alias Bruce.

You Name It.

I saw a bumper sticker like this one on a truck the other day.

What a tribute to the awe-inspiringly seductive powers of delusion. For the sake of a sought-after feeling of potency, or a fearful swipe at the specter of a black president, or a sense of heroic devotion to a single cause (e.g., guns), gaggles of scared and struggling folks are able to convince themselves that by nodding at the power of citizen-stomping corporations in a near-depression economy they are "keeping their freedom and their money." This while the New York Times reports that national unemployment has hit 17.5 percent when you factor in those who are seeking jobs, those who have given up looking, and those who are working part-time because they can't find full-time jobs.

We could detour here into a rant about far-right gullibility and brain failure, but why? It is hardly news that the back-slapping refrain of, "You've got yours, just like us, and don't let those people take any of it away from you" has been the ruling class's most effective sop for white wage slaves ever since the days of black non-wage slavery.

I heard a Republican say on the radio a few days ago that the rise of so-called social conservatism has been the worst thing that ever happened to the G.O.P. Its passing off a mob-mentality moralism as "conservatism," he said, has splintered the party's planks of true conservatism: those being belief in small government, maximum market competition, staying out of people's private lives, etc. This isn't news, either, since we know very well that today's farthest right is not "conservative" at all but a loose posse of reactionaries who like big government and violation of individual rights just fine when it does what they want: punishing women for abortions, using military and police surveillance and violence with abandon, detaining assorted feared "others" without due process, passing laws forbidding gay people to marry, and so on.

So all of this gets me to thinking: We need to make it a public point to delete the word "conservative" from the terms we use to describe such people, and substitute another.

How about "coercive?" As in, "Social coercives have shown support for a measure that would make public the names and medical records of women who have abortions." (This is true, by the way.) Or as in, "In an intra-party conflict among Republicans, coercives are calling for harsh government policies toward illegal immigrants, while business-oriented conservatives are not."

I'm still mulling over other possible terms. Maybe you'll want to as well. It's definitely time to change the lexicon. Calling people "conservatives" when they embrace government-as-God's-goon just won't cut it.

The Fort Hood Shootings.

My first reaction upon reading this morning that the alleged shooter in yesterday's nightmarish Fort Hood massacre is a Muslim named Nidal Malik Hasan was to groan, "Oh, no."

Not because of anything this means about him. But because of what it may mean for how the nation deals with its own attitudes. It's like when many of we black males hear news of an unthinkably brutal attack on a white stranger, one of our immediate thoughts, alongside our empathy with the victim, is, "God, I hope this perp isn't black." Something in us starts to brace, from experience, to watch the venerable Fear of Black Men rear its snarling head another foot higher among the hordes of our white brethren. Sometimes this presumptive dread by people of color of whites' reaction proves irrelevant or just wrong, either because the perp is white or because the white reaction to his race rebuts our conditioned (and sometimes paranoid) response.

The glass-half-full take on how the country reacts to Hasan is that this horrible tragedy may reveal a teachable moment, when (Foxoid crazies aside) citizens sidestep the post-9-11 "get those Islamist bastards" tar pit and instead view the alleged mass-murderer according to the still-unfolding facts of who he is: an Army psychiatrist, apparently taunted for being a Muslim, who treated enough PTSD patients to develop a contempt for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a panic about his upcoming deployment, which he allegedly tried to avert by attempting unsuccessfully to get out of the Army. So the dominant public narrative about Hasan, after these years of baseless detentions of Muslims and the emergence of white terrorism suspects, becomes one of an angry doctor going antiwar and losing his marbles in a murderous rampage.

The glass-half-empty version, of course, is that the dominant narrative about Hasan devolves to anti-Islamist boilerplate, or that the pockets of  birthers/anti-immigrant vigilantes/Christian supremacists/terrorphobes simply drown out the more reasoned public mood in their shrieking blame of an uppity black president for the assured nuking of the republic.

Today's New York Times reported that terrorist intent had not been ruled out, but that it appeared unlikely. Even if that changes, the glass-half-full mindset could still hold. And even if it doesn't change, the glass-half-full juggernaut could surge onward anyway, the facts of this case be damned.

We'll see where this horrendous story goes.

"Dithering."

So Dick Cheney, that sneering ghost of failures past, has recently been hissing into the ear of the national punditry corps that Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan.

It's an interesting accusation coming from Cheney, a man whose quick trigger finger and lack of perceptual acuity under pressure have made him a danger both to the world and to his hunting partners.

