alias Bruce.

Is the NRA as crazy as it acts?

It sure looks that way, doesn't it? After all, in the wake of an almost-inconceivable succession of spectacular recent gun murders, what sane organization would choose to stonewall even the limpest suggestions for public gun safety when it is on the wrong side of the opinion polls on most gun control issues? How nuts does an organization have to be to publicly denounce reforms (such as widened background checks) that most of its own membership favors? How can any brain-active gun advocacy group today not understand the need to cut its losses and offer at least minor concessions to a Congress addicted to both gun money and voter poll numbers? I mean, Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, the Webster NY firefighter ambush, the gun show shootings – how many neon signs for the need to yield some public ground on guns does even the cultish NRA leadership need?

It may well be that Wayne LaPierre and his fellow White Geezer Gunners at the helm of the National Rifle Association are just plain wacked: shrieking zealots who have lost touch with their own organizational interests as well as the basics of human morality.

But I think it is just as likely that the NRA's top brain trust is crazy like a fox. I see one demonstrated reason for this, and also an unproven but evilly feasible reason.

The demonstrated reason comes from the chief axiom of America's increasingly frightened White Far Right: the best strategy for a right-wing white fringe that finds itself losing both the demographics and the public debates is to become so audacious, so bloodthirstily provocative and wildly uncompromising, as to scare money-whipped politicians and terrified white voters alike into whimpering agreement with NRA ideas that are way out of whack with voters' deeper desires and interests. This has been the tactic, for instance, of the Republican Party since 2008, and while it may appear suicidal in the long run, it is actually the sensible option for a cadre that has nothing to lose. With the NRA, as with the GOP, if they hard-line it the worst that can happen to them is the kind of defeat that would happen anyway if they were to yield now to demographics and the public's better instincts. And their best-case scenario is that they secure wins for their agenda that protect their power in spite of the fact that their arguments make no actual sense. So the NRA, ruthless power broker that it is, is going for it.

And then there is the not-yet-proven but evilly feasible reason: Even if the NRA, like the Repubs, sacrifices itself on the altar of broader public opinion, it wins a victory in consolidating the fear and fury of a sector of the white electorate that will accept increased state violence against designated "others" (blacks, Latinos, Muslims, the poor) in exchange for whites' perceived "freedom" to protect their own personal stature with guns. And it so happens that this political transaction serves and pleases those who most aggressively underwrite the Republican Party and the NRA: the very meanest of the rich.

Seen this way, the NRA's ignoring broader public wishes in order to whip up the loyal fury of its relatively narrow base is one of the few practical – and profitable – gambits it has left.

New York acts on guns while Washington ducks.

Good for New York (my home state, I'm happy to brag) for pushing at least some action to curtail gun-happy madness while President Irrelevant and most of Washington remain politely jacked up by gun money and influence, even in their alleged resistance to the gun lobby.

What a spectacle: to see the President and Congress so timidly and congenially address a landscape of such bloody insanity. A national "conversation" about an industry of carnage? Please. Obama's gun speech today, with children and families as supporting players, will be the usual mix of emotional sincerity and practical inadequacy. He will utter gun-control words but he will fight for nothing.

As with any civil rights issue (in this case the "life" in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"), the long-term outcome in the gun battle will be driven by those who fight for what is just, not by those who accommodate what is expedient.

The gang rape and murder of a young woman in India

is such an unspeakable act that it is hard to find words.

First there is the very obscenity of a young woman's being targeted for planned gang rape by six men, including the driver of the bus in which she was riding and several other males – her alleged attackers, now facing murder charges – and her being savagely beaten, raped, sodomized with an iron rod with such force that surgeons had to later remove her intestines in trying to save her, and thrown from the bus to ultimately die of her awful injuries.

Then there is the further horror that, while this particular case made global headlines due to its blood-curdling brutality and the relatively high class stature of the victim, India's tradition of men beating, raping, and murdering women with impunity is long, pervasive, and still widely-approved.

All of this is part and parcel of a deeply-entrenched patriarchy in which a woman (or a girl) can be promised and delivered to a man as de facto chattel for marriage and servitude, and in which women suffer one of the highest rates of rape in the world. Were it not for the explosion of pent-up outrage by Indian women in the wake of this highly-publicized torture and murder, it might have continued to be business as usual. Even after this sensationally horrific crime, Indian officials continue to respond to protestors with rapespeak. This from an Al Jazeera piece by Naomi Wolf:

It is not simply the high rate of rape in India that is driving the protests' virulence. In a passionate speech, Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association, spoke to the deeper issue behind the protests: the blame-the-victim culture in India around sex crimes. She notes that government and police officials recently insisted that most rapists cannot be prosecuted in India, because, as one official put it, they are known to the women attacked. Other officials have publicly suggested that victims themselves are "asking for it" by their use of freedom of movement.

