing smugness. Like the Cromwell described in A Man for All Seasons, the prototypical member of the old elite possesses "a self conceit that can cradle gross crimes in the name of effective action."
But now, without doubt, the party is over. To be sure, the elite does not admit this any more than it admits it exists at all, but to those like myself born on the cusp of the Second World War there is no point to the pretense. We remember the victories and the celebrations of them; we remember men standing motionless for the national anthem in baseball stadiums with fedoras held over their hearts; the jobs waiting for you when you graduated from college; politicians who were revered; newscasters who were trusted; and music that dripped syrup over our spirits and made them sweet and sticky. We remember when there was a right and wrong and who belonged with each. We remember a time when those in power lied and were actually able to fool us. We remember what a real myth is like.
Now, among the young or the ethnic, you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. Most Americans believe we are on the wrong track. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed the natural habitats of the southern white pine and of the northern black human. We have created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, reduced their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have sold our downtowns to foreign companies and sold our environment to domestic ones. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched indifferently as the slain, the homeless and the miserable pile up. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to admire, but only to gawk.
Many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or commercially imitative of something that is no longer there. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner, but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And we still vote, but expect ever less in return.
Turning on others
An awfulness has come over us. We have become obsessed with what we should ignore and ignore what we should honor. We seem to have lost capacity for either grace or decency.
Something profound has happened and yet we are not even talking about it. The media won't tell us because it is largely servile towards, or owned by, those who have profited from the debacle. Instead, it daily aggravates our tendency to salve our discouragement by turning on others even more helpless than ourselves. The assault on the poor, minorities and immigrants is not an accident. It is what people do when they're not told what's really wrong, when the media won't let them in on the secret. It's one of power's oldest tricks: to deflect blame downward so the victims fight among themselves.
Nor is the destruction of social programs at every level mere happenstance. With the collapse of America's post-war empire, the country's elite has become increasingly concerned with getting more for itself while getting us to accept less. Hence the New York City budget that cut 24% from social services and added 7% to the police. It is, after all, cheaper to shoot or bury them then it is to sustain them. As Latin American countries have found, the children can live on the streets and the wealthy can hire guards to stand in front of their walled homes and life can be very pleasant as long as you are behind the wall and don't really think about it too much.
There is not among the elite, old or new, even any particular loyalty to this country. More and more, its business is elsewhere; and it is shamelessly willing to use political power to further that business. It seeks a playing field of greatly weakened countries in which stateless corporations and their managers are accountable to no one. The pledge of allegiance has been replaced by trade agreements. The House Speaker talks of America; his wife works abroad.
Thus not only does the American elite lack any sense of guilt for what has happened, it is, like a hit and run driver, leaving the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers -- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in action. No longer does even national myth connect them with the greater mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them from each other; Republicans and Democrats have become, rather than choices, degrees of the same thing.
Hi, I'm America and I'm a recovering country
It is long overdue time to admit such things -- and to force our leaders and the media to admit them as well. One of the less observed utilities of the 1960s was serving as a group intervention, interrupting the self-justified intoxication of the elite consensus. This intervention provided the intellectual, moral and psychological framework for much that happened.
We need such intervention now. We need to speak the truth. To admit freely that America has crashed. To tell the story of how America's own elite helped to bring it down. And to argue that, by consequence, they have lost their license to lead.
We further need to commence the sort of inquiry that disasters demand, an investigation into the death of American substance and of the American spirit. Before such an inquiry we might bring such evidence as:
The Vietnam War, the first great public disaster of the post-WWII best and brightest.
The destruction of the America city, beginning with the subsidized suburbanization of the fifties, continuing through the economic abandonment of downtowns in the 70s and 80s, and ending with the Reagan-Bush-Clinton withdrawal of urban aid.
Three decades of mob politics during which the country's elite snuggled up to its intelligence agencies, which in turn made numerous deleterious pacts with criminals, freebooters and drug lords.
The drug war, now more dangerous to black US males than was serving in Vietnam. A barbaric, unconstitutional, and counterproductive battle that has placed large sections of our cities under para-military occupation and has corrupted our political life -- from police precincts to governors' mansions.
The S&L and BCCI scandals, the bipartisan revival of robber baron politics that greatly destabilized our financial system.
The failure to exercise ecological wisdom before large numbers of human lives were endangered, species damaged or destroyed, and lands ruined.
The development of the corporate state in which the government is increasingly reduced to serving ever more powerful oligopolies.
The conversion of medicine from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.
.The encouragement of economic desertion. Through such means as NAFTA and GATT, America has hastened the emigration of its own commercial base.
The failure to halt the growing monopolization of information and ideas in the American media.
The retreat from common responsibility for the problems of the nation's less fortunate.
The nomination of Bill Clinton, a president picked, managed and bankrolled by America's elite. This final error devastated the Democratic Party and made possible last November's right-wing coup.
In each of these instances, the plans were drawn, sold and executed by those who considered themselves among the nation's smartest men and women. And in each case, the nation paid a fearful price. In the end we have been left with a country devoid of confidence, a nation beset by fears, short on jobs, bereft of joy, disputatious, sniveling, without compassion, internationally impotent, domestically catatonic -- in a word, shattered.
While other generations of leaders have failed the country, none has managed to do quite so much damage. The first step in recovery is to reveal how this came about, and by whose hand, and then to tell them to be off.
The premise here is simple: when the plane crashes, find out why.
Simple it may be, but few in federal Washington even seem to notice that the country they came to rule has crumbled around them and fewer still would accept the notion that it might be useful to inquire as to the cause of this disaster. The disaster, of course, is that of the country -- not that of its elite, which still floats like a hovercraft above the roiled waters of America.
To be sure, the more traditional faction of this elite has suffered a significant political blow in recent months, but now there is a new elite, headed by a man who hails from the richest county in Georgia, represents some of the wealthiest interests in the country, and still manages to call other people "elitist." This particular form of demagoguery is far from novel. Nixon and Wallace used it freely but then socio-economically they had better credentials for doing so. By 1978, says William Safire, elitism had already "become a standard blast at anyone with an undue regard for excellence as a criterion for the receipt of money or power."
The old elite, in its purest form, went to Ivy schools, practiced law or investments, and belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations. The new elite has been raised in the groves of advertising, marketing and focus groups, and is representative not of its legislative districts but of the largest trade associations. Its members speak not American but postmodern Orwellian. Listening to their rhetoric is like being trapped at table 129 -- with a bursting bladder and all the doors locked -- during a never-endng congressional dinner of the Asbestos Manufacturers Association. The members of this new elite may be different, yet by income, attitude and isolation, they are every bit as elitist as those they have expelled.
Thus the recent transfer of power was not from elitism to populism, but rather from one elite to another. And it did not happen, contrary to what one might glean from the elite media, as a result of some stunning sagacity on the part of the new crowd, but mostly due to the compounding ignorance, insularity and ineffectiveness of the old.
This old elite particularly prided itself in its wisdom and intelligence, but its greatest true skill was the successful circumnavigation of collective guilt. No embarrassment was too great, no crisis too unnecessary, no expense too inexplicable, and no war too unjustified, that it became ashamed. Instead, its members would rise as one to pronounce it not the time for blame, but rather for moving forward together into the future. Everyone would nod their heads and the foxes would renovate the chicken house once more.
Psychologically impervious to either misfortune or fact, this elite never felt any need for rigorous self-examination. When things got truly out of hand, as when a president was assassinated, a blue ribbon investigation would be called, producing a ritual of introspection that, almost without exception, came to conclusions that were faulty, incomplete or deliberately deceptive.
When members of the elite faltered -- a Kissinger, Helms, McNamara, Abrams and so forth -- their peers moved quickly to protect, rehabilitate and restore them to the pantheon of the wise. Given that more than ten percent of the Council on Foreign Relations -- a sort of Elks Club for the tenured elite -- is composed of journalists, it is not surprising to find the latter often serving as EMTs, reviving some beloved source suffering a momentary attack of imperfection. This service was not, of course, provided to all. For example, surgeons general from the lesser ethnic groups could not expect rehabilitation, nor could individuals whose misdeeds were personal rather than merely an abrogation of the Constitution.
All this was carried out with a numbing smugness. Like the Cromwell described in A Man for All Seasons, the prototypical member of the old elite possesses "a self conceit that can cradle gross crimes in the name of effective action."
But now, without doubt, the party is over. To be sure, the elite does not admit this any more than it admits it exists at all, but to those like myself born on the cusp of the Second World War there is no point to the pretense. We remember the victories and the celebrations of them; we remember men standing motionless for the national anthem in baseball stadiums with fedoras held over their hearts; the jobs waiting for you when you graduated from college; politicians who were revered; newscasters who were trusted; and music that dripped syrup over our spirits and made them sweet and sticky. We remember when there was a right and wrong and who belonged with each. We remember a time when those in power lied and were actually able to fool us. We remember what a real myth is like.
Now, among the young or the ethnic, you can't raise a majority that is proud of this country. Most Americans believe we are on the wrong track. We hate our politicians, ignore our moral voices, and distrust our media. We have destroyed the natural habitats of the southern white pine and of the northern black human. We have created the nation's first downwardly mobile generation, reduced their parent's income, and removed the jobs of each to distant lands. We have sold our downtowns to foreign companies and sold our environment to domestic ones. We have created rapacious oligopolies of defense and medicine, frittered away public revenues and watched indifferently as the slain, the homeless and the miserable pile up. Perhaps most telling, we are no longer able to admire, but only to gawk.
Many of the symbols of America remain, but they have become crude -- desperately or commercially imitative of something that is no longer there. We still stand for the Star Spangled Banner, but we no longer know what to do while on our feet. We still subscribe to the morning paper but it reads like stale beer. And we still vote, but expect ever less in return.
Turning on others
An awfulness has come over us. We have become obsessed with what we should ignore and ignore what we should honor. We seem to have lost capacity for either grace or decency.
Something profound has happened and yet we are not even talking about it. The media won't tell us because it is largely servile towards, or owned by, those who have profited from the debacle. Instead, it daily aggravates our tendency to salve our discouragement by turning on others even more helpless than ourselves. The assault on the poor, minorities and immigrants is not an accident. It is what people do when they're not told what's really wrong, when the media won't let them in on the secret. It's one of power's oldest tricks: to deflect blame downward so the victims fight among themselves.
Nor is the destruction of social programs at every level mere happenstance. With the collapse of America's post-war empire, the country's elite has become increasingly concerned with getting more for itself while getting us to accept less. Hence the New York City budget that cut 24% from social services and added 7% to the police. It is, after all, cheaper to shoot or bury them then it is to sustain them. As Latin American countries have found, the children can live on the streets and the wealthy can hire guards to stand in front of their walled homes and life can be very pleasant as long as you are behind the wall and don't really think about it too much.
There is not among the elite, old or new, even any particular loyalty to this country. More and more, its business is elsewhere; and it is shamelessly willing to use political power to further that business. It seeks a playing field of greatly weakened countries in which stateless corporations and their managers are accountable to no one. The pledge of allegiance has been replaced by trade agreements. The House Speaker talks of America; his wife works abroad.
Thus not only does the American elite lack any sense of guilt for what has happened, it is, like a hit and run driver, leaving the scene of the accident. More and more, those who run this country have the character of wealthy, isolated strangers -- armed but afraid, intrusive yet indifferent, personally profligate but politically penurious, priggish in rhetoric yet corrupt in action. No longer does even national myth connect them with the greater mass of America. Nor, any longer, does politics separate them from each other; Republicans and Democrats have become, rather than choices, degrees of the same thing.
Hi, I'm America and I'm a recovering country
It is long overdue time to admit such things -- and to force our leaders and the media to admit them as well. One of the less observed utilities of the 1960s was serving as a group intervention, interrupting the self-justified intoxication of the elite consensus. This intervention provided the intellectual, moral and psychological framework for much that happened.
We need such intervention now. We need to speak the truth. To admit freely that America has crashed. To tell the story of how America's own elite helped to bring it down. And to argue that, by consequence, they have lost their license to lead.
We further need to commence the sort of inquiry that disasters demand, an investigation into the death of American substance and of the American spirit. Before such an inquiry we might bring such evidence as:
The Vietnam War, the first great public disaster of the post-WWII best and brightest.
The destruction of the America city, beginning with the subsidized suburbanization of the fifties, continuing through the economic abandonment of downtowns in the 70s and 80s, and ending with the Reagan-Bush-Clinton withdrawal of urban aid.
Three decades of mob politics during which the country's elite snuggled up to its intelligence agencies, which in turn made numerous deleterious pacts with criminals, freebooters and drug lords.
The drug war, now more dangerous to black US males than was serving in Vietnam. A barbaric, unconstitutional, and counterproductive battle that has placed large sections of our cities under para-military occupation and has corrupted our political life -- from police precincts to governors' mansions.
The S&L and BCCI scandals, the bipartisan revival of robber baron politics that greatly destabilized our financial system.
The failure to exercise ecological wisdom before large numbers of human lives were endangered, species damaged or destroyed, and lands ruined.
The development of the corporate state in which the government is increasingly reduced to serving ever more powerful oligopolies.
The conversion of medicine from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.
.The encouragement of economic desertion. Through such means as NAFTA and GATT, America has hastened the emigration of its own commercial base.
The failure to halt the growing monopolization of information and ideas in the American media.
The retreat from common responsibility for the problems of the nation's less fortunate.
The nomination of Bill Clinton, a president picked, managed and bankrolled by America's elite. This final error devastated the Democratic Party and made possible last November's right-wing coup.
In each of these instances, the plans were drawn, sold and executed by those who considered themselves among the nation's smartest men and women. And in each case, the nation paid a fearful price. In the end we have been left with a country devoid of confidence, a nation beset by fears, short on jobs, bereft of joy, disputatious, sniveling, without compassion, internationally impotent, domestically catatonic -- in a word, shattered.
While other generations of leaders have failed the country, none has managed to do quite so much damage. The first step in recovery is to reveal how this came about, and by whose hand, and then to tell them to be off.
February 13, 2007
Corporations and America: the back story
Encomiums to the wonders of market forces fill speeches and media reports. One National Public Radio reporter even went so far as to describe a form of government called market democracy, apparently a blend of the Bill of Rights and the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
In fact, most free workers in this country were self-employed well into the 19th century. They were thus economic as well as political citizens.
Further, until the last decades of the 19th century, Americans believed in a degree of fair distribution of wealth that would shock many today. James L. Huston writes in the American Historical Review:
"Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth."