Not that prospects look good for a productively wise Obama response to the horrors in that tortured nation, which every day looks more and more like a mountainous quagmire for American hubris. It's looking clear that wrong-headed American military escalation is on the way. And it's also looking clear that furrow-browed Washington rhetoric about pairing a successful military surge with a hearts-and-minds political victory betrays a floundering cluelessness about how to actually pull this off. The honest folks in the room, I believe, already know that it cannot be achieved militarily and that it cannot be forced politically in a nation where the U.S. has cornered itself, with its drones and its dirty alliances, into the role of a hopelessly bloody-handed interloper. The growing comparisons to Vietnam are no coincidence, and Obama's nearly 300-day presidential record of spinal plasticity is no reason for confidence. Behind closed doors, the "realistic" options on the White House table may be various scenarios of good-old-college-try escalation followed, after a respectable interval, by the most face-saving winding down of U.S. intervention deemed politically possible. The Soviets tried to warn us.

But if Obama is, at worst, a weakling in the pull of a bad war, Cheney is a madman. There are reasons aplenty for deep deliberation on Afghanistan, not the least of which are the possible upcoming electoral defeat (or victory) of a corrupt and largely discredited Afghan government; the horrible prospects for the American war effort; and the hemorrhaging economy and spirit of an America caught in two bad wars and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

Add to that the fact that America's most catastrophic troubles of the past decade have resulted directly from dishonest and misinformed rushes to rash action (deregulation, Iraq), and you can make a pretty good case for dithering.

The Arizona Sweat Lodge.

The three deaths and many injuries from the October 8 sweat lodge at a $9,000-per-head Arizona spiritual retreat are tragic evidence (as if we needed more) that misusing a tradition this powerful is a terrible and dangerous game.

I'll leave it to people who know more to say more. There are many who feel that the sweat lodge ceremony, which goes back thousands of years on this continent and others, should never be in the hands of cultural middlemen in the first place. On the other hand, if we forbade an  American Indian from becoming a Catholic priest and taking confession from Native American parishioners, what would that say? It is, of course, not a level playing field: on the cultural theft scoreboard, the numbers are something like American Settlers 200, Native Americans 2. All I'll say is that I have been in many a sweat lodge, all led with sufficient respect and grounding in the tradition to be carried out reverently and safely. This ceremony, and what happens to body and spirit in the searing steam and pitch blackness of the lodge ritual, is nothing to mess with.

If a survivor's account of the fateful Arizona lodge is true, and self-help icon and lodge leader James Arthur Ray put more than 50 modern consumers through eight 15-to-20-minute sweat rounds covering a total of two hours -- all after five days of fasting and sleep deprivation -- Ray needs to be held accountable for negligent homicide. That kind of package-tour contempt for the tradition and for his paying customers is so reckless as to take the breath away.

In the wake of the tragedy, CNN posted an excellent background piece about the history, meaning, and methods of sweat lodge ceremonies -- and they didn't just quote white people. Read it if you'd like more of a sense of what this ancient ritual is for, how it is intended to function, and the huge burden of responsibility on the ceremony leader to care for those who enter the lodge.

Clearly, Ray didn't get the part about respect and care. It's looking as if he had no business even being in a position to.

Argue No More?

A friend told me a couple of days ago that she avoids political blogs because most of them are less about dialogue than about spitfire opinion. She is right, of course; most political blogs are online opinion columns. Of those I read (the "Blogs and Friends" roster at left will give you an idea), my favorites are those where the writers think hard about issues and where readers and commenters do as well, whether there is agreement or not.

I think my own trajectory about discourse has moved, over the past 10 years or so, more and more toward trying to muster the energy of people of good will toward the pursuit of progressive (generally leftward) social change and away from the notion of more purely even-handed exchange, which is where I think I was when my first book, the original Race Manners, came out in 1999. I guess, like a lot of civil rights and racial justice advocates, I reached a point where I felt my energy was better used in service of those ready to carry out actual social change than in trying to pull in those who are invested in resisting it. To be blunt about it, I think history gives us pretty vivid evidence (abolitionism, women's suffrage, black and gay civil rights) that there is generally a majority that stands around watching while a committed minority doggedly pursues change until it is achieved.

Anyway, just after I had this conversation about blogs and discourse, I received an email from my friend Rob Levy pointing me toward an October 15 manifesto by Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, a fiercely liberal church reformer and author of, among other works, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Spong's new manifesto, "The Time Has Come!", is a scathing critique of Christian homophopia, and it basically argues that the time has passed for debating, engaging or even responding to the Christian Right on issues of gay rights, because those rights are on an inevitable path toward victory and there is no longer any moral, religious or political argument to be had.