Like other coexisting regimes of rule by repression, including those of race and sexual orientation, rule by gender is both ruthless and steadfast. We hear an avalanche of reasons why we cannot change it: It's what God wants, it's what nature wants, it's what the public wants, it's what the law says, it's what people are going to do regardless. We've heard it all before on each unique front of battle, including gender rights: Maybe it's not fair, but you people just have to accept reality.

One front of battle in the war for gender equality is, of course, that of class. Indian feminist and publisher Urvashi Butalia has some interesting things to say about this. Listen to a radio interview in which she talks about how the bitter resentment of millions of low-income Indian men left behind by global capitalism expresses itself partly through rage and violence toward women, particularly toward "uppity" upwardly-mobile women who have the gall to seek education and equality. Women like the victim in this attack, who was a 23-year-old university student. The more women gain, the greater the desire of insecure men to dominate and punish them.

The conditions faced by women in parts of the developing world, where capitalist and pre-capitalist brutalities meet, are particularly dire. But before we pretend that elemental issues of gender justice exclude the West, consider this from Wolf:

This return to pre-feminist discourse is not confined to India. Italy is having a similar debate about whether women's clothes and behaviour invite rape. Even in Sweden, activists complain, rapes in which the men know their assailants go unprosecuted, because the victims are not seen as "good girls."

And this from yesterday's Huffington Post:

WASHINGTON -- Despite a late-stage intervention by Vice President Joe Biden, House Republican leaders failed to advance the Senate's 2012 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, an embattled bill that would have extended domestic violence protections to 30 million LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants and Native American women.

"The House leadership would not bring it up, just like they wouldn't bring up funding for Sandy [hurricane damage] last night," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a key backer of the Senate version of the bill, in an interview with HuffPost. "I think they are still so kowtowing to the extreme on the right that they're not even listening to the moderates, and particularly the women, in their caucus who are saying they support this."

If you want to hear Governor Chris Christie ferociously blow the "populist" cover of the Republican Party over Hurricane Sandy,

watch Christie's Wednesday news conference in which he called his own party and its congressional leader, John Boehner, what they are: a den of amoral mercenaries more beholden to their own crooked loyalties than anything remotely resembling the public interest. This truth is no secret, to be sure. But to hear a solid corporate-political functionary so bluntly and bitterly call out his colleagues is pretty remarkable.

In my lifetime, I have seen few mainstream politicians speak with such candid fury. I sat transfixed in my parked car listening to the C-SPAN broadcast of Christie's news conference. In response to congressional leadership's refusal to act on relief for Sandy victims after more than 60 horrific days had elapsed, Christie was beyond infuriated. He was a man willing to bear enraged witness to the tangible human casualties of an inhuman political regime.

It's interesting what the raw reality of an overwhelming natural disaster will do to create political fractures in corporate monarchy.

Expect to see more of this as climate change intensifies.

The exploding white guy syndrome.

Here is a story:

A population of people, wanting more room after having overgrown and ravaged their own land, sets sail and, with their superior killing tools, successfully invades several other continents around the globe. Since the engine of their particular economy is one by which all entities – including humans, animals, and nature – are treated as physical property for generating wealth for an elite, this intercontinental invasion of theirs includes slaughter of those already inhabiting the newly-"discovered" lands, a savage and bloody pursuit of gold in what is now South America, and a massive slavery industry that ships kidnapped Africans to plantations in North and South America.

Of necessity, the invaders' economic and political elite create a couple of handy popular beliefs in their brand-new nation to help all of this madness feel a bit more normal.

One such manufactured belief is the idea of "whiteness" as a measurable human quality that enables "whites" of all economic classes in the new nation to feel accustomed to having at least some amount of privilege over "Indians," "blacks," and other nonwhites. This gulf of privilege covers a wide span: the right to claim the land you walk on versus being kicked off of it; the right to personal freedom versus slavery; the right to vote versus disenfranchisement; the right to relative safety versus being subject to extermination, lynching, and other flavors of routine discrimination and murder.