Such a distribution, in theory at least, came from enjoying the "fruits of one's labor" but no more. Businesses that sprung up didn't flourish on competition because there generally wasn't any and, besides, cooperation worked better. You didn't need two banks or two drug stores in the average town. Prices and business ethics were not regulated by the marketplace but by a complicated cultural code and the fact that the banker went to church with his depositors. Although the practice was centuries old, the term capitalism -- and thus the religion -- didn't even exist until the middle of the 19th century.
Americans were intensely commercial, but this spirit was propelled not by Reaganesque fantasies about competition but by the freedom that engaging in business provided from the hierarchical social and economic system of the monarchy. Business, including the exchange as well as the making of goods, was seen as a natural state allowing a community and individuals to get ahead and to prosper without the blessing of nobility.
In the beginning, if you wanted to form a corporation you needed a state charter and had to prove it was in the public interest, convenience and necessity. During the entire colonial period only about a half-dozen business corporations were chartered; between the end of the Revolution and 1795 this rose to about a 150. Jefferson to the end opposed liberal grants of corporate charters and argued that states should be allowed to intervene in corporate matters or take back a charter if necessary.
With the pressure for more commerce and indications that corporate grants were becoming a form of patronage, states began passing free incorporation laws and before long Massachusetts had thirty times as many corporations as there were in all of Europe.
"killed the republican theory of the distribution of wealth and probably ended whatever was left of the political theory of republicanism as well. . . .[The] corporation brought about a new form of dependency. Instead of industry, frugality, and initiatives producing fruits, underlings in the corporate hierarchy had to be aware of style, manners, office politics, and choice of patrons -- very reminiscent of the Old Whig corruption in England at the time of the revolution -- what is today called "corporate culture."
Concludes Huston:
"The rise of Big Business generated the most important transformation of American life that North America has ever experienced."
By the end of the last century the Supreme Court had declared corporations to be persons under the 14th Amendment, entitled to the same protections as human beings. As Morton Mintz pointed out in the National Law Journal, this 1888 case ignored the fact that "the only 'person' Congress had in mind when it adopted the 14th Amendment in 1866 was the newly freed slave." Justice Black observed in the 1930s that in the first fifty years following the adoption of the 14th Amendment, "less than one-half of 1 percent [of Supreme Court cases] invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." During this period the courts moved to limit democratic power in other ways as well. For example, the Supreme Court restricted the common law right of juries to nullify a wrongful law; other courts erected barriers against third parties such as banning fusion slates.
It was during this same time that the myth of competitive virtue sprouted, helping to justify one of the great rapacious periods of American business. It was a time when J.P. Morgan would come to own half the railroad mileage in the country -- the same J. P. Morgan who got his start during the Civil War by buying defective rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal and then selling them to a general in the field for $22 apiece. The founding principles of what we now proudly call the "American free market system" flowered in an era of enormous bribes, massive legislative corruption, and the creation of great anti-competitive cartels. It was a time when the government, in a precursor to industrial policy, gave two railroad companies 21 million acres of free land.
And it was also the time that American workers, who had once used commerce to free themselves from the economic and social straitjacket of the monarchy, found themselves servants of a new rigid hierarchy, that of the modern corporation.
In fact, most free workers in this country were self-employed well into the 19th century. They were thus economic as well as political citizens.
Further, until the last decades of the 19th century, Americans believed in a degree of fair distribution of wealth that would shock many today. James L. Huston writes in the American Historical Review:
"Americans believed that if property were concentrated in the hands of a few in a republic, those few would use their wealth to control other citizens, seize political power, and warp the republic into an oligarchy. Thus to avoid descent into despotism or oligarchy, republics had to possess an equitable distribution of wealth."
Such a distribution, in theory at least, came from enjoying the "fruits of one's labor" but no more. Businesses that sprung up didn't flourish on competition because there generally wasn't any and, besides, cooperation worked better. You didn't need two banks or two drug stores in the average town. Prices and business ethics were not regulated by the marketplace but by a complicated cultural code and the fact that the banker went to church with his depositors. Although the practice was centuries old, the term capitalism -- and thus the religion -- didn't even exist until the middle of the 19th century.
Americans were intensely commercial, but this spirit was propelled not by Reaganesque fantasies about competition but by the freedom that engaging in business provided from the hierarchical social and economic system of the monarchy. Business, including the exchange as well as the making of goods, was seen as a natural state allowing a community and individuals to get ahead and to prosper without the blessing of nobility.
In the beginning, if you wanted to form a corporation you needed a state charter and had to prove it was in the public interest, convenience and necessity. During the entire colonial period only about a half-dozen business corporations were chartered; between the end of the Revolution and 1795 this rose to about a 150. Jefferson to the end opposed liberal grants of corporate charters and argued that states should be allowed to intervene in corporate matters or take back a charter if necessary.
With the pressure for more commerce and indications that corporate grants were becoming a form of patronage, states began passing free incorporation laws and before long Massachusetts had thirty times as many corporations as there were in all of Europe.
The purposes for which every such corporation shall be established shall be distinctly and definitely specified in the articles of association, and it shall not be lawful for said corporation to appropriate its funds to any other purpose. -- State of Wisconsin, 1864Still it wasn't until after the Civil War that economic conditions turned sharply in favor of the large corporation. These corporations, says Huston:
The charter or acts of association of every corporation hereafter created may be amendable or repealed at the will of the general assembly. -- State of Rhode Island, 1857
[Legislators shall] alter, revoke or annul any charter of a corporate hereafter conferred . . . whenever in their opinion it may be injurious to citizens of the community. -- State of Pennsylvania, constitutional amendment, 1857.
"killed the republican theory of the distribution of wealth and probably ended whatever was left of the political theory of republicanism as well. . . .[The] corporation brought about a new form of dependency. Instead of industry, frugality, and initiatives producing fruits, underlings in the corporate hierarchy had to be aware of style, manners, office politics, and choice of patrons -- very reminiscent of the Old Whig corruption in England at the time of the revolution -- what is today called "corporate culture."
Concludes Huston:
"The rise of Big Business generated the most important transformation of American life that North America has ever experienced."
By the end of the last century the Supreme Court had declared corporations to be persons under the 14th Amendment, entitled to the same protections as human beings. As Morton Mintz pointed out in the National Law Journal, this 1888 case ignored the fact that "the only 'person' Congress had in mind when it adopted the 14th Amendment in 1866 was the newly freed slave." Justice Black observed in the 1930s that in the first fifty years following the adoption of the 14th Amendment, "less than one-half of 1 percent [of Supreme Court cases] invoked it in protection of the Negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations." During this period the courts moved to limit democratic power in other ways as well. For example, the Supreme Court restricted the common law right of juries to nullify a wrongful law; other courts erected barriers against third parties such as banning fusion slates.
It was during this same time that the myth of competitive virtue sprouted, helping to justify one of the great rapacious periods of American business. It was a time when J.P. Morgan would come to own half the railroad mileage in the country -- the same J. P. Morgan who got his start during the Civil War by buying defective rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal and then selling them to a general in the field for $22 apiece. The founding principles of what we now proudly call the "American free market system" flowered in an era of enormous bribes, massive legislative corruption, and the creation of great anti-competitive cartels. It was a time when the government, in a precursor to industrial policy, gave two railroad companies 21 million acres of free land.
And it was also the time that American workers, who had once used commerce to free themselves from the economic and social straitjacket of the monarchy, found themselves servants of a new rigid hierarchy, that of the modern corporation.
WHY IS LIBBY ALWAYS SMILING?
WHY IS LIBBY always photographed smiling? Two possible explanations:
- GWB has already told him, "Great job, Libosco; you'll have that pardon before I leave."
- Or Libby, unlike much of the Washington media, understands how hopelessly confusing this story is to most Americans and particularly to those forced to follow for hours at a time on the DC jury.
We have never cottoned to this overblown tale not because lying is nice, but rather because if you're going to prove it with political effectiveness you not only have to prove the lie but its importance.
Lies in Washington are too easy to spin as Bill Clinton proved. Most Democrats think his lie was just about sex. It wasn't; it was about denying a woman a fair trial in her case against Clinton. But even this key fact easily fell by the wayside.
So why do Democrats and the media think they've got something hot with Libby? Too many years of playing inside ball.
You know you're in trouble when you have the AP writing, "Defense attorneys got Woodward, Novak, Pincus, New York Times reporter David Sanger, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, and Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas to say they had talked to Libby about Wilson's allegations during the summer of 2003, but Libby had not disclosed Plame Wilson's identity or employment."
According to Vanity Fair, Valerie Plame told Joe Wilson on their third date that she was with the CIA. It is clear that more than a few Washington journalists were also let in on the secret, which is not too surprising because what's the thrill of being an important CIA official in Washington if people don't whisper about it? And if you don't do it yourself, then someone else, as happened with Plame, will do it for you to make nice to some capital scribe.
I don't even think about it anymore until the conversation goes ever so slightly awkwardly astray and you wonder: CIA? NSA? And you look around for someone more interesting with whom to talk.
And that's even before you get to the really deep cover spies like the ones on the rendition squad in Italy described by Tom Englehardt:
"The CIA agents took rooms in Milan's 5-star hotels, including the Principe di Savoia ("one of the world's most luxuriously appointed hotels") where they rang up $42,000 in expenses; the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton, and the Star Hotel Rosa as well as similar places in the seaside resort of La Spezia and in Florence, running up cumulative hotel bills of $144,984."
But the key perspective is that of the jury box. How would you like to listen to the confusing yet deadening detail of this incident and then decide whether you had it all down beyond a reasonable doubt? A lot of people say the prosecutor is a real bright guy but I wonder whether he knows DC juries - accustomed to the annoyance, boredom and inconvenience of living near a misbehaving elite. Maybe they'll give it to Libby, but chances are just as good they'll look at the Yucky Flat mountain of evidence and say, "Beats me."
- GWB has already told him, "Great job, Libosco; you'll have that pardon before I leave."
- Or Libby, unlike much of the Washington media, understands how hopelessly confusing this story is to most Americans and particularly to those forced to follow for hours at a time on the DC jury.
We have never cottoned to this overblown tale not because lying is nice, but rather because if you're going to prove it with political effectiveness you not only have to prove the lie but its importance.
Lies in Washington are too easy to spin as Bill Clinton proved. Most Democrats think his lie was just about sex. It wasn't; it was about denying a woman a fair trial in her case against Clinton. But even this key fact easily fell by the wayside.
So why do Democrats and the media think they've got something hot with Libby? Too many years of playing inside ball.
You know you're in trouble when you have the AP writing, "Defense attorneys got Woodward, Novak, Pincus, New York Times reporter David Sanger, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler, and Newsweek reporter Evan Thomas to say they had talked to Libby about Wilson's allegations during the summer of 2003, but Libby had not disclosed Plame Wilson's identity or employment."
According to Vanity Fair, Valerie Plame told Joe Wilson on their third date that she was with the CIA. It is clear that more than a few Washington journalists were also let in on the secret, which is not too surprising because what's the thrill of being an important CIA official in Washington if people don't whisper about it? And if you don't do it yourself, then someone else, as happened with Plame, will do it for you to make nice to some capital scribe.
I don't even think about it anymore until the conversation goes ever so slightly awkwardly astray and you wonder: CIA? NSA? And you look around for someone more interesting with whom to talk.
And that's even before you get to the really deep cover spies like the ones on the rendition squad in Italy described by Tom Englehardt:
"The CIA agents took rooms in Milan's 5-star hotels, including the Principe di Savoia ("one of the world's most luxuriously appointed hotels") where they rang up $42,000 in expenses; the Westin Palace, the Milan Hilton, and the Star Hotel Rosa as well as similar places in the seaside resort of La Spezia and in Florence, running up cumulative hotel bills of $144,984."
But the key perspective is that of the jury box. How would you like to listen to the confusing yet deadening detail of this incident and then decide whether you had it all down beyond a reasonable doubt? A lot of people say the prosecutor is a real bright guy but I wonder whether he knows DC juries - accustomed to the annoyance, boredom and inconvenience of living near a misbehaving elite. Maybe they'll give it to Libby, but chances are just as good they'll look at the Yucky Flat mountain of evidence and say, "Beats me."
February 07, 2007
CROSS-OVER POLITICS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SCALE
Sam Smith
[Part of a continuing series on devolution - the opposite of governmental centralization, commercial monopoly and cultural domination. Devolution is the art of conducting public affairs at a practical level closest to the human spirit and human communities]
In an age of conglomeration and domination, the cross-political nature of devolution - or the ideology of scale - attracts little attention. One can go through a whole political campaign and never consider it. But that doesn't mean the issue is not there.
Consider two current examples: the assault on local control of public schools and the smart growth movement. Both are driven by a curious alliance of liberal, conservative and corporate interests. And both attempt to replace the decentralization of decision-making with centralized, bureaucratic choices.
For example, only Vilsack among the Democratic candidate for president has challenged the No Child law despite it being based on absurdly inadequate justifications, proposed by the least qualified president ever to hold office and pushed by a bunch of child profiteers who will probably be the only clear winners under the legislation.
Similarly, the smart growth movement is being increasingly driven by a dubious alliance between "we know what's good for you" liberal planners and developers who initially resisted the idea until they realized how many new high-rises might result.
Liberals and conservatives who favor America's two centuries of local school control, or wish to resist the transformation of successful communities into high-rise factory farms for globalized serfs, find themselves ignored, ridiculed as NIMBYs or considered behind the times.
One developer's Power Point even declared that "fear and loathing of density is. . .ironic, dangerous, counter-productive." In other words, preferring the lifestyle predominant in 99.9% of human history is now dangerous and counter-productive. Further, in the tradition of the new managerial mullahs, anyone who doesn't like what they're up to is suffering from fear and loathing of positive change.
No Child Left Unregimented
The assault on community controlled public education is not only a result of Bush's No Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles that it was liberal Harvard president President James Conant who produced a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination of the small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets and deal with the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the barbarian triumphed: the number of school districts plummeted from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in 1970."
Writing in Principal Magazine, Kathleen Cushman pointed out that the small school movement was driven by "the steady rise in school size that has seen the average school population increase five-fold since the end of World War II. A push to consolidate schools has reduced the number of districts by 70 percent in the same period. Ironically, this trend toward big schools coincides with research that repeatedly has found small schools - commonly defined as no more than 400 students for elementary schools - to be demonstrably better for students of all ability levels, in all kinds of settings. Academic achievement rises, as indicated by grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject-area achievement, and assessment of higher-order thinking skills. For both elementary and secondary students, researchers also find small schools equal or superior to large ones on most student behavior measures. Rates of truancy, classroom disruption, vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and gang participation all are reduced in small schools, according to a synthesis of 103 studies."