Spong declares, in part, that:

 "...it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. "Don't ask, don't tell" will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women?"

And he goes on to say:

"The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. ...I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the "Flat Earth Society" either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union."

I challenge the idea that the battle is won, but I also get it that Spong is speaking of the engine of spirit more than the machinery of politics. I suspect he knows very well that there are many more lawsuits yet to be filed, more gay family tragedies and triumphs to be played out, more wicked voter propositions to be fought, more insults and awful injuries to be endured. But at the heart of it, Spong is telling advocates of gay rights that it is now time to act victorious and to stop stooping to bicker with bigots who have already lost to the inertia of spiritual advancement. History has already spoken on this issue, Spong is saying, and it is time for progressives to act like it.

We could apply this idea to other fronts on which it has become an article of faith for progressives to exhaustively rebut the hard right: abortion rights, the socially supportive role of government, racial justice. What if we were to confidently wield the moral triumph of these ideas instead of yelling about them on Hardball or Crossfire? What would the progressive movement look like if we steadily affirmed the inevitability of meaningful reform of health care and campaign financing? How much time did the black civil rights movement spend debating with the sworn enemies of human rights? How much of their energy did Cuban visionaries of economic equality devote to shouting matches with the Batista regime and United Fruit Company?

I'm simply asking questions here. But I think Spong is trying to tell us something. Maybe argument isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Lessons from the Miss Hampton University Pageant.

At least part of what's been going on in recent days at Hampton University, I think, is that the price of racial progress has been spotlit. In an ugly way.

Last week, Hampton became one of a small but growing number of historically-black colleges and universities (HBCUs to those of us who speak informally about them) to choose a school pageant winner (in this case Miss Hampton University and Homecoming Queen) who is not black.

What we know for certain is that last Friday, Nikole Churchill (above, center), a 22-year-old senior from Hawaii who has an Italian mother and a father from Guam, won the crown in front of about 900 spectators. What happened next depends on what you read and who you talk to.

Initial press coverage highlighted a dramatic "divide" between those at Hampton who supported Churchill's having been chosen and those who didn't like having a non-black Miss Hampton. One story cited a spectator who said that a noticeable number of people walked out of the auditorium when Churchill won but a majority stood and applauded. Press accounts spoke of resentful students and alumni who felt Churchill could not represent a historically black school and who questioned her Hampton bona fides because she attends the school's smaller Virginia Beach campus instead of the main campus in Hampton, Virginia. Even more dramatically, Churchill wrote a letter to President Obama asking him to visit Hampton to refute the negativity she said she was receiving on campus. "I am hoping that perhaps you would be able to make an appearance to my campus, Hampton University, so that my fellow Hamptonians can stop focusing so much on the color of my skin and doubting my abilities to represent," she wrote to Obama, "but rather be proud of the changes our nation is making toward accepting diversity."

But then, within a day, the university released a statement from Churchill in which she apologized for her letter to Obama and reversed her initial claim. In the statement, she says that "I took the comments of a few and blew it out of proportion. In reality, all comments that have been directed towards me and the reception I received at the Hampton University versus Howard University football game on Saturday, October 10, 2009 were genuinely supportive."

So. Either a lot of Hamptonians were giving Churchill a hard time, as she first wrote, or very few were, as she later wrote. My guess is that she took flack and freaked out, but then changed her tack after the university read her the riot act about her role as the new Miss Hampton and as a contestant in the upcoming Miss Virginia pageant. But of course, I don't know.

What does seem clear is that this is a rite of passage for Hampton University and an object lesson in what happens when historically-necessary black self-protection butts up against, to use Obama's word, change.

This controversy first looked to me like a sorry case of self-guarding black folk refusing to grant the kind of respect to ethnic others that they rightly expect for themselves. A kind of reflexive "me-first" defensiveness that doesn't know when it's time to switch itself off. But then I had a conversation with someone I know who is a black graduate of an HBCU. What is going on here, they suggested to me, is a visceral fear of the possible death of a safe haven. As they put it:

"Some of the outrage is that HBCUs were designed soley because we were not welcomed at the Cornells and Harvards of the world, so a lot of the underlying anger is undoubtedly, 'This is our school for us and how dare this happen??' From what I've read (and heard) only a minority of the student body is bent out of shape. It's probably the alumni, who are very, very used to tradition, who are losing sleep over this. My belief (and fear, really) is that HBCUs may down the road find themselves becoming like Ebony [a popular black magazine]. Ebony, (like HBCUs), was very necessary at a certain time in history for obvious reasons. No publication reflected us, so we created our own and did it ourselves. No one would let us into their universities, so we (with the help of white abolitionists) built our own schools. Booker T. Washington was so motivated after graduating from Hampton that he went on and founded Tuskegee. So maybe some see [Churchill's selection as Miss Hampton] as a little sign that something that is so dear and close to our hearts might be slowly slipping away."