The new nation's other handy manufactured belief is the idea of the lone hero striding in and kicking ass in hostile territory.  Thanks to this ethos, the popular measure of power in this new land of "individual opportunity" becomes the ability to personally triumph when surrounded by threats and insecurities. The revered lions of the culture are those fiercely solo souls who, facing danger and risk on all sides, claw their way to success and security. This cult of fiery-eyed self-infatuation completely ignores the cooperative clan- and collective-based influences in human history. But it makes a bang-up salve for a traumatized conquering army of American "whiteness," haunted and increasingly outnumbered by the ghosts and descendants of those whose vengeance it fears, and needing to steadily shore up its self-image of rightness and decency.

And so in this nation's official gospel we see a long and deep thread of self-righteous paranoia grounded in the lie of a heroic individual surrounded by threats. But underlying this myth are cruel realities from which even whiteness provides little or no protection: a nuclear family cut off from true community; the worst joblessness since the Great Depression; not being able to afford health care and higher education; personal finances teetering at (or over) the edge of bankruptcy; a feeling of one's having personally failed the culture's heroic expectations; a rage at having been thrown overboard by one's own country. Into this volatile mix flows an ongoing gun culture where legal and easy access to absurdly lethal firearms meets the bitterness of failed whiteness.

Which brings us to the exploding white guys.

The epidemic of gun availability, and the fact that America has largely given up on providing widely-available care for severe mental illness, cannot by themselves explain why the perpetrators of mass shootings are almost exclusively white men – so much so that criminologists asked to profile mass shooters now routinely begin interviews by saying, "He's going to be a white guy...".  A fair proportion of seriously mentally ill men, many of them poor or homeless, are men of color. And while young black and brown gang-bangers who steadily execute one another on the streets share a lot of the Bad-Ass-with-a-Gun archetype embraced by scared white men, their violence is different both in its causes and its expression. For starters, it is handguns (as opposed to massacre-friendly assault weapons) that are the guns of choice in gang and drug shootings because they are easy to conceal and cheap to buy and replace. Moreover, it is one thing for enraged young men of color in jobless and father-deprived neighborhoods to shoot one another and the occasional bystander in the daily carnage of the drug trade and the gang wars. It is quite another – and much more rare compared with white men – for a black male to walk into a public space and open fire on dozens of strangers with the intent of killing as many innocent people as possible.

So what is the white-guy trigger? Is it an emotional breaking point inherent in the late-capitalist tension between the venerable white male expectation of dominant power and the widespread white male reality of pain and loss and rage? Is it a deep sense of white male entitlement, something that is perhaps much less common in men of color who have a conscious experience of long-term oppression but is screamingly exposed in white men who feel betrayed? Is it something else? A mixture?

Sane gun control, starting with an outright retroactive ban on assault weapons, would pre-empt many of these massacres simply by making it much more physically difficult to kill so many people at once. This is so obvious that it doesn't require elaboration. Curtailing the massive availability of other guns is just as necessary: every day, easily-accessible guns turn arguments into quick and efficient murders.

But behind the gun barrels and bullets and manufacturers is a greater and deadlier machinery: a well-oiled mechanism that sets up whites to fail at whiteness and that sets up people of color to fail at gaining fairness. We need, instead, government that is not purchased by the insurance conglomerates, by the banking sector, by the prison industry, or by the gun lobby. We need leadership that understands what universal health care and living wages and fully-funded education and job training and racial and gender justice and true neighborhood security would look like. And we need the popular will to institutionalize the public interest instead of private conquest.

Otherwise, we will continue to manufacture murder.

Coming soon: Is the NRA as crazy as it looks?

What the NRA's guns-in-schools pitch and the Facebook experience have in common.

I quit Facebook a while back, after having enjoyed being FB friends with a bunch of people with whom I like being connected. I left because Facebook's price of "friendship" was too high for me. What Facebook wanted – what it expected, actually – was for me to be okay with Facebook's tracking and sharing with my "friends" and others my minute-to-minute physical location and other information about me. Facebook also expected me to be okay with its quietly changing its privacy settings so as to steadily and stealthily narrow users' privacy options. I'm not okay with those things. So I left. And I'm happily in touch with people in other ways.

One thing about which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been brutally honest, though, is his willingness to exploit what people will tolerate. Online privacy, he has said publicly, is an increasingly outmoded social norm. So the audacity of Facebook's suddenly making public what it formerly declared to be strictly private information about users is something Zuckerberg expects FB users to accept as a trade-off for the ease and pleasure of continuing to hang with their friends on Facebook. For this pleasure, he thinks, Facebook users will tolerate a sliding slope of eroding power over what is told about them and to whom. And it appears he is right. What we're really talking about here is Facebook creating a new normal – that is, a new low – for people's expectations of online privacy. The idea is that if you make people sufficiently accustomed to an experience, they'll roll over and just go with it. There is plenty of evidence that this is true.