Education is one of those human activities clearly centered on two people (teacher and student). As the system surrounding this experience becomes larger, more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players become pawns in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the principal also dramatically shifts - from being an educational administrator to being a cross between a corporate executive and a warden. It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment, that not a single private school has merged with five or ten other academies in the name of efficiency and improved learning. No one has suggested a Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools really helped, why would such places not give it a try? I once asked the head of one of the top private girl's schools in the country what he considered the maximum size of a school he'd like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that means 1,000 parents."
Yet not only do we find George Bush, with lots of Democratic support, actively destroying local control over public schools, mayors and governors rushing to join the attack.
For example, inspired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has yet to produce convincing results for his corporatization of public education, DC's 36-year old new mayor Adrian Fenty is following suit. He wants to abolish the elected school and put the system under his control despite his impressive inexperience in education. But Fenty, like many in politics and business, is absolutely convinced that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence.
How little he really understands was well described by Colbert King in the Washington Post:
"If governance and lack of accountability are the main problems, why do students attending Lafayette and Murch elementary schools, which are west of Rock Creek Park, exceed proficiency targets in reading and math by wide margins while students at Ketchum and Stanton elementary schools, east of the Anacostia River, fall far short of the mark? The four schools are in the same governance structure. Their principals report to the same superintendent and are guided by the same school board policies. True, Lafayette and Murch, located in middle-income neighborhoods, have more white students. But before going off on a racial tangent, consider this: Black students attending Lafayette and Murch, in contrast to their counterparts in Southeast, also excel in reading and math." King asked Fenty why his takeover would help matters: "His bottom line: he has the energy, determination, and sense of urgency that he feels are missing among school leaders to make those things happen." In other words, he thinks what the schools really need most is himself.
Perhaps even more bizarre is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself is familiar: the pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency through the concentration of school districts as ordered by the governor. 290 school districts would be merged into 26 regional administrative units.
What makes it stranger is that Maine is one of a handful of New England states where one can still find the remnants of American democracy functioning at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings and lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent years more independent governors (although not the present one) than just about any state and a culture of honest independence in politics and governance that would best be emulated rather than reorganized.
And who suggested the course that the governor is following? None other than representatives of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic elitism, that hospice of prematurely aging MBAs and political science majors: the Brookings Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington coaching the Chicago Bears.
To add to the oddity, it is all being done in the name of "smart growth."
To give a sense of how alien this is to traditional Maine culture, consider a town meeting I attended a few years back in Freeport. I got there a little late and the respectables had taken all the chairs, so I stood in the hall outside with the baseball cap and pencil in the ear set, all intensely interested and exchanging play by play among themselves. It was a heated discussion that eventually produced the resignation of a couple of council members but I tired of standing and so returned to my quarters to watch it on TV. At 11 pm, when I thought the citizen input was almost over, two people showed up to testify explaining they had become so perturbed, they had gotten out of bed, dressed and braved the ice and cold to join the fray at town hall.
Now that's the way democracy is meant to work, but it's damn seldom that you see it any more. And when you do, the sensible reaction should be: don't mess with it.
Although the Maine media has seemed to give implied blessing to the school reorganization scheme, there is life in the state yet as public comment illustrates.
One Brunswick school board member called Governor Balducci's plan "totalitarian." Said another, "To lose our local control, I think it would be devastating." Asked one citizen: "Tell me folks, right here in Brewer, do you want somebody from Alton, Bradley or Bangor telling you how we should run our school system?"
A school superintendent, according to the Brunswick Times Record, "warned the plan could mean a higher per-student cost for Brunswick, possible budget cuts that would affect teaching staff, and a potential clash of educational philosophies between Brunswick, Freeport and the towns of School Administrative District 75 that would share one administrative office and one school board under the proposed plan. [The superintendent] also criticized the governor and Education Commissioner Susan Gendron for producing a plan that glossed over the loss of more than 600 teachers, hundreds of jobs for administrative office staff and the educational impact of superintendents.
Other comment, as reported by local press:
Roger Shaw, superintendent of the Mars Hills schools: "All small schools are struggling for survival and all small schools are in danger. Whether by chance or design, we are in the crosshairs of state policy."
Harvey Shue, a junior at Hampden Academy called it an "extreme act" to merge his 2,200-student school district into a 16,000-student district based miles away.
Richard Farrell of Monhegan "said it would be unworkable to relocate the management of its seven-pupil elementary school to the mainland. He said parents would be hard-pressed to attend meetings and that the island's overall cost would be bound to increase."
Andrew Geranis of York "asked lawmakers to reject any proposal that would change the way schools are now governed. 'Local control is the heart of our life in Maine,' he said.
Angela Iancelli of Monhegan Island "said she feared that district consolidation would lead to the closing of the island's small school, which she said manages to operate efficiently while turning out students who perform well on state achievement tests."
This is not a left-right struggle but one that may far more important for our future: a struggle between communities and bureaucracies and between humans and systems. At present, the communities and humans are not winning.
Smart Growth
The tie-in with smart growth is quite revealing. The smart growth movement started as a largely well-intentioned movement led by planners and environmentalists. Many of their proposals made sense but it had some serious problems, beginning with the insulting manner it treated suburban communities in which many Americans lived, had improved their lives and educated their children. As is traditionally the case with planners, these citizens were expected to adapt to a purportedly ideal physical model - even at the cost of having to move or being evicted - instead of having the emphasis placed on improving - for them as well as the environment - the communities in which they currently lived.
This is not a new problem with planners. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton described two characters, Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in such a disparate manner that the one came to favor the building of large public tenements for the poor while the other believed that these public projects were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact preferable. Wrote Chesterton:
"Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduced as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery, men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.
"Neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."
Much of American politics and planning follows the Hudge-¬Gudge model, producing failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former offering us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally with drug-infested housing projects.
In the case of smart growth, the Hudge-Gudge conflict could have been avoided by considering not just a community's ecological liabilities but its assets, and then figuring out how to lessen the former without harming the latter. This might lead not to large scale redevelopment but towards ways of making it less necessary for people to move around so much in order to fulfill a day's tasks, permitting accessory apartments in single-family neighborhoods and easing zoning restrictions on community-serving small businesses. In many suburbs wastefully designed shopping strips can provide more than enough room for high-rise density without imposing them on communities that don't want them.
It is helpful also to bear in mind that next to economists, no profession has been so consistently wrong and harmful to the human spirit as urban planning.
There was, for example, zoning that destroyed the mixed use city in the name of cleanliness and health and that laid the groundwork for the sprawl of which planners now complain.
There were decades of racist federal housing lending policies that created ghettoes in cities as the money fed the expansion of the suburbs.
There was the destruction of magnificent streetcar systems on behalf of the automobile.
There was urban renewal that destroyed communities instead of rebuilding them.
There was anti-human public housing.
There were - and continues to be - grandiose "economic development" programs that overwhelmingly favored the upper class and a small coterie of developers but which left less wealthy urban residents increasingly victims of neglect and of gentrification.
Each of these schemes were based on physical solutions to human, social and economic problems - conceived by planners and politicians stunningly indifferent to their affect on actual people.
The human, the community, the small were repeatedly considered archaic, insignificant and regressive.
From the progressive movement of the early 20th century on, well-meaning but excessively self-assured members of the elite have controlled the debate, the money and the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the reservations, concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is with smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned growth but lack the resources and experience to manage that change in ways that protect the character of their community. . . The Model Town Community Project will work with a selected town during 2006 and 2007 to provide tools and advice that will help the town shape its future. The project will mobilize local, state and regional resources, enable the town to explore new growth strategies and fully engage local residents by combining the best elements of New England town meetings with ground breaking new technologies."
In other words, we'll come in and show you how to run a town meeting our way, just like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is meant to be about environmentally sound planning, how come we have to consolidate our school districts and our town offices?
Because once you put your faith in the sort of expertise that a planning-managerial elite offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn to Jesus, then you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small schools. What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have been promised that, so why worry?
Further, even over smart growth's short life, a disturbing alliance has developed between some liberals and developers thanks to the latter discovering that the environmentalists didn't really want to stop them from building, they just want them to build somewhere else and most likely in a place where they could get more per square foot.
Washington, DC offers a good example and, once again, the Brookings mafia is hard at work. In fact, it even wants to eliminate something that make Washington one of the most appealing cities in the world: its building height limit.
Reports the Washington Post: "Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use expert at the Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect of raising the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't specify a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and developers to at least entertain the idea. 'Things have changed,' he told a standing-room-only crowd . . . 'We have an office market that needs to go someplace,' he said. 'Density is critical. We're running out of land. We need to build up.'"
In some neighborhoods, citizens are even being called NIMBYs because they don't want high-rises shoved into their pleasant communities and the name-callers include not just the developers but enabling liberals who think they're saving the planet. Never mind that in their own city, in Greenwich Village or in Europe there are plenty of examples of density without high-rise factory farms.
Fortunately, not everyone is taken in.
One in attendance at the density meeting wrote online afterwards: "The biggest hole in the program, in my humble opinion, was the fact that none of the presenters acknowledged that DC is not Bethesda or Atlanta or Portland. It is our nation's capital, not a strip mall out in Fairfax waiting to be retooled."
It is this remarkable notion of our nation's capital and other cities - that they are just strip malls waiting to be retooled - that is driving much of urban planning and politics these days.
In both the school consolidation and the smart growth debates the issue of human scale - and not some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the core. But we have been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by politicians, - to revere a promise of efficiency and technological advance over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have traditionally lived, including valuing the small places that host, nurture and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere physical change.
We should notice, though, because in the end, if we lose the fight for staying human, whether we were liberal or conservative won't have mattered a bit.
A FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
[Part of a continuing series on devolution - the opposite of governmental centralization, commercial monopoly and cultural domination. Devolution is the art of conducting public affairs at a practical level closest to the human spirit and human communities]
In an age of conglomeration and domination, the cross-political nature of devolution - or the ideology of scale - attracts little attention. One can go through a whole political campaign and never consider it. But that doesn't mean the issue is not there.
Consider two current examples: the assault on local control of public schools and the smart growth movement. Both are driven by a curious alliance of liberal, conservative and corporate interests. And both attempt to replace the decentralization of decision-making with centralized, bureaucratic choices.
For example, only Vilsack among the Democratic candidate for president has challenged the No Child law despite it being based on absurdly inadequate justifications, proposed by the least qualified president ever to hold office and pushed by a bunch of child profiteers who will probably be the only clear winners under the legislation.
Similarly, the smart growth movement is being increasingly driven by a dubious alliance between "we know what's good for you" liberal planners and developers who initially resisted the idea until they realized how many new high-rises might result.
Liberals and conservatives who favor America's two centuries of local school control, or wish to resist the transformation of successful communities into high-rise factory farms for globalized serfs, find themselves ignored, ridiculed as NIMBYs or considered behind the times.
One developer's Power Point even declared that "fear and loathing of density is. . .ironic, dangerous, counter-productive." In other words, preferring the lifestyle predominant in 99.9% of human history is now dangerous and counter-productive. Further, in the tradition of the new managerial mullahs, anyone who doesn't like what they're up to is suffering from fear and loathing of positive change.
No Child Left Unregimented
The assault on community controlled public education is not only a result of Bush's No Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles that it was liberal Harvard president President James Conant who produced a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination of the small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets and deal with the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the barbarian triumphed: the number of school districts plummeted from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in 1970."
Writing in Principal Magazine, Kathleen Cushman pointed out that the small school movement was driven by "the steady rise in school size that has seen the average school population increase five-fold since the end of World War II. A push to consolidate schools has reduced the number of districts by 70 percent in the same period. Ironically, this trend toward big schools coincides with research that repeatedly has found small schools - commonly defined as no more than 400 students for elementary schools - to be demonstrably better for students of all ability levels, in all kinds of settings. Academic achievement rises, as indicated by grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject-area achievement, and assessment of higher-order thinking skills. For both elementary and secondary students, researchers also find small schools equal or superior to large ones on most student behavior measures. Rates of truancy, classroom disruption, vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and gang participation all are reduced in small schools, according to a synthesis of 103 studies."
Education is one of those human activities clearly centered on two people (teacher and student). As the system surrounding this experience becomes larger, more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players become pawns in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the principal also dramatically shifts - from being an educational administrator to being a cross between a corporate executive and a warden. It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment, that not a single private school has merged with five or ten other academies in the name of efficiency and improved learning. No one has suggested a Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools really helped, why would such places not give it a try? I once asked the head of one of the top private girl's schools in the country what he considered the maximum size of a school he'd like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that means 1,000 parents."
Yet not only do we find George Bush, with lots of Democratic support, actively destroying local control over public schools, mayors and governors rushing to join the attack.
For example, inspired by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has yet to produce convincing results for his corporatization of public education, DC's 36-year old new mayor Adrian Fenty is following suit. He wants to abolish the elected school and put the system under his control despite his impressive inexperience in education. But Fenty, like many in politics and business, is absolutely convinced that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence.
How little he really understands was well described by Colbert King in the Washington Post:
"If governance and lack of accountability are the main problems, why do students attending Lafayette and Murch elementary schools, which are west of Rock Creek Park, exceed proficiency targets in reading and math by wide margins while students at Ketchum and Stanton elementary schools, east of the Anacostia River, fall far short of the mark? The four schools are in the same governance structure. Their principals report to the same superintendent and are guided by the same school board policies. True, Lafayette and Murch, located in middle-income neighborhoods, have more white students. But before going off on a racial tangent, consider this: Black students attending Lafayette and Murch, in contrast to their counterparts in Southeast, also excel in reading and math." King asked Fenty why his takeover would help matters: "His bottom line: he has the energy, determination, and sense of urgency that he feels are missing among school leaders to make those things happen." In other words, he thinks what the schools really need most is himself.
Perhaps even more bizarre is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself is familiar: the pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency through the concentration of school districts as ordered by the governor. 290 school districts would be merged into 26 regional administrative units.
What makes it stranger is that Maine is one of a handful of New England states where one can still find the remnants of American democracy functioning at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings and lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent years more independent governors (although not the present one) than just about any state and a culture of honest independence in politics and governance that would best be emulated rather than reorganized.