Makes sense to me. It also makes me sad.

But I also have to ask: Why is an internationally-respected historically black university, in 2009, still holding an annual de facto beauty pageant that includes a swimsuit competition? I'd expect better from an institution such as Hampton.

Perhaps that conversation, too, can be part of the growth that comes from this controversy.

Obama, the Nobel Prize, and Jazz.

It's a fair question whether President Barack Obama really deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It's just that, in the scheme of things, I don't think it's a very interesting question.

I'm still digesting all of this, of course. Talk about a weekend surprise. But if we go by the usual Nobel standards, I can't see, at the moment, how Obama even comes close to deserving the laurels, which generally reward either a life commitment to changing the world (think Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela) or a huge accomplishment in the cause of peace (think Mikhail Gorbachev, pivotal in ending the Cold War, or Woodrow Wilson, instrumental in the Treaty of Versailles). Not that every Nobel Peace Prize winner has that kind of global veneration; recent recipients include former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Mohamed Elbaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency. And anyway, I do think Obama has the potential for greatness in leadership -- if someday soon he would gird his loins to lead his party and his wobbly nation.

No doubt, there is plenty of sound and fury in the "is he worthy?" Nobel debate that is now rattling our American windows. Head Republican buffoon Michael Steele darted into traffic to yell public insults to the effect that Obama is a sorry excuse for a Nobel laureate. Some prominent Washington figures with better home training than Steele have murmured their tepid congratulations. Others are heartily slapping the prez on the back. Obama himself, wisely, comes across as humbled and overwhelmed by the honor. If nothing else, the event illustrates in thick bright-red crayon just how childishly single-minded some Republicans are in finding any Obama outcome to be proof of his evil. (RNC position if Obama wins Nobel: Of course he won. He's a slick black strutter who has managed to sweet-talk the world. RNC position if Obama does not win Nobel: Of course he didn't win. Did you really think this gibbering fascist huckster was even in the running?)

But as I said, to me what's important about this is not how we in our Americanness try to hash out Obama's Nobel merit. What's important is what Europeans are actually trying to say in giving him the award and in their response to his receiving it. It looks to me as if, for Europe, this award is less about what Obama has accomplished and more about what he makes possible, which I'm guessing they see as a bona fide hallelujah moment after the apocalypse of the Bush years.

Listen to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who the New York Times quoted as saying the award marked “America’s return to the hearts of the world’s peoples.”

And here is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, proclaiming that “In a short time [Obama] has been able to set a new tone throughout the world and to create a readiness for dialogue.”

Then there was Nobel committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, who declared, “The question we have to ask is who has done the most in the previous year to enhance peace in the world. And who has done more than Barack Obama?”

That whooshing sound you hear is a great gasp of relief from across the Atlantic at their now having an American partner who studies, thinks, plays well with others, and who keeps the cover securely locked over the blinking red buttons on the console.

Which is where jazz comes in.

Our country has a long tradition of missing or dissing the global meaning of things African-American. Just as jazz has been revered in Europe as essentially a very advanced and creative form of classical music while its primarily-black American practitioners have struggled here to be viewed as more than barroom entertainers, Europe now bows to a man (who happens to be black) who represents a return to global statesmanship on a teetering planet -- while Americans squabble about whether he is really a legal citizen and whether he really hates white people.

We Americans really need to get out more often.

Eye-Openers.

In searching for something else, I ran across this article about differences between European and Native American attitudes toward children at the time of the European conquest of North America. It provides food for thought about what has made modern capitalism, with its lack of soulful purpose and its machined inhumanity, possible. Here is an excerpt:

European observers were shocked by the differences between their child-rearing customs and those of the Indian peoples of the Eastern woodlands. There were certain superficial similarities. Native peoples, like Europeans, surrounded pregnancy with rituals to ensure the newborn's health, and practiced rites following a childbirth that Europeans regarded as perversions of baptism and CIRCUMCISION (such as rubbing an infant in bear's fat and piercing the newborn's tongue, nose, or ears). The differences in child rearing were especially striking. Girls were not expected to spin, weave, or knit, as they were in Europe, and boys were not expected to farm. Nor were children subjected to corporal punishment, since this was believed to produce timidity and submissiveness.