This is one way in which the National Rifle Association's nonsensical and seemingly self-destructive war cry for more guns in K-12 public schools makes tactical sense: the NRA is trying to create a new normal for the borders of mainstream negotiation about guns. As covered by corporate journalists who will repeat virtually any claim (unless it threatens basic capitalist norms), NRA representative Wayne LaPierre's insane call for "a good guy with a gun" in every school succeeds, perversely, in extending the lunatic fringe of public gun debate by about 100 miles. So now a question like, "Is there an argument for having guns in every grade school?" can shove its way into the realm of respectable talking-head commentary while, just weeks ago, it was rightly ignored as craziness.

I'm not saying the NRA's gambit will work. As I'll write in an upcoming post, in the past few weeks the NRA has had a spectacular Christmastime collision with reality. Along with its cartons of cash, audacity is one of the few remaining weapons in the NRA arsenal.

But, as NRA-purchased political demagogues and Facebook's Zuckerberg have learned very well, a little audacity can go a long way.

In a restaurant, I just overheard

a 19-year-old tell his two peers that, as classical conservatory students, they are playing "the best music ever written." All three seemed to agree.

I'll let their point of view speak for itself.

President Obama crying over 20 dead children will change nothing.

I hate to put it that way. I'm absolutely certain that the President felt every tear he shed.

But the problem underlying this tragedy and the dozens of mass shootings that have preceded it goes deeper than an ocean of tears. And a clear eye will tell you that Obama is of as little use in the fight for gun control as he is in most fights. Everything you need to know about the futility of asking him for more can be found in his coded words about guns in his response to the Newtown, Connecticut shootings: "We're going to have to come together to meaningful action on this, regardless of the politics."

I don't want to dwell on this, because Obama will never be part of a real solution to the American gun murder epidemic -- which, by the way, claims a far greater number of little-noticed people of color than it does mediagenic suburban whites. But let's quickly dissect Obama's veiled reference to gun control and see what's really there.

Obama's words: "We're going to have to come together to meaningful action on this, regardless of the politics." Truth: America's gun-crazy policies are all about politics (as well as economics), and "coming together" is a guarantee of inaction. Gun proliferation and its resulting climate of fear are essential to the monied interests of big gun manufacturers, and are central to the political interests of corporate-owned demagogic congresspersons and senators who sell fear of the other to scared white people. (Let's tell it like it is: citizens of color are, by and large, not clamoring for easy access to guns.) Any challenge to this gun hegemony must by its nature be political. And "coming together" will never, ever win such a victory. All sides "coming together" to defeat the rule of guns is as absurd as all sides "coming together" to defeat slavery in the 19th century. Or Jim Crow in the 20th century. Or the denial of women's reproductive rights right up through today. In each case, what has won the day has not been all sides "coming together," but, instead, those committed to justice proving themselves unstoppable in the face of brutal opposition. The same is true of the gun war.

Which is why Obama will never be part of the solution.

What is and always will be the solution is when enough Americans generate enough of an understanding of the root of the problem and accrue enough rage about its bloody consequences to demand – through strategically-organized protest, civil disobedience, and economic and legislative outcry – that guns not be sold like candy.

To get an idea of just how cowardly Obama is on gun control, read yesterday's remarks by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the guy who did his best to crush the Occupy movement and who presides over NYC's infamous stop-and-frisk policy – in which Bloomberg tried to prod Obama beyond tears and into action on reining in guns.

And to hear someone who has actually experienced a mass shooting talk back to Obama about the Newtown massacre, watch this video of Steve Barton, who survived being shot in the face and neck in the recent Aurora, Colorado theater shooting that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.

This is what your future commercial airline travel experience could be:

Airline Fee Parody

From APM's Marketplace Money radio show, 11/23/2012.

Marriage equality wins here in Maryland.

Finally, my home state of Maryland has stopped waffling on the right of gay people to marry.

On Tuesday we citizens overrode an attempt to defeat by referendum a state law allowing gay marriage. We are one of several states that made Tuesday a historic day for upholding marriage equality.

As I and many others keep saying, opponents of marriage equality are so strident and desperate precisely because they know in their bitter little hearts that the struggle for marriage equality is ultimately going to prevail. If this reactionary desperation sounds familiar (think defenders of slavery, defenders of denying women the vote, defenders of racial segregation) it's because it is. Nobody is quite so mean as the eagerly privileged when they see their privilege slipping away.

I'm proud of the 52 percent of fellow Maryland voters who stood up for marriage equality.

The 48 percent who voted against it? I'm not so proud of them.