And who suggested the course that the governor is following? None other than representatives of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic elitism, that hospice of prematurely aging MBAs and political science majors: the Brookings Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington coaching the Chicago Bears.
To add to the oddity, it is all being done in the name of "smart growth."
To give a sense of how alien this is to traditional Maine culture, consider a town meeting I attended a few years back in Freeport. I got there a little late and the respectables had taken all the chairs, so I stood in the hall outside with the baseball cap and pencil in the ear set, all intensely interested and exchanging play by play among themselves. It was a heated discussion that eventually produced the resignation of a couple of council members but I tired of standing and so returned to my quarters to watch it on TV. At 11 pm, when I thought the citizen input was almost over, two people showed up to testify explaining they had become so perturbed, they had gotten out of bed, dressed and braved the ice and cold to join the fray at town hall.
Now that's the way democracy is meant to work, but it's damn seldom that you see it any more. And when you do, the sensible reaction should be: don't mess with it.
Although the Maine media has seemed to give implied blessing to the school reorganization scheme, there is life in the state yet as public comment illustrates.
One Brunswick school board member called Governor Balducci's plan "totalitarian." Said another, "To lose our local control, I think it would be devastating." Asked one citizen: "Tell me folks, right here in Brewer, do you want somebody from Alton, Bradley or Bangor telling you how we should run our school system?"
A school superintendent, according to the Brunswick Times Record, "warned the plan could mean a higher per-student cost for Brunswick, possible budget cuts that would affect teaching staff, and a potential clash of educational philosophies between Brunswick, Freeport and the towns of School Administrative District 75 that would share one administrative office and one school board under the proposed plan. [The superintendent] also criticized the governor and Education Commissioner Susan Gendron for producing a plan that glossed over the loss of more than 600 teachers, hundreds of jobs for administrative office staff and the educational impact of superintendents.
Other comment, as reported by local press:
Roger Shaw, superintendent of the Mars Hills schools: "All small schools are struggling for survival and all small schools are in danger. Whether by chance or design, we are in the crosshairs of state policy."
Harvey Shue, a junior at Hampden Academy called it an "extreme act" to merge his 2,200-student school district into a 16,000-student district based miles away.
Richard Farrell of Monhegan "said it would be unworkable to relocate the management of its seven-pupil elementary school to the mainland. He said parents would be hard-pressed to attend meetings and that the island's overall cost would be bound to increase."
Andrew Geranis of York "asked lawmakers to reject any proposal that would change the way schools are now governed. 'Local control is the heart of our life in Maine,' he said.
Angela Iancelli of Monhegan Island "said she feared that district consolidation would lead to the closing of the island's small school, which she said manages to operate efficiently while turning out students who perform well on state achievement tests."
This is not a left-right struggle but one that may far more important for our future: a struggle between communities and bureaucracies and between humans and systems. At present, the communities and humans are not winning.
Smart Growth
The tie-in with smart growth is quite revealing. The smart growth movement started as a largely well-intentioned movement led by planners and environmentalists. Many of their proposals made sense but it had some serious problems, beginning with the insulting manner it treated suburban communities in which many Americans lived, had improved their lives and educated their children. As is traditionally the case with planners, these citizens were expected to adapt to a purportedly ideal physical model - even at the cost of having to move or being evicted - instead of having the emphasis placed on improving - for them as well as the environment - the communities in which they currently lived.
This is not a new problem with planners. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton described two characters, Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in such a disparate manner that the one came to favor the building of large public tenements for the poor while the other believed that these public projects were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact preferable. Wrote Chesterton:
"Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduced as a type of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery, men are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course lead him to a model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally, to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man back to the rookery.
"Neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."
Much of American politics and planning follows the Hudge-¬Gudge model, producing failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former offering us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally with drug-infested housing projects.
In the case of smart growth, the Hudge-Gudge conflict could have been avoided by considering not just a community's ecological liabilities but its assets, and then figuring out how to lessen the former without harming the latter. This might lead not to large scale redevelopment but towards ways of making it less necessary for people to move around so much in order to fulfill a day's tasks, permitting accessory apartments in single-family neighborhoods and easing zoning restrictions on community-serving small businesses. In many suburbs wastefully designed shopping strips can provide more than enough room for high-rise density without imposing them on communities that don't want them.
It is helpful also to bear in mind that next to economists, no profession has been so consistently wrong and harmful to the human spirit as urban planning.
There was, for example, zoning that destroyed the mixed use city in the name of cleanliness and health and that laid the groundwork for the sprawl of which planners now complain.
There were decades of racist federal housing lending policies that created ghettoes in cities as the money fed the expansion of the suburbs.
There was the destruction of magnificent streetcar systems on behalf of the automobile.
There was urban renewal that destroyed communities instead of rebuilding them.
There was anti-human public housing.
There were - and continues to be - grandiose "economic development" programs that overwhelmingly favored the upper class and a small coterie of developers but which left less wealthy urban residents increasingly victims of neglect and of gentrification.
Each of these schemes were based on physical solutions to human, social and economic problems - conceived by planners and politicians stunningly indifferent to their affect on actual people.
The human, the community, the small were repeatedly considered archaic, insignificant and regressive.
From the progressive movement of the early 20th century on, well-meaning but excessively self-assured members of the elite have controlled the debate, the money and the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the reservations, concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is with smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned growth but lack the resources and experience to manage that change in ways that protect the character of their community. . . The Model Town Community Project will work with a selected town during 2006 and 2007 to provide tools and advice that will help the town shape its future. The project will mobilize local, state and regional resources, enable the town to explore new growth strategies and fully engage local residents by combining the best elements of New England town meetings with ground breaking new technologies."
In other words, we'll come in and show you how to run a town meeting our way, just like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is meant to be about environmentally sound planning, how come we have to consolidate our school districts and our town offices?
Because once you put your faith in the sort of expertise that a planning-managerial elite offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn to Jesus, then you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small schools. What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have been promised that, so why worry?
Further, even over smart growth's short life, a disturbing alliance has developed between some liberals and developers thanks to the latter discovering that the environmentalists didn't really want to stop them from building, they just want them to build somewhere else and most likely in a place where they could get more per square foot.
Washington, DC offers a good example and, once again, the Brookings mafia is hard at work. In fact, it even wants to eliminate something that make Washington one of the most appealing cities in the world: its building height limit.
Reports the Washington Post: "Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use expert at the Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect of raising the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't specify a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and developers to at least entertain the idea. 'Things have changed,' he told a standing-room-only crowd . . . 'We have an office market that needs to go someplace,' he said. 'Density is critical. We're running out of land. We need to build up.'"
In some neighborhoods, citizens are even being called NIMBYs because they don't want high-rises shoved into their pleasant communities and the name-callers include not just the developers but enabling liberals who think they're saving the planet. Never mind that in their own city, in Greenwich Village or in Europe there are plenty of examples of density without high-rise factory farms.
Fortunately, not everyone is taken in.
One in attendance at the density meeting wrote online afterwards: "The biggest hole in the program, in my humble opinion, was the fact that none of the presenters acknowledged that DC is not Bethesda or Atlanta or Portland. It is our nation's capital, not a strip mall out in Fairfax waiting to be retooled."
It is this remarkable notion of our nation's capital and other cities - that they are just strip malls waiting to be retooled - that is driving much of urban planning and politics these days.
In both the school consolidation and the smart growth debates the issue of human scale - and not some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the core. But we have been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by politicians, - to revere a promise of efficiency and technological advance over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have traditionally lived, including valuing the small places that host, nurture and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere physical change.
We should notice, though, because in the end, if we lose the fight for staying human, whether we were liberal or conservative won't have mattered a bit.
A FIELD GUIDE TO DEVOLUTION
January 28, 2007
HILLARY CLINTON, BARACK OBAMA AND VANNA WHITE
Sam Smith
The secret of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that nobody knows who they are. They are vases on the table of politics waiting to be filled by whatever flowers arrive at the door. Jody Kantor, in the NY Times, nicely captures this in a piece on Obama:
"Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood. . . Charles J. Ogletree Jr., another Harvard law professor and a mentor of Mr. Obama, said, 'He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts'. . .
"People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama's words. . . Mr. Obama stayed away from the extremes of campus debate, often choosing safe topics for his speeches. . . In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice."
This is not a new phenomenon in presidential politics. It was introduced by Bill Clinton, our first post-modern president, and his wife Hillary Clinton. In "Shadows of Hope," I discussed the arrival of post-modernism in politics as well as one of its inspirations, Vanna White, the wheel spinner on 'Wheel of Fortune." As Ted Koppel put it, "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."
SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994 - The ability to communicate is one common to all animals. What distinguishes human beings, it has been noted, is that they can also think. This is not a mere quibble, because people who use the verb 'communicate' a lot tend to mean something closer to a frog's 'baroomph' than an essay by Emerson. In response to their communications they seek not thought nor an articulated response, but a feeling. We are supposed to feel like having a Michelob, feel like the president's bill will stimulate the economy, feel like all our questions about healthcare have been answered.
The rhetoric of contemporary "communications" is quite different from that of thought or argument. The former is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain, but when you have made the full trip you are right back where you started. Consider again Mrs. Clinton's comment on the death penalty:
"We go back and forth on the issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas. We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe it does have a role."
She paused dutifully at major objections to the death penalty yet finished her homily as though she had never been to them at all. In the end, the president would propose fifty new capital crimes in his first year.
The approach became infectious. As the Clinton administration was attempting to come up with a logical reason for being in Somalia, an administration official told the New York Times that "we want to keep the pressure on [General] Aidid. We don't want to spend all day, every day chasing him. But if opportunity knocks, we want to be ready. At the same time, we want go get him to cooperate on the prisoner question and on a political settlement."
If you challenge the contemporary "communicator," you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth. Clinton is very good at this technique. In fact, the White House made it official policy. A memo was distributed to administration officials to guide them in marketing the president's first budget. The memo was titled: "HALLELUJAH! CHANGE IS COMING!" It read in part:
"While you will doubtless be pressed for details beyond these principles, there is nothing wrong with demurring for the moment on the technicalities and educate the American people and the media on the historic change we need."
Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of the New Year's "Renaissance" gatherings attended by the Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language as well. Said Lader on PBS:
"The gist of Renaissance has been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas and relationships. And I would hope that this administration might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other."
There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters one's normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "Total Quality Management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.
Some of the language sounds significant while in fact being completely devoid of sense, such as "recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other." Some of it is Orwellian reversal of meaning such as the president's pronouncement after his first budget squeaked through: "The margin was close, but the mandate is clear." This is the language not of the rationalists that the communicators claim to be, but straight from the car and beer ads. One might ask, for example, exactly what has really been transformed by the "power of ideas and relationships" at Renaissance other than the potential salaries, positions and influence of those participating.
The third virtue claimed by the Clintonites is the ability to arise above the petty disputes of normal life -- to become "post-ideological." For example, the president, upon nominating Judge Ginsberg to the Supreme Court called her neither liberal nor conservative, adding that she "has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels." In one parenthetical aside, Clinton dismissed three hundred years of political philosophical debate.
Similarly, when Clinton made the very political decision to name conservative David Gergen to his staff, he announced that the appointment signaled that "we are rising above politics."
"We are," he insisted, "going beyond partisanship that damaged this country so badly in the last several years to search for new ideas, a new common ground, a new national unity." And when Clinton's new chief of staff was announced, he was said to be "apolitical," a description used in praise.
Politics without politics. The appointee was someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda that would interfere with a successful management of the White House."
By the time Clinton had been in office for eight months he appeared ready to dispense with opinion and thought entirely. "It is time we put aside the divisions of party and philosophy and put our best efforts to work on a crime plan that will help all the American people," he declared in front of a phalanx of uniformed police officers -- presumably symbols of a new objectivity about crime.
Clinton, of course, was not alone. The Third Millennium, a slick Perotist organization of considerable ideological intent, calls itself "post-partisan." Perot himself played a similar game: the man without a personal agenda.
The media also likes to pretend that it is above political ideology or cultural prejudice. Journalists like Leonard Downie Jr. and Elizabeth Drew don't even vote and Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, once instructed his staff to "cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions."
"What part of government are you interested in?" I asked a thirtysomething lawyer who was sending in his resume to the new Clinton administration. "I don't have any particular interest," he replied, "I would just like to be a special assistant to someone." It no longer surprised me; it had been ten years since I met Jeff Bingaman at a party. He was in the middle of a multi-million dollar campaign for US Senate; he showed me his brochure and spoke enthusiastically of his effort. "What brings you to Washington?" I asked. He said, "I want to find out what the issues are."
If you got the right grades at the right schools and understood the "process," it didn't matter all that much what the issues were or what you believed. Issues were merely raw material to be processed by good "decision-making." As with Clinton, it was you -- not an idea or a faith or a policy -- that was the solution.
This purported voiding of ideology is a major conceit of post-modernism -- that assault on every favored philosophical notion since the time of Voltaire. Post-modernism derides the concepts of universality, of history, of values, of truth, of reason, and of objectivity. It, like Clinton, rises above "party and philosophy" and like much of the administration's propaganda, above traditional meaning as well.
Like Clinton, the post-modernist is obsessed with symbolism. Giovanna Borradori calls post-modernism a "definitive farewell" to modern reason. And Pauline Marie Rosenau writes:
"Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations (meanings) of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable."
She adds:
"Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic."
Marshall Blonsky brings us closer to Clinton's post-modernist side in American Mythologies:
"High modernists believe in the ideology of style -- what is as unique as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body. By contrast, postmodernism. . . sees nothing unique about us. Postmodernism regards 'the individual' as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. If you're postmodern, you scarcely believe in the 'right clothes' that take on your personality. You don't dress as who you are because, quite simply, you don't believe 'you' are. Therefore you are indifferent to consistency and continuity.
The consistent person is too rigid for a post-modern world, which demands above all that we constantly adapt and that our personalities, statements and styles become a reflection for those around us rather than being innate.
Later, Blonsky writes, :
"Character and consistency were once the most highly regarded virtue to ascribe to either friend or foe. We all strove to be perceived as consistent and in character, no matter how many shattering experiences had changed our lives or how many persons inhabited our bodies. Today, for the first time in modern times, a split or multiple personality has ceased to be an eccentric malady and becomes indispensable as we approach the turn of the century."