Maturation among Indians was much more enmeshed in religious and communal rituals than among Europeans. For boys, there were ceremonies to mark one's first tooth, killing of one's first large game, and a vision quest, in which boys went alone into the wilderness to find a guardian spirit. Many girls were secluded at the time of first menstruation. Among certain Southeastern tribes, there was a ceremony called huskinaw through which boys and girls shed their childish identity and assumed adult status.

English colonists regarded children as "adults-in-training." They recognized that children differed from adults in their mental, moral, and physical capabilities, and drew a distinction between childhood, an intermediate stage they called youth, and adulthood. But they did not rigidly segregate children by age. Size and physical strength were more important than chronological age in defining a young person's roles and responsibilities. Parents wanted children to speak, read, reason, and contribute to their family's economic well-being as soon as possible.

Infancy was regarded as a state of deficiency. Unable to speak or stand, infants lacked two essential attributes of full humanity. Parents discouraged infants from crawling, and placed them in "walking stools," similar to modern walkers. To ensure proper adult posture, young girls wore leather corsets and parents placed rods along the spines of very young children of both sexes. The colonists rarely swaddled their infants, and not surprisingly some youngsters fell into fireplaces or wells.

It goes on from there. I suggest reading it in its entirety. But you get the idea. The momentum toward today's treatment of 11-year-olds as consumer decision-makers was set early. The culture we now live in continues to pay dearly for its careless, randomized view of life trajectory, as if each of our 70-year episodes of life on earth is a mechanically-jangled course in material competency, or, alternatively, employment in servitude toward an autocratic afterlife CEO.

As it happens, I am now reading Of Water and the Spirit, a memoir of traditional West African ritual initiation by Malidoma Patrice Somé. It's some story, and it illuminates the point that consumer life unanchored in participatory meaning is one hell of a horrible way to starve.

But, like I said, I found the article about childhood while looking for something else. I was seeking information I remembered having seen about sleep patterns for a friend who awakens inexplicably in the middle of the night. And I found it: in the form of a New York Times op-ed by Virginia Tech professor A. Roger Ekirch. His basic premise, which I have also seen elsewhere, is that our idea of a continuous, unbroken, peaceful night's sleep is a recent one. Historically, insect bites, cold, and other unavoidable discomforts have made sleep a more normally fragmented proposition. In European colonial America, for instance, the nightly habit of a "first sleep" and a "second sleep," separated by a period of wee-hours wakeful activity, was commonly accepted.

So if you're awake and perky -- as I am at the moment -- sometime after 3 in the morning, there may be more reason for it than you know. In my case, my siblings and I had night-owl parents. But that simply begs the question of where they got it.

In any case, Ekirch's article might give you some things to ponder late at night. Me, I'm now going to bed. It's time for my First Sleep.

Public Option: Whose Math?

The Senate Finance Committee has just voted down a public health insurance option in its health reform bill.

This is thanks both to Republicans and some Democrats, including Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), who mumbles that he likes the idea but that in the real world it won't get enough senate votes.

Meanwhile, in the real  real world, nearly two-thirds of Americans continue to favor a public option, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Which apparently answers the question of whose opinion actually counts.

Roman Polanski: Madness.

Why is the three-decade-old case against Roman Polanski for his having had sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 being dragged wheezily along by U.S. prosecutors, this time with a celebrity-bust drama in Switzerland?

It's not for the sake of the victim. Samantha Geimer, now 45, who Polanski had sex with after he gave her champagne and part of a Quaalude following a photo shoot with the young would-be actress, has said repeatedly over the years that the courts and media have damaged her far more than her ordeal with Polanski, and that the criminal case should have been dismissed years ago. (She sued Polanski and they settled out of court.)

Nor is this spectacle being pursued for the sake of justice. The trial, already a media circus, became a travesty when Judge Laurence J. Rittenband intervened and revoked a plea agreement reached between the prosecution and the defense. The Washington Post has reported (9/28/09) that the prosecutor, defense, and journalists at the time agreed that the judge's get-tough act stemmed from his own well-known hunger for publicity. It was in response to the judge's stunt that Polanski fled the country in fear of a prison sentence of up to 50 years.

So why is the State of California, already beyond bankrupt, flushing dearly-needed public funds on an international caper that satisfies no need and serves no one's interest? Why recruit Switzerland for an absurd extradition attempt that accomplishes nothing except to underline the hypocrisy and puritanical obsession of a nation that blithely steamrollers universal health care while breathlessly pursuing a 31-year-old sex case that even the victim says is past tense?

Somebody here needs a good therapist.