Other presidents have engaged in periodic symbolic extravaganzas, but most have relied on stock symbols such as the Rose Garden or the helicopter for everyday use. Clinton, on the other hand, understands that today all power resides in symbols and devotes a phenomenal amount of time and effort to their creation, care and manipulation. Thus the co-chair of his inauguration announced that people would be encouraged to join Clinton in a walk across Memorial Bridge a few days before his swearing-in. "It signifies the way that this president will act," Harry Thomason said. "There are always going to be crowds, and he's always going to be among them."
As a post-modernist, Clinton is in some interesting company. Such as Vanna White, of whom Ted Koppel remarks, "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be." Blonsky reports that Koppel sees himself as having a similar effect and says of Bush's dullness: "You would think that the voter would become frustrated... but on the contrary he has become acclimated to the notion that you just fill in the blank." And then Koppel warns: "It is the very level of passion generated by Jesse Jackson that carries a price." Clinton understands the warning and the value of the blank the viewer can fill in at leisure."
Of course, in the postmodern society that Clinton proposes -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.
Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.
Michael Berman describes one postmodernist writer's "radical skepticism both about what people can know and about what they can do [passing] abruptly into dogmatism and peremptory a priori decrees about what is and what is not possible." The result, Berman says, can be a "left-wing politics from the perspective of a rightwing metaphysics."
ORDER 'SHADOWS OF HOPE'
The secret of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that nobody knows who they are. They are vases on the table of politics waiting to be filled by whatever flowers arrive at the door. Jody Kantor, in the NY Times, nicely captures this in a piece on Obama:
"Friends say he did not want anyone to assume they knew his mind and because of that, even those close to him did not always know exactly where he stood. . . Charles J. Ogletree Jr., another Harvard law professor and a mentor of Mr. Obama, said, 'He can enter your space and organize your thoughts without necessarily revealing his own concerns and conflicts'. . .
"People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama's words. . . Mr. Obama stayed away from the extremes of campus debate, often choosing safe topics for his speeches. . . In dozens of interviews, his friends said they could not remember his specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis on diversity and social and economic justice."
This is not a new phenomenon in presidential politics. It was introduced by Bill Clinton, our first post-modern president, and his wife Hillary Clinton. In "Shadows of Hope," I discussed the arrival of post-modernism in politics as well as one of its inspirations, Vanna White, the wheel spinner on 'Wheel of Fortune." As Ted Koppel put it, "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."
SAM SMITH, SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994 - The ability to communicate is one common to all animals. What distinguishes human beings, it has been noted, is that they can also think. This is not a mere quibble, because people who use the verb 'communicate' a lot tend to mean something closer to a frog's 'baroomph' than an essay by Emerson. In response to their communications they seek not thought nor an articulated response, but a feeling. We are supposed to feel like having a Michelob, feel like the president's bill will stimulate the economy, feel like all our questions about healthcare have been answered.
The rhetoric of contemporary "communications" is quite different from that of thought or argument. The former is more like a shuttle bus endlessly running around a terminal of ideas. The bus plays no favorites; it stops at every concept and every notion, it shares every concern and feels every pain, but when you have made the full trip you are right back where you started. Consider again Mrs. Clinton's comment on the death penalty:
"We go back and forth on the issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas. We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe it does have a role."
She paused dutifully at major objections to the death penalty yet finished her homily as though she had never been to them at all. In the end, the president would propose fifty new capital crimes in his first year.
The approach became infectious. As the Clinton administration was attempting to come up with a logical reason for being in Somalia, an administration official told the New York Times that "we want to keep the pressure on [General] Aidid. We don't want to spend all day, every day chasing him. But if opportunity knocks, we want to be ready. At the same time, we want go get him to cooperate on the prisoner question and on a political settlement."
If you challenge the contemporary "communicator," you are likely to find the argument transformed from whatever you thought you were talking about to something quite different -- generally more abstract and grandiose. For example if you are opposed to the communicator's proposed policy on trade you may be accused of being against "change" or "fearful of new ideas" and so forth. Clinton is very good at this technique. In fact, the White House made it official policy. A memo was distributed to administration officials to guide them in marketing the president's first budget. The memo was titled: "HALLELUJAH! CHANGE IS COMING!" It read in part:
"While you will doubtless be pressed for details beyond these principles, there is nothing wrong with demurring for the moment on the technicalities and educate the American people and the media on the historic change we need."
Philip Lader, creator and maitre d' of the New Year's "Renaissance" gatherings attended by the Clintons for many years, liked this sort of language as well. Said Lader on PBS:
"The gist of Renaissance has been to recognize the incredible transforming power of ideas and relationships. And I would hope that this administration might be characterized by the power of ideas. But also the power of relationships. Of recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other."
There is an hyperbolic quality to this language that shatters one's normal sense of meaning. Simple competence is dubbed "a world-class operation," common efficiency is called "Total Quality Management," a conversation becomes "incredibly transforming," and a gathering of hyper-ambitious and single-minded professionals is called a "Renaissance" weekend.
Some of the language sounds significant while in fact being completely devoid of sense, such as "recognizing the integrity of people dealing with each other." Some of it is Orwellian reversal of meaning such as the president's pronouncement after his first budget squeaked through: "The margin was close, but the mandate is clear." This is the language not of the rationalists that the communicators claim to be, but straight from the car and beer ads. One might ask, for example, exactly what has really been transformed by the "power of ideas and relationships" at Renaissance other than the potential salaries, positions and influence of those participating.
The third virtue claimed by the Clintonites is the ability to arise above the petty disputes of normal life -- to become "post-ideological." For example, the president, upon nominating Judge Ginsberg to the Supreme Court called her neither liberal nor conservative, adding that she "has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels." In one parenthetical aside, Clinton dismissed three hundred years of political philosophical debate.
Similarly, when Clinton made the very political decision to name conservative David Gergen to his staff, he announced that the appointment signaled that "we are rising above politics."
"We are," he insisted, "going beyond partisanship that damaged this country so badly in the last several years to search for new ideas, a new common ground, a new national unity." And when Clinton's new chief of staff was announced, he was said to be "apolitical," a description used in praise.
Politics without politics. The appointee was someone who, in the words of the Washington Post, "is seen by most as a man without a personal or political agenda that would interfere with a successful management of the White House."
By the time Clinton had been in office for eight months he appeared ready to dispense with opinion and thought entirely. "It is time we put aside the divisions of party and philosophy and put our best efforts to work on a crime plan that will help all the American people," he declared in front of a phalanx of uniformed police officers -- presumably symbols of a new objectivity about crime.
Clinton, of course, was not alone. The Third Millennium, a slick Perotist organization of considerable ideological intent, calls itself "post-partisan." Perot himself played a similar game: the man without a personal agenda.
The media also likes to pretend that it is above political ideology or cultural prejudice. Journalists like Leonard Downie Jr. and Elizabeth Drew don't even vote and Downie, executive editor of the Washington Post, once instructed his staff to "cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions."
"What part of government are you interested in?" I asked a thirtysomething lawyer who was sending in his resume to the new Clinton administration. "I don't have any particular interest," he replied, "I would just like to be a special assistant to someone." It no longer surprised me; it had been ten years since I met Jeff Bingaman at a party. He was in the middle of a multi-million dollar campaign for US Senate; he showed me his brochure and spoke enthusiastically of his effort. "What brings you to Washington?" I asked. He said, "I want to find out what the issues are."
If you got the right grades at the right schools and understood the "process," it didn't matter all that much what the issues were or what you believed. Issues were merely raw material to be processed by good "decision-making." As with Clinton, it was you -- not an idea or a faith or a policy -- that was the solution.
This purported voiding of ideology is a major conceit of post-modernism -- that assault on every favored philosophical notion since the time of Voltaire. Post-modernism derides the concepts of universality, of history, of values, of truth, of reason, and of objectivity. It, like Clinton, rises above "party and philosophy" and like much of the administration's propaganda, above traditional meaning as well.
Like Clinton, the post-modernist is obsessed with symbolism. Giovanna Borradori calls post-modernism a "definitive farewell" to modern reason. And Pauline Marie Rosenau writes:
"Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations (meanings) of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable."
She adds:
"Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic."
Marshall Blonsky brings us closer to Clinton's post-modernist side in American Mythologies:
"High modernists believe in the ideology of style -- what is as unique as your own fingerprints, as incomparable as your own body. By contrast, postmodernism. . . sees nothing unique about us. Postmodernism regards 'the individual' as a sentimental attachment, a fiction to be enclosed within quotation marks. If you're postmodern, you scarcely believe in the 'right clothes' that take on your personality. You don't dress as who you are because, quite simply, you don't believe 'you' are. Therefore you are indifferent to consistency and continuity.
The consistent person is too rigid for a post-modern world, which demands above all that we constantly adapt and that our personalities, statements and styles become a reflection for those around us rather than being innate.
Later, Blonsky writes, :
"Character and consistency were once the most highly regarded virtue to ascribe to either friend or foe. We all strove to be perceived as consistent and in character, no matter how many shattering experiences had changed our lives or how many persons inhabited our bodies. Today, for the first time in modern times, a split or multiple personality has ceased to be an eccentric malady and becomes indispensable as we approach the turn of the century."
Other presidents have engaged in periodic symbolic extravaganzas, but most have relied on stock symbols such as the Rose Garden or the helicopter for everyday use. Clinton, on the other hand, understands that today all power resides in symbols and devotes a phenomenal amount of time and effort to their creation, care and manipulation. Thus the co-chair of his inauguration announced that people would be encouraged to join Clinton in a walk across Memorial Bridge a few days before his swearing-in. "It signifies the way that this president will act," Harry Thomason said. "There are always going to be crowds, and he's always going to be among them."
As a post-modernist, Clinton is in some interesting company. Such as Vanna White, of whom Ted Koppel remarks, "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be." Blonsky reports that Koppel sees himself as having a similar effect and says of Bush's dullness: "You would think that the voter would become frustrated... but on the contrary he has become acclimated to the notion that you just fill in the blank." And then Koppel warns: "It is the very level of passion generated by Jesse Jackson that carries a price." Clinton understands the warning and the value of the blank the viewer can fill in at leisure."
Of course, in the postmodern society that Clinton proposes -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.
Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.
Michael Berman describes one postmodernist writer's "radical skepticism both about what people can know and about what they can do [passing] abruptly into dogmatism and peremptory a priori decrees about what is and what is not possible." The result, Berman says, can be a "left-wing politics from the perspective of a rightwing metaphysics."
ORDER 'SHADOWS OF HOPE'
January 26, 2007
ON FINDING A CANDIDATE
Sam Smith
As always happens, as soon as I say something nice about a political candidate, I find myself in trouble.
Part of the problem may be that I think about political candidates differently than a lot of people. Unlike many, I don�t see myself as part of some great collective of St. Peters at the gate deciding who should get into heaven and then, in a strange twist of metaphor, come back to earth and save us. Rather I think of politicians as one more tool in social and political change and the first question that jumps to my mind is: what can they do for us?
I expect them to fail, con, double-cross and desert, but before they betray us too much I would like to get a civil liberties bill or universal healthcare passed.
Before television turned candidates into pseudo saviors, people took this for granted about politics. It was almost a feudal arrangement: politicians paid for their corruption with public service. If you wanted perfection you went to church; you didn't go to the ward office.
Every once in a while a real reformer would come along but like one of those sunny days in February such campaigns were a reminder of the possible rather than of the probable.
Today politicians don't even have to tithe to their constituents. They just concoct a nice fairy tale for the campaign and upon election perform their services by, as Mayor Daley once said, dancing "with the one that brung you" - which ain't us. We just applauded at the right time.
One alternative, of course, is to take the high road. Ignore the Democrats and support a Green for president or stay with the Democrats but support Kucinich. There's nothing wrong with this except that the game is completely rigged against you and it may not be the best game to be playing anyway.
Some of us tried it with Nader in 2000. It worked about as well as can be expected for third parties and, despite the whining of Democratic spoiled children, did not cause Gore's loss - as any fair statistical analysis will show.
But it was also clear after that election that it wasn't a particularly useful route to continue. History shows that third parties - given America's biased election system - only get one shot at having an effect in a presidential campaign. Further, given the Democrats' deep denial over their collapsing role in American politics, it meant there would be little but endless and pointless arguments in sight. I urged that Nader not run, arguing that standing in the middle of a freeway to make his point might not be the most productive use of his time. And I urged that Greens concentrate on local and state races which is where they continue to show their real strength and potential.
Lots of Greens disagreed with me and that's fine and I still admire them. It's just that I think of some of them more as monks and nuns of a righteous order than as political activists.
There is one other purpose to such moral campaigns besides the final tally and that is to use the effort as part of organizing efforts for some greater and longer purpose. Campaigns are good ways to get people active, but too often the campaign is both the beginning and the end of that activity.
With that in mind, for example, I invited some Greens over to my house to meet with Dennis Kucinich in 2004. The meeting went well, but then I asked the wrong question. What, I inquired of Kucinich, do you plan to do when you lose? Kucinich clearly didn't like it but it is a the key question when you enter a campaign for mainly moral reasons. How do you make sure the cause continues after the election?
We should look at this Democratic primary season in the same way: not as an end in itself but as part of an organizing effort that has many miles to travel.
The minute you do this, iconic candidates without significant positive programs are easily eliminated. Obama is certainly a better fall-back position than Hillary Clinton but neither have anything to offer advocates of the changes this country needs.
Three candidates do: Kucinich for peace, Gore for the environment and Edwards for economic fairness.
I don't think Kucinich can pull it off, I fear Gore has waited too late if, indeed, he intends to join the fray, which leaves us - at least for now - with Edwards.
No, I'm not thrilled about Edwards and, yes, I know that he, like every candidate running save Kucinich, has a lousy position on the occupation of Palestine, but he's saying things that haven't been heard in a campaign in a long time and he's already making a lot of the powers that be nervous - which is one reason why the big media is trying to pretend he's not in the race.
If Edwards stops being useful to the causes in which I believe, I'll ditch him.
And if you don't like the answer I came up then come up with your own.
Just do me one favor: don't ask which candidate best fits your paradigm of what a president should be and says the things that make you feel most comfortable, but rather which candidate stands the best chance of advancing the things in which you believe. That's a practical, not a moral, question.
Instead of being just the candidate's supporter, make the candidate your tool.
As always happens, as soon as I say something nice about a political candidate, I find myself in trouble.
Part of the problem may be that I think about political candidates differently than a lot of people. Unlike many, I don�t see myself as part of some great collective of St. Peters at the gate deciding who should get into heaven and then, in a strange twist of metaphor, come back to earth and save us. Rather I think of politicians as one more tool in social and political change and the first question that jumps to my mind is: what can they do for us?
I expect them to fail, con, double-cross and desert, but before they betray us too much I would like to get a civil liberties bill or universal healthcare passed.
Before television turned candidates into pseudo saviors, people took this for granted about politics. It was almost a feudal arrangement: politicians paid for their corruption with public service. If you wanted perfection you went to church; you didn't go to the ward office.
Every once in a while a real reformer would come along but like one of those sunny days in February such campaigns were a reminder of the possible rather than of the probable.
Today politicians don't even have to tithe to their constituents. They just concoct a nice fairy tale for the campaign and upon election perform their services by, as Mayor Daley once said, dancing "with the one that brung you" - which ain't us. We just applauded at the right time.
One alternative, of course, is to take the high road. Ignore the Democrats and support a Green for president or stay with the Democrats but support Kucinich. There's nothing wrong with this except that the game is completely rigged against you and it may not be the best game to be playing anyway.
Some of us tried it with Nader in 2000. It worked about as well as can be expected for third parties and, despite the whining of Democratic spoiled children, did not cause Gore's loss - as any fair statistical analysis will show.
But it was also clear after that election that it wasn't a particularly useful route to continue. History shows that third parties - given America's biased election system - only get one shot at having an effect in a presidential campaign. Further, given the Democrats' deep denial over their collapsing role in American politics, it meant there would be little but endless and pointless arguments in sight. I urged that Nader not run, arguing that standing in the middle of a freeway to make his point might not be the most productive use of his time. And I urged that Greens concentrate on local and state races which is where they continue to show their real strength and potential.
Lots of Greens disagreed with me and that's fine and I still admire them. It's just that I think of some of them more as monks and nuns of a righteous order than as political activists.
There is one other purpose to such moral campaigns besides the final tally and that is to use the effort as part of organizing efforts for some greater and longer purpose. Campaigns are good ways to get people active, but too often the campaign is both the beginning and the end of that activity.
With that in mind, for example, I invited some Greens over to my house to meet with Dennis Kucinich in 2004. The meeting went well, but then I asked the wrong question. What, I inquired of Kucinich, do you plan to do when you lose? Kucinich clearly didn't like it but it is a the key question when you enter a campaign for mainly moral reasons. How do you make sure the cause continues after the election?
We should look at this Democratic primary season in the same way: not as an end in itself but as part of an organizing effort that has many miles to travel.
The minute you do this, iconic candidates without significant positive programs are easily eliminated. Obama is certainly a better fall-back position than Hillary Clinton but neither have anything to offer advocates of the changes this country needs.
Three candidates do: Kucinich for peace, Gore for the environment and Edwards for economic fairness.
I don't think Kucinich can pull it off, I fear Gore has waited too late if, indeed, he intends to join the fray, which leaves us - at least for now - with Edwards.
No, I'm not thrilled about Edwards and, yes, I know that he, like every candidate running save Kucinich, has a lousy position on the occupation of Palestine, but he's saying things that haven't been heard in a campaign in a long time and he's already making a lot of the powers that be nervous - which is one reason why the big media is trying to pretend he's not in the race.
If Edwards stops being useful to the causes in which I believe, I'll ditch him.
And if you don't like the answer I came up then come up with your own.
Just do me one favor: don't ask which candidate best fits your paradigm of what a president should be and says the things that make you feel most comfortable, but rather which candidate stands the best chance of advancing the things in which you believe. That's a practical, not a moral, question.
Instead of being just the candidate's supporter, make the candidate your tool.
January 25, 2007
2008 AND THE MEDIA MYTH MACHINE
Sam Smith
ONE THING is clear about the 2008 Democratic primary: there will be little room for reality. The media story line is already being driven by a mythology that in more trivial times would only be annoying but, given America's collapse as a constitutional society and as a respected nation, merely adds to the extraordinary danger the country faces today.
It used to be that the length of the Democratic primary season at least allowed time for reflection and for recovery from illusions shattered in scattered states as presumed victors stumbled or fell. Now not even that is possible.
The NY Times reports that "as many as four big states California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey - are likely to move up their 2008 presidential primaries to early next February, further upending an already unsettled nominating process and forcing candidates of both parties to rethink their campaign strategies, party officials said Wednesday."
The Times politely notes that "Democrats and Republicans said that the changes would be the latest step in the evolution of a presidential nominating system that increasingly seems resistant to the kind of dark-horse presidential bid that was possible back when small states like Iowa and New Hampshire enjoyed such influence over the nominating process."
What is really happening is that the primary system is being nationalized and compressed for the benefit of those with the most money and the best early standings in the media mythology.
Money at every level in American politics has already replaced the importance of the voter because money combined with media mythology makes voters do what the money wants them to. And in the last election cycle 48% of this money came from zip codes with a high proportion of households making over $100,000 a year.
Two items give a good feel for what's going on this year:
From ABC News: Movie moguls Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg want their Hollywood peers to join them at a Feb. 20 fundraiser the three are throwing for Obama. For $2,300 a person and $4600 a couple, they can meet the candidate at a reception at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Those who commit to raising $46,000 (10 couples/20 tickets) for the evening will be invited to a private dinner at Geffen's Malibu, Calif., home.
From the Jewish journal Forward: Democratic activists and operatives said Clinton will pull in large quantities of cash among Jewish donors not only because of what they described as her strong positions on Israel and domestic matters of interest to Jews, but also because of longtime ties with these activists dating back to her husband's administration. The haul is important: Strategists say that serious candidates will need to raise at least $50 million -- and probably more like $100 million -- by the end of the year. They say that money from Jewish donors constitutes about half the donations given to national Democratic candidates.
This is not democracy. This is a cattle auction.
But the money's not enough. The media, which is, after all, part of the money, has to provide a myth to replace any troubling intrusions by reality. Hence we have the lovely story of an iconic feminist running against an iconic black with, by our count, two-thirds of the candidate headlines this month going to Clinton and Obama.
The third placed candidate, John Edwards, has gotten just six percent of the headlines this month despite being ahead in Iowa and tying Clinton for second place in the last New Hampshire poll.
Edwards, once a darling of the Democratic Abandonship Council, has done the unforgivable. He has strayed from the flock and is playing his own game. It matters not that this game is the most realistically Democratic one of any major candidate in the past few decades or that his opponents often seem to be trying to prove how conservative they can be. For them it's not a matter of being the best Democrat; it's a matter pleasing the media and the money.
So you won't hear much about Hillary Clinton once being a Goldwater Republican or that Barack Obama offers little to write about, let alone justify electing him to the White House. To a media that otherwise produces soap operas and American Idol, Clinton and Obama are ideally simple to present in their mythcasts.
And the mythology runs deep. For example, the Washington Post reports that black Democrats favor Clinton over Obama by a three to one majority. Why? Because Bill Clinton, the best hustler since Elmer Gantry, managed to get blacks to take the faux Baptist bait, favoring inflection in the pulpit over improvements in the community. Even Toni Morrison fell for the scam and few seemed to notice that black incomes and net worth were continuing to decline, that Clinton's so-called welfare reforms favored whites far more than blacks, and that his aggressive pursuit of the drug war made young urban black men worse victims than their fathers fighting in Vietnam.
I once was asked by a reporter about to interview Clinton on the radio whether I had any good questions. I suggested asking him, "Why do you like blacks so much more when they're in a church than when they're on the street?" He didn't take my suggestion, but twice during the Clinton years cab drivers told me how great the economy was. "How many jobs are you working?" I asked each and it was a revelation. They had never thought of their personal disconnect between myth and reality.
That's a big job of the mainstream media: to keep us from discovering that disconnect.
And that's why they don't want to give John Edwards too many headlines. He's no longer playing their game.
Sure, Edwards partied with the Bilderberg mob, he's taken part in the current anti-Iran hysteria, he supports the death penalty, and he's won some court cases based on questionable medical science.
On the other hand it's hard to think of anyone since as far back as Fred Harris who has been willing to run for president sounding so much like a real Democrat, which is to say one centered on making life better for the most number of Americans.
And I would rather deal with Edwards' straight-forward error on the death penalty than with Hillary Clinton's attempt to make all sides think she agreed with them.
I may be unduly optimistic, but Edwards seems an unusual politician in another way. He seems to have learned something along the way. That doesn't happen often in politics.
But then Edwards lost a son in a car accident and his wife had breast cancer. It's hard to retain the sort of hubris one finds in a Clinton or a Kerry when life intrudes like that.
Now life has intruded again. From a darling of the DLC and a Bilderberg prospect he's become an outsider like us. He may be a trial lawyer but he's chosen to be our trial lawyer.
It's not perfect by a damn shot. For example, no major Democratic candidate - including Edwards - has addressed the collapse of American constitutional government and none has rejected Bush's education program.
And it's also possible that Obama might turn out to be something other than a somewhat sanctimonious pop star trying to make us feel good about him. Certainly he's a vast improvement over the most corrupt and dishonest Democrat to seek the presidency since her husband.
But at the moment, whatever his faults and given the realities of America's sick politics, Edwards is the best we've got, the best chance to hold the line against the money and the myths, against the corrupters and the corroders.
And we don't have a hell of a lot of time. Both the money and the media want this settled soon and weeks to them would be better than months.
The SUV liberals will stick with Clinton and Obama but, as Howard Dean showed the last time round, there's still a little room for an unanticipated rebellion, a demand for Democrats to be Democrats, for decency to go before power, and for the myth makers and the money shakers to be taught the lesson that reality still matters.
ONE THING is clear about the 2008 Democratic primary: there will be little room for reality. The media story line is already being driven by a mythology that in more trivial times would only be annoying but, given America's collapse as a constitutional society and as a respected nation, merely adds to the extraordinary danger the country faces today.
It used to be that the length of the Democratic primary season at least allowed time for reflection and for recovery from illusions shattered in scattered states as presumed victors stumbled or fell. Now not even that is possible.
The NY Times reports that "as many as four big states California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey - are likely to move up their 2008 presidential primaries to early next February, further upending an already unsettled nominating process and forcing candidates of both parties to rethink their campaign strategies, party officials said Wednesday."
The Times politely notes that "Democrats and Republicans said that the changes would be the latest step in the evolution of a presidential nominating system that increasingly seems resistant to the kind of dark-horse presidential bid that was possible back when small states like Iowa and New Hampshire enjoyed such influence over the nominating process."
What is really happening is that the primary system is being nationalized and compressed for the benefit of those with the most money and the best early standings in the media mythology.
Money at every level in American politics has already replaced the importance of the voter because money combined with media mythology makes voters do what the money wants them to. And in the last election cycle 48% of this money came from zip codes with a high proportion of households making over $100,000 a year.
Two items give a good feel for what's going on this year:
From ABC News: Movie moguls Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg want their Hollywood peers to join them at a Feb. 20 fundraiser the three are throwing for Obama. For $2,300 a person and $4600 a couple, they can meet the candidate at a reception at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Those who commit to raising $46,000 (10 couples/20 tickets) for the evening will be invited to a private dinner at Geffen's Malibu, Calif., home.
From the Jewish journal Forward: Democratic activists and operatives said Clinton will pull in large quantities of cash among Jewish donors not only because of what they described as her strong positions on Israel and domestic matters of interest to Jews, but also because of longtime ties with these activists dating back to her husband's administration. The haul is important: Strategists say that serious candidates will need to raise at least $50 million -- and probably more like $100 million -- by the end of the year. They say that money from Jewish donors constitutes about half the donations given to national Democratic candidates.
This is not democracy. This is a cattle auction.
But the money's not enough. The media, which is, after all, part of the money, has to provide a myth to replace any troubling intrusions by reality. Hence we have the lovely story of an iconic feminist running against an iconic black with, by our count, two-thirds of the candidate headlines this month going to Clinton and Obama.
The third placed candidate, John Edwards, has gotten just six percent of the headlines this month despite being ahead in Iowa and tying Clinton for second place in the last New Hampshire poll.
Edwards, once a darling of the Democratic Abandonship Council, has done the unforgivable. He has strayed from the flock and is playing his own game. It matters not that this game is the most realistically Democratic one of any major candidate in the past few decades or that his opponents often seem to be trying to prove how conservative they can be. For them it's not a matter of being the best Democrat; it's a matter pleasing the media and the money.
So you won't hear much about Hillary Clinton once being a Goldwater Republican or that Barack Obama offers little to write about, let alone justify electing him to the White House. To a media that otherwise produces soap operas and American Idol, Clinton and Obama are ideally simple to present in their mythcasts.
And the mythology runs deep. For example, the Washington Post reports that black Democrats favor Clinton over Obama by a three to one majority. Why? Because Bill Clinton, the best hustler since Elmer Gantry, managed to get blacks to take the faux Baptist bait, favoring inflection in the pulpit over improvements in the community. Even Toni Morrison fell for the scam and few seemed to notice that black incomes and net worth were continuing to decline, that Clinton's so-called welfare reforms favored whites far more than blacks, and that his aggressive pursuit of the drug war made young urban black men worse victims than their fathers fighting in Vietnam.
I once was asked by a reporter about to interview Clinton on the radio whether I had any good questions. I suggested asking him, "Why do you like blacks so much more when they're in a church than when they're on the street?" He didn't take my suggestion, but twice during the Clinton years cab drivers told me how great the economy was. "How many jobs are you working?" I asked each and it was a revelation. They had never thought of their personal disconnect between myth and reality.
That's a big job of the mainstream media: to keep us from discovering that disconnect.
And that's why they don't want to give John Edwards too many headlines. He's no longer playing their game.
Sure, Edwards partied with the Bilderberg mob, he's taken part in the current anti-Iran hysteria, he supports the death penalty, and he's won some court cases based on questionable medical science.
On the other hand it's hard to think of anyone since as far back as Fred Harris who has been willing to run for president sounding so much like a real Democrat, which is to say one centered on making life better for the most number of Americans.
And I would rather deal with Edwards' straight-forward error on the death penalty than with Hillary Clinton's attempt to make all sides think she agreed with them.
I may be unduly optimistic, but Edwards seems an unusual politician in another way. He seems to have learned something along the way. That doesn't happen often in politics.
But then Edwards lost a son in a car accident and his wife had breast cancer. It's hard to retain the sort of hubris one finds in a Clinton or a Kerry when life intrudes like that.
Now life has intruded again. From a darling of the DLC and a Bilderberg prospect he's become an outsider like us. He may be a trial lawyer but he's chosen to be our trial lawyer.
It's not perfect by a damn shot. For example, no major Democratic candidate - including Edwards - has addressed the collapse of American constitutional government and none has rejected Bush's education program.
And it's also possible that Obama might turn out to be something other than a somewhat sanctimonious pop star trying to make us feel good about him. Certainly he's a vast improvement over the most corrupt and dishonest Democrat to seek the presidency since her husband.
But at the moment, whatever his faults and given the realities of America's sick politics, Edwards is the best we've got, the best chance to hold the line against the money and the myths, against the corrupters and the corroders.
And we don't have a hell of a lot of time. Both the money and the media want this settled soon and weeks to them would be better than months.
The SUV liberals will stick with Clinton and Obama but, as Howard Dean showed the last time round, there's still a little room for an unanticipated rebellion, a demand for Democrats to be Democrats, for decency to go before power, and for the myth makers and the money shakers to be taught the lesson that reality still matters.
January 23, 2007
What I learned as a part Jew
Sam Smith
I grew up part Jewish. It was hard not to if you lived in a New Deal family where your father was involved in things like starting Americans for Democratic Action. My own introduction to politics came as a pre-teen stuffing envelopes for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he helped organize the removal of Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican machine. Shull was one of those who early convinced me that there were three branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and your Liberal Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful. I was certain that Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions and win elections for the good guys.
If you think I'm kidding, consider this: for many years we lived across the street from a prominent activist couple - she black, he Jewish. One day one of their sons came over and slumped at our kitchen table. "What's the matter?" asked my wife. "I had a terrible night," the boy explained. "I dreamt I was Jacob Javits." He had already learned to fear becoming a Jewish Republican.
Although I knew Jews went to synagogue, I wasn't all that impressed. After all, as my friend Peter Temin was going to Hebrew school on Saturdays, I got to go to the Henry Glass music store and take drum lessons, clearly the better deal. During the week we went to a Quaker school where perhaps a quarter of the students were Jewish and nobody thought it odd. The tradition continues. The joke about Washington's Sidwell Friends School is that it is a place where Episcopalians teach Jews how to act like Quakers.
Much later I would figure out what Quakerism and Judaism had in common: a blend of individualism, pragmatism, and responsibility, with a particular emphasis on the last. You didn't come into the world pre-ordained and your primary goal wasn't to leave it saved; what really mattered is what you did in the meantime.
For much of my life, what I have done and what I have thought have been deeply influenced by existential Judaism and its practitioners. I can't even begin to count the number of times I have come across Jews in the lonely corners of hope trying to do what others, through lack of interest or courage, would not.
But a number of things have happened since I was first introduced to Judaism. The direct ties to the often radical Jewish immigrant tradition began to fade. The offspring of the immigrants became wealthier and less involved. America of whatever ethnicity began paying less attention to others and more to itself.
As I put it once, "The great 20th century social movements [were] successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. The minority elites had joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest drove around town in their Range Rovers, who would speak for those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, fugitives from the law of averages? The work of witness remained."
A whole history began to disappear. A part of the story was told by journalist Paul S. Green in his memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to the War in Europe. He notes that by the dawn of the 20th century
"Jewish youth in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow focus of their lives. They were determined to take part in the opportunities opening up around them - exciting new developments in science, the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into conflict with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way of life, they began to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict age-old Orthodoxy of their ancestors. "
Out of this grew several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked towards retrieving a Jewish nation. Others were socialist, ranging from hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as
"An organization of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist government - evolutionary rather than revolutionary - could hope to bring together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an end to anti-Semitism and pogroms."
And so we find, not too many years later, the New York City Jewish cigar-makers each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. And the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, became the first president of the American Federation of Labor.
Green's own family joined the rebellion:
"In embracing the principles of free-thinking non-religious belief, my parents had made a profound break with the past. The generation gap with their own parents was unbelievably deep. They had been born and brought up in a world that brooked no deviation. . . They were turning their backs on the fearsome God of their forefathers who had ruled Jewish lives for thousands of years. . . They realized that maintaining their beliefs set them apart from the mainstream of Jewish life, but the fact that they were a small minority did not bother them. "
They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.
It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on 20th century modern American politics.
Sadly, however, social and economic progress inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change not just among Jews but within the entire post-liberal elite. And, in many ways, Israel became the icon that replaced the cause of social justice. This is not to say that the two are antithetical. That certainly wasn't the case when I was younger. But as Jewish rhetoric and politics became increasingly in the hands of powerful conservative interests, an iconic, unexamined Israel began to serve Jews much as an absurdly trivialized Jesus has been used by the powerful conservative Christian interests to serve their ends. And other things just got forgotten.
Just as it is important for Americans not to define their country's past by the tragic distortions of the past quarter century, it is important for Jews not to be misled by a powerful right wing's reduction of Judaism to the goals of a deeply misguided and militaristic nation.
The fact is both America and Israel have badly damaged themselves through grandiosity, arrogance and narcissism. Beyond that is a truth few want to admit: no culture, no ethnicity, no value system can exist in a vacuum any more. This is not the fault of terrorists or anti-Semites. It's the result of television and multinational corporations that have usurped the role of culture, values and ethnicities. Add to that Israel's demographic trends and you've got a problem that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help you with in the slightest.
The answer, to the extent there still is one for the human species, is to be found in honest, personal witness. You can't save Christianity with hypocrisy and you can't save Judaism with missiles. What might work, however, is to reach back into the past of one's own culture or ethnicity and find examples of actions and behaviors that produced positive change. Neither Christians nor Jews have always been as absurdly self-destructive as they are today. And before they offer any more dangerous directions for dealing with today's problems, they need to rediscover their own good paths.
It is along such paths - and not on battlefields - that faith is solidified, admiration is encouraged, and loyalty is attracted. And along the way you may even pick up some unorthodox stragglers like me.
I grew up part Jewish. It was hard not to if you lived in a New Deal family where your father was involved in things like starting Americans for Democratic Action. My own introduction to politics came as a pre-teen stuffing envelopes for the local ADA director Leon Shull as he helped organize the removal of Philadelphia's 69-year-old Republican machine. Shull was one of those who early convinced me that there were three branches of Judaism: your Orthodox, your Reform and your Liberal Democratic, with the last clearly the most powerful. I was certain that Jews were put on this earth to run labor unions and win elections for the good guys.
If you think I'm kidding, consider this: for many years we lived across the street from a prominent activist couple - she black, he Jewish. One day one of their sons came over and slumped at our kitchen table. "What's the matter?" asked my wife. "I had a terrible night," the boy explained. "I dreamt I was Jacob Javits." He had already learned to fear becoming a Jewish Republican.
Although I knew Jews went to synagogue, I wasn't all that impressed. After all, as my friend Peter Temin was going to Hebrew school on Saturdays, I got to go to the Henry Glass music store and take drum lessons, clearly the better deal. During the week we went to a Quaker school where perhaps a quarter of the students were Jewish and nobody thought it odd. The tradition continues. The joke about Washington's Sidwell Friends School is that it is a place where Episcopalians teach Jews how to act like Quakers.
Much later I would figure out what Quakerism and Judaism had in common: a blend of individualism, pragmatism, and responsibility, with a particular emphasis on the last. You didn't come into the world pre-ordained and your primary goal wasn't to leave it saved; what really mattered is what you did in the meantime.
For much of my life, what I have done and what I have thought have been deeply influenced by existential Judaism and its practitioners. I can't even begin to count the number of times I have come across Jews in the lonely corners of hope trying to do what others, through lack of interest or courage, would not.
But a number of things have happened since I was first introduced to Judaism. The direct ties to the often radical Jewish immigrant tradition began to fade. The offspring of the immigrants became wealthier and less involved. America of whatever ethnicity began paying less attention to others and more to itself.
As I put it once, "The great 20th century social movements [were] successful enough to create their own old boy and girl networks, powerful enough to enter the Chevy Chase Club, and indifferent enough to ignore those left behind. The minority elites had joined the Yankee and the Southern aristocrat and the rest of God's frozen people to form the largest, most prosperous, and most narcissistic intelligentsia in our history. But as the best and brightest drove around town in their Range Rovers, who would speak for those who were still, in Bill Mauldin's phrase, fugitives from the law of averages? The work of witness remained."
A whole history began to disappear. A part of the story was told by journalist Paul S. Green in his memoir, From the Streets of Brooklyn to the War in Europe. He notes that by the dawn of the 20th century
"Jewish youth in Poland grew more and more impatient with the narrow focus of their lives. They were determined to take part in the opportunities opening up around them - exciting new developments in science, the arts, in social relationships. This brought them into conflict with their parents and grandparents. In seeking a different way of life, they began to do the unthinkable - to reject the strict age-old Orthodoxy of their ancestors. "
Out of this grew several new movements, one of which, Zionism, looked towards retrieving a Jewish nation. Others were socialist, ranging from hard-core Bolshevik to the Bund, which Green describes as
"An organization of free-thinking Jewish youth who whole-heartedly embraced Yiddish culture and a Yiddish life that completely rejected traditional religion. The Bundists believed that only a socialist government - evolutionary rather than revolutionary - could hope to bring together all peoples of whatever origin and outlaw racial and religious conflict, with all men becoming brothers, thereby bringing an end to anti-Semitism and pogroms."
And so we find, not too many years later, the New York City Jewish cigar-makers each contributing a small sum to hire a man to sit with them as they worked - reading aloud the classic works of Yiddish literature. And the leader of the New York cigar-makers, Samuel Gompers, became the first president of the American Federation of Labor.
Green's own family joined the rebellion:
"In embracing the principles of free-thinking non-religious belief, my parents had made a profound break with the past. The generation gap with their own parents was unbelievably deep. They had been born and brought up in a world that brooked no deviation. . . They were turning their backs on the fearsome God of their forefathers who had ruled Jewish lives for thousands of years. . . They realized that maintaining their beliefs set them apart from the mainstream of Jewish life, but the fact that they were a small minority did not bother them. "
They became part of a Jewish tradition that profoundly shaped the politics, social conscience, and cultural course of 20th century America. It helped to create the organizations, causes, and values that built this country's social democracy. While Protestants and Irish Catholics controlled the institutions of politics, the ideas of modern social democracy disproportionately came from native populists and immigrant socialists, heavily Jewish.
It is certainly impossible to imagine liberalism, the civil rights movement, or the Vietnam protests without the Jewish left. There is, in fact, no greater parable of the potential power of a conscious, conscientious minority than the influence of secular Jews on 20th century modern American politics.
Sadly, however, social and economic progress inevitably produced a dilution of passion for justice and change not just among Jews but within the entire post-liberal elite. And, in many ways, Israel became the icon that replaced the cause of social justice. This is not to say that the two are antithetical. That certainly wasn't the case when I was younger. But as Jewish rhetoric and politics became increasingly in the hands of powerful conservative interests, an iconic, unexamined Israel began to serve Jews much as an absurdly trivialized Jesus has been used by the powerful conservative Christian interests to serve their ends. And other things just got forgotten.
Just as it is important for Americans not to define their country's past by the tragic distortions of the past quarter century, it is important for Jews not to be misled by a powerful right wing's reduction of Judaism to the goals of a deeply misguided and militaristic nation.
The fact is both America and Israel have badly damaged themselves through grandiosity, arrogance and narcissism. Beyond that is a truth few want to admit: no culture, no ethnicity, no value system can exist in a vacuum any more. This is not the fault of terrorists or anti-Semites. It's the result of television and multinational corporations that have usurped the role of culture, values and ethnicities. Add to that Israel's demographic trends and you've got a problem that AIPAC and Abe Foxman can't help you with in the slightest.
The answer, to the extent there still is one for the human species, is to be found in honest, personal witness. You can't save Christianity with hypocrisy and you can't save Judaism with missiles. What might work, however, is to reach back into the past of one's own culture or ethnicity and find examples of actions and behaviors that produced positive change. Neither Christians nor Jews have always been as absurdly self-destructive as they are today. And before they offer any more dangerous directions for dealing with today's problems, they need to rediscover their own good paths.
It is along such paths - and not on battlefields - that faith is solidified, admiration is encouraged, and loyalty is attracted. And along the way you may even pick up some unorthodox stragglers like me.
January 21, 2007
The real divide on Hillary Clinton
Sam Smith
The major media likes to talk about Hillary Clinton being divisive. In fact she isn't anywhere near as divisive, say, as George Bush doggedly pursing a war even some of his advisers and many of his former allies would like to get out of. Besides, since you never know what she's going to say on any given issue on any given day it, it's hard to have a fierce argument about her positions. Even in her kickoff for the Democratic nomination the best she could come up with was:
"Let's talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq and to restore respect for America around the world. How to make us energy independent and free of foreign oil. How to end the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare. And let's definitely talk about how every American can have quality affordable health care."
Well, we actually have been talking about these things for some time; it's just hard to get Clinton into the conversation. This is a classic piece of Clinton rhetoric. To the casual listener she is supporting an end to the war, energy independence and universal healthcare. Far from it. She just wants us to talk about it. A neat semiotic slide, sort of like Barack Obama wanting us to come together. . . so he doesn't have to choose between us.
And it's not new. In the early 90s Clinton offered these views on the death penalty: "We go back and forth on the issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas. We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe it does have a role."
There is, however, a real divide on Hillary Clinton. It is between reality and myth and it is a divide that has existed ever since her husband ran for the presidency. But, as with her husband, the media has done a superb job of protecting its audience from reality.
This mythology will flourish until after the Democratic convention. If HRC wins the nomination, the game will dramatically change. The Republicans would be delighted to have Clinton as the candidate and don't want to spoil their chances by beating up on her now.
It is hard to get Democrats to focus on this problem, but consider this: The Justice Department's and other investigatory files on the Clinton years are currently fully under the control the Bush administration and will be until Inauguration Day.
Bluntly put, the Democrats are walking into a huge trap.
Sadly, it is not that hard to see. In the months before her husband's nomination I reported on more than a score of institutions and individuals whose relationship with Bill Clinton raised serious questions. The major media nearly totally ignored this publicly available information. Yet, in the end, almost all these individuals and institutions became a major part of what became known as the Clinton scandals.
A similar fate awaits Hillary Clinton. Here are a few of the topics that can fairly be expected to be involved in what will become known as the Hillary Clinton scandals:
- The disappearance of the Rose law firm billing records, their later discovery in the White House and Hillary Clinton's inability to explain how they got there.
- Her huge and inexplicable winnings in a cattle futures operation
- Her role in the Whitewater development which was - although the media refuses to admit it - simply a land resort scam and one that was particularly aimed at seniors.
- Her role in the despicable White House travel office firings apparently aimed at favoring the travel firm that bankrolled Bill Clinton's campaign by delayed billing.
- Her role in the use of FBI files on political opponents and the open question of what information from these files she still possesses.
- A case, still in court, involving the alleged failure to report over a million dollars in campaign contributions. Clinton's Senate campaign has already been fined by the FEC for failing to accurately report $700,000 in contributions.
- Her relationship with such indisputably dubious persons such as Johnny Chung, John Huang, Ng Lap Seng, Mochtar Riady, the McDougalds, Craig Livingstone, Webster Hubbell and Jorge Cabrera.
- This report from CNN in 1999: "Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing testified at the Susan McDougal trial Thursday that he had written a 'rough draft indictment' of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after he doubted her truthfulness in a deposition. Ewing, who questioned Mrs. Clinton in a deposition at the White House on April 22, 1995, said, 'I had questions about whether what she was saying were accurate. We had no records. She was in conflict with a number of interviews.'" . . . Ewing also testified that in a later deposition with both the president and first lady on July 22, 1995, he had questions about the truthfulness of both Clintons. McDougal's attorney Mark Geragos asked Ewing: 'Did you say the Clintons were liars?' 'I don't know if I used the 'L-word' but I expressed internally that I was concerned,' Ewing said."
There was a time when any sane campaign consultant and party leadership outside of Chicago would have told such a candidate to forget about running. But the assumption today is that all sins can be spun away.
It may seem that way, but it isn't true. The Democratic Party suffered in an unprecedented way at the national and state level because of Bill Clinton's misdoings. These scandals helped defeat two Democratic candidates for president and only in the last election were there signs of recovery.
The best favor the Democrats could do for themselves is to flush the Clinton name and its sorry memories down the toilet.
The major media likes to talk about Hillary Clinton being divisive. In fact she isn't anywhere near as divisive, say, as George Bush doggedly pursing a war even some of his advisers and many of his former allies would like to get out of. Besides, since you never know what she's going to say on any given issue on any given day it, it's hard to have a fierce argument about her positions. Even in her kickoff for the Democratic nomination the best she could come up with was:
"Let's talk about how to bring the right end to the war in Iraq and to restore respect for America around the world. How to make us energy independent and free of foreign oil. How to end the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare. And let's definitely talk about how every American can have quality affordable health care."
Well, we actually have been talking about these things for some time; it's just hard to get Clinton into the conversation. This is a classic piece of Clinton rhetoric. To the casual listener she is supporting an end to the war, energy independence and universal healthcare. Far from it. She just wants us to talk about it. A neat semiotic slide, sort of like Barack Obama wanting us to come together. . . so he doesn't have to choose between us.
And it's not new. In the early 90s Clinton offered these views on the death penalty: "We go back and forth on the issues of due process and the disproportionate minorities facing the death penalty, and we have serious concerns in those areas. We also abhor the craze for the death penalty. But we believe it does have a role."
There is, however, a real divide on Hillary Clinton. It is between reality and myth and it is a divide that has existed ever since her husband ran for the presidency. But, as with her husband, the media has done a superb job of protecting its audience from reality.
This mythology will flourish until after the Democratic convention. If HRC wins the nomination, the game will dramatically change. The Republicans would be delighted to have Clinton as the candidate and don't want to spoil their chances by beating up on her now.
It is hard to get Democrats to focus on this problem, but consider this: The Justice Department's and other investigatory files on the Clinton years are currently fully under the control the Bush administration and will be until Inauguration Day.
Bluntly put, the Democrats are walking into a huge trap.
Sadly, it is not that hard to see. In the months before her husband's nomination I reported on more than a score of institutions and individuals whose relationship with Bill Clinton raised serious questions. The major media nearly totally ignored this publicly available information. Yet, in the end, almost all these individuals and institutions became a major part of what became known as the Clinton scandals.
A similar fate awaits Hillary Clinton. Here are a few of the topics that can fairly be expected to be involved in what will become known as the Hillary Clinton scandals:
- The disappearance of the Rose law firm billing records, their later discovery in the White House and Hillary Clinton's inability to explain how they got there.
- Her huge and inexplicable winnings in a cattle futures operation
- Her role in the Whitewater development which was - although the media refuses to admit it - simply a land resort scam and one that was particularly aimed at seniors.
- Her role in the despicable White House travel office firings apparently aimed at favoring the travel firm that bankrolled Bill Clinton's campaign by delayed billing.
- Her role in the use of FBI files on political opponents and the open question of what information from these files she still possesses.
- A case, still in court, involving the alleged failure to report over a million dollars in campaign contributions. Clinton's Senate campaign has already been fined by the FEC for failing to accurately report $700,000 in contributions.
- Her relationship with such indisputably dubious persons such as Johnny Chung, John Huang, Ng Lap Seng, Mochtar Riady, the McDougalds, Craig Livingstone, Webster Hubbell and Jorge Cabrera.
- This report from CNN in 1999: "Deputy independent counsel Hickman Ewing testified at the Susan McDougal trial Thursday that he had written a 'rough draft indictment' of first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton after he doubted her truthfulness in a deposition. Ewing, who questioned Mrs. Clinton in a deposition at the White House on April 22, 1995, said, 'I had questions about whether what she was saying were accurate. We had no records. She was in conflict with a number of interviews.'" . . . Ewing also testified that in a later deposition with both the president and first lady on July 22, 1995, he had questions about the truthfulness of both Clintons. McDougal's attorney Mark Geragos asked Ewing: 'Did you say the Clintons were liars?' 'I don't know if I used the 'L-word' but I expressed internally that I was concerned,' Ewing said."
There was a time when any sane campaign consultant and party leadership outside of Chicago would have told such a candidate to forget about running. But the assumption today is that all sins can be spun away.
It may seem that way, but it isn't true. The Democratic Party suffered in an unprecedented way at the national and state level because of Bill Clinton's misdoings. These scandals helped defeat two Democratic candidates for president and only in the last election were there signs of recovery.
The best favor the Democrats could do for themselves is to flush the Clinton name and its sorry memories down the toilet.
January 17, 2007
OBAMA'S 2004 SPEECH REVISITED
Sam Smith
Since the establishment media is trying to get us to elect a man as president on the basis of one speech he gave, I thought it might be useful to go back and look at Barack Obama's 2004 talk.
Before preceding further, it should be noted that electing anyone on the basis of a speech is a dangerous way of going about politics because, in the first place, you're not necessarily voting for the person who wrote it. I have long argued that speech writers ought to be listed on the ballot alongside their candidates and if any writer gets fired or leaves, then a special election needs to be called to select a new speechwriter-enhanced politician.
But that reform is a long way off so we'll just go along with the dominant principle that anyone who gives a good speech is entitled to be president.
Unfortunately, Obama's 2004 speech wasn't all that good. One can't read it without a sense that it wasn't the all too familiar cliches that appealed to the media and voters as much as the fact that they were being delivered by a black man. What Obama did was to say absolutely nothing that a centrist white voter would find offensive or nerve troubling. Not a hint of Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan or King.
The speech consisted of 2341 words (including the applause credits listed in the transcript). These broke down into the following:
15% - A description of Obama's family
7% - Standard cliches about the U.S.
10% - Standard warm and fuzzy anecdotes
16% - Words in praise of the candidate, John Kerry
8% - Cliches about hope
15% - We're all in this together, there's nothing much to argue about
The last theme can be summed up as why can't the pro-war, anti-abortion, evolution-despising Christian evangelical and the secular, pacifist, pro-gun control gay just be friends? It is a theme that seems to be central to Obama's current plans. Yet what does Obama have to offer to resolve such conflicts. Nothing but mushy, goo-good imprecations of the sort we used to hear from our fourth grade teacher. It's actually a lot harder than that.
There was one other theme in the speech - taking 8% of the words - that was startling to rediscover: Obama was subtlety but distinctly anti-government. A sample:
"Now, don't get me wrong, the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solves all of their problems. They know they have to work hard to get a head. And they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you: They don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon.
"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.
"People don't expect -- people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.
So now we're going waste months in the search for a candidate who will provide "just a slight change in priorities." And that, in his own words, is precisely what Obama promises.
What Obama was doing was sending a signal to the establishment that he wouldn't cause any trouble, that he was willing to join the extremist center, that most dangerous faction of American politics - the one that starts wars, destroys the environment, and celebrates economic equality all the time bragging about how moderate it is. Besides, as Harry Truman said, "Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he is going to vote against me."
Since the establishment media is trying to get us to elect a man as president on the basis of one speech he gave, I thought it might be useful to go back and look at Barack Obama's 2004 talk.
Before preceding further, it should be noted that electing anyone on the basis of a speech is a dangerous way of going about politics because, in the first place, you're not necessarily voting for the person who wrote it. I have long argued that speech writers ought to be listed on the ballot alongside their candidates and if any writer gets fired or leaves, then a special election needs to be called to select a new speechwriter-enhanced politician.
But that reform is a long way off so we'll just go along with the dominant principle that anyone who gives a good speech is entitled to be president.
Unfortunately, Obama's 2004 speech wasn't all that good. One can't read it without a sense that it wasn't the all too familiar cliches that appealed to the media and voters as much as the fact that they were being delivered by a black man. What Obama did was to say absolutely nothing that a centrist white voter would find offensive or nerve troubling. Not a hint of Jackson, Sharpton, Farrakhan or King.
The speech consisted of 2341 words (including the applause credits listed in the transcript). These broke down into the following:
15% - A description of Obama's family
7% - Standard cliches about the U.S.
10% - Standard warm and fuzzy anecdotes
16% - Words in praise of the candidate, John Kerry
8% - Cliches about hope
15% - We're all in this together, there's nothing much to argue about
The last theme can be summed up as why can't the pro-war, anti-abortion, evolution-despising Christian evangelical and the secular, pacifist, pro-gun control gay just be friends? It is a theme that seems to be central to Obama's current plans. Yet what does Obama have to offer to resolve such conflicts. Nothing but mushy, goo-good imprecations of the sort we used to hear from our fourth grade teacher. It's actually a lot harder than that.
There was one other theme in the speech - taking 8% of the words - that was startling to rediscover: Obama was subtlety but distinctly anti-government. A sample:
"Now, don't get me wrong, the people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solves all of their problems. They know they have to work hard to get a head. And they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you: They don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon.
"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.
"People don't expect -- people don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all. They know we can do better. And they want that choice.
So now we're going waste months in the search for a candidate who will provide "just a slight change in priorities." And that, in his own words, is precisely what Obama promises.
What Obama was doing was sending a signal to the establishment that he wouldn't cause any trouble, that he was willing to join the extremist center, that most dangerous faction of American politics - the one that starts wars, destroys the environment, and celebrates economic equality all the time bragging about how moderate it is. Besides, as Harry Truman said, "Whenever a fellow tells me he is bipartisan, I know he is going to vote against me."
January 16, 2007
CLINTON AND OBAMA: LOGOS WITHOUT LOGOS
Sam Smith
There is already something quite scary about the 2008 election. Despite unprecedented crises of climate and constitution and the collapse of America's respected role in the world, the best the Democratic establishment has to offer are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two candidates full of logos, which is Madison Avenue for symbols, but devoid of logos, which is Greek for reason.
What is scary about this is that this is no ordinary election coming up. This is an election that could determine whether America is condemned to further descend into totalitarianism and how easy it will be for our children to breathe, drink water and find food. To reduce the election to a matter of making whites feel smug about their willingness to vote for a black or a woman for president is to trivialize human and planetary survival. Besides, Margaret Thatcher was a woman and Idi Amin was a black. Equality means the bad is fairly distributed as well.
If, as liberals have traditionally argued, justice requires looking past a person's ethnicity or gender to their essential being, there is no better time to practice this than in the 2008 election. And once you do, Clinton and Obama quickly fade as options, Clinton because her disreputable past, her chronic dishonesty and indifferent politics; and Obama for his lack of having done anything for us in the past and his failure so far to promise anything meaningful for us in the future.
As issues go, the question of the Iraq war is far less significant than it appears. We've lost and we're just arguing over the best way to get out. What is far more important are such issues as:
- Which candidates will best help America live peacefully and positively in a highly fractured world and which will merely aggravate the crises their predecessors permitted to fester?
- Which candidates will best reverse the America's growing anti-constitutional authoritarianism and which will merely increase the trend?
- Which candidates will take global warming seriously and which will just use it as another feel-good issue?
- Which candidate will work hardest to reverse the economic inequalities that have flourished in America over the past quarter century?
At present, there is no easy answer but one thing is certain: Clinton and Obama don't make it to the top of the list on any of these issues.
MORE FLOTSAM & JETSAM
There is already something quite scary about the 2008 election. Despite unprecedented crises of climate and constitution and the collapse of America's respected role in the world, the best the Democratic establishment has to offer are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, two candidates full of logos, which is Madison Avenue for symbols, but devoid of logos, which is Greek for reason.
What is scary about this is that this is no ordinary election coming up. This is an election that could determine whether America is condemned to further descend into totalitarianism and how easy it will be for our children to breathe, drink water and find food. To reduce the election to a matter of making whites feel smug about their willingness to vote for a black or a woman for president is to trivialize human and planetary survival. Besides, Margaret Thatcher was a woman and Idi Amin was a black. Equality means the bad is fairly distributed as well.
If, as liberals have traditionally argued, justice requires looking past a person's ethnicity or gender to their essential being, there is no better time to practice this than in the 2008 election. And once you do, Clinton and Obama quickly fade as options, Clinton because her disreputable past, her chronic dishonesty and indifferent politics; and Obama for his lack of having done anything for us in the past and his failure so far to promise anything meaningful for us in the future.
As issues go, the question of the Iraq war is far less significant than it appears. We've lost and we're just arguing over the best way to get out. What is far more important are such issues as:
- Which candidates will best help America live peacefully and positively in a highly fractured world and which will merely aggravate the crises their predecessors permitted to fester?
- Which candidates will best reverse the America's growing anti-constitutional authoritarianism and which will merely increase the trend?
- Which candidates will take global warming seriously and which will just use it as another feel-good issue?
- Which candidate will work hardest to reverse the economic inequalities that have flourished in America over the past quarter century?
At present, there is no easy answer but one thing is certain: Clinton and Obama don't make it to the top of the list on any of these issues.
MORE FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)