My Dinner With W.
I dreamed I had dinner with George W. Bush the other night. At least I think it was a dream.
I
realize that to some the experience might qualify, technically, as a nightmare. But
boy, was it interesting. How many chances does one get, after all to,
sit face to face with the contemporary world's surely most powerful,
compulsive and destructive liar? To watch treachery work its jaws and
wipe its dribbling chin? To hear it account for itself up close and
personally?
Also,
the food was good. We met at a Thai joint in some city I didn't
recognize. There was no plan or explanation for our rendezvous; we both
simply showed up and sat down together. (You know how dreams are.) I
ordered a green curry. W had the Pad Thai, which he swore is his
favorite dish despite the bloody-steak Texas swagger act. Who
knew?
We
dined and talked for what seemed like a very long time. We each had a
couple of Thai beers (he didn't explain his falling off the wagon). He
had no entourage, and there were no secret service droids in evidence, which again, is inexplicable but typical for a dream.
At
any rate, for those of you who might be curious, here -- courtesy of
the CyberCam dream recorder, one of the weirder inventions of my
expatriate Harvard physicist pal -- are some highlights from the
transcript of my dinner conversation with the sitting President:
________________________________
BAJ: A lot of people hate you. Do you know that?
W: (laughs) Hate me? Oh, my. Oh, dear. (laughs again) They hate me? Now why would they hate me? What's the matter, they think I'm dishonest or something? (laughs again)
BAJ: See, that's it. Right there. The sarcasm. The frat-boy thing. As if you think you can get away with anything. If
there's anything people hate even more than evil, it's evil that gloats.
W:
Yeah, well, let me tell you something. I'm the goddamned president of
the United States, and they're not. Okay? So they can hate me or think
I'm not so smart or wish torture and torment on me or think any
God-fucking-damned thing they want to about me and it won't mean shit.
Won't mean rabbit shit. Know why? Because I'm the goddamned president,
that's why. Were you watching TV last fall? See who got elected? Me. Me
and my base, that's who got elected. Hate me? Fuck them. You can tell
them I said that. Tell them the President of the United States, the
most powerful man on the planet, said Fuck You. Up your goddamned
highfalutin' candy asses.
BAJ: When they hear that, they'll hate you even more.
W: (Laughs) Hey, I've always known how to give a crowd what it wants.
BAJ:
Well, that's the thing. I've got to say, when we get past your lying,
your ducking one bad war and then starting one as president, your using
government as a private global-reconfiguration service for the wealthy
and the tar-pit right...
W: "Tar-pit right." I like that.
BAJ:
...when we get past all that, the thing that makes progressives want to
shove your face into a wood chipper is your 'tude. I mean, you're mean.
You really are. You're unkind, and you like being that way, and it
shows. Whenever you try to act soft and caring, you look completely
phony. I mean, it's a joke: you're up there on the dais smirking at
parents whose kids have died in Iraq. But when you're mean, man, that's
when you shine. When you're trashing people and telling raging lies,
you glow. It's like ugly is the real you.
W:
Well, look. In all seriousness. All right? In all seriousness, I've
just never given a shit. Okay? I'm a guy who basically doesn't give a
shit about consequences. Because I don't have to. I don't have to care.
When I was growing up I didn't have to figure out how to be a nice boy,
how to go by the rules. Hell, families like ours, we made the rules.
I've always liked having a good time, feeling the rush, doing what I
want. When I was doing coke and then later drinking, I didn't give a
shit about anything. I was royalty. I'd do what I wanted and it would
be all right. No matter what I did, people would fix it for me. Karl
does that for me now. Same thing. I like being a shithead, getting in
people's faces. Okay? I like it. When I was at Yale I sat in the back
of the classroom and chewed tobacco and told my professors and my
classmates they were fucking assholes.
BAJ: I've heard that.
W:
It's true. And guess what? Americans voted for me. No matter what you
think about Florida and Ohio. I got half the American vote. Those
millions of people wanted somebody who's not afraid to look like an
asshole. That would be me. I'm their man.
BAJ: There's a professor named Mark Crispin Miller...
W: Never heard of him.
BAJ:
He's got a theory about you. He's studied how you act in public, and
his basic theory is that you're comfortable being mean and
uncomfortable being nice. He claims that nearly all of your verbal
slip-ups and gaffes happen when you're trying to be nice, but that when
you're flat-out mean you speak perfectly and your instincts are
flawless. He says that's because you're basically a mean guy.
W: (Shrugs) Call it what you want. I've got a style and it works for me. So what?
BAJ:
Let me ask you this. You remember Karla Faye Tucker, right? The woman
you executed in Texas while you were governor. She and a friend had
committed two brutal murders on a drug binge. After she turned her life
around in prison and became a born-again Christian, and people like the
brother of one of the victims started asking for her to be spared, she
begged to meet with you. You refused, and she was executed in 1998 by
lethal injection. Remember?
W: Sure. I remember her.
BAJ:
Well, you did an interview with Talk Magazine in September 1999 in
which you talked about having seen Ms. Tucker's televised interview
with Larry King. And in that Talk Magazine interview, you mocked her.
You told the reporter how Ms. Tucker had been asked by King what she
would say to Governor Bush. The reporter asked you what she replied.
And you, Mr. President, then Governor, mockingly screwed up your face
and, in a voice jokingly mimicking Ms. Tucker, you whined, "Please
don't kill me!" And the story among journalists is that you then sat
there grinning at the reporter because you thought this was funny. But
then you looked at the reporter and you noticed that the reporter was
staring at you in horror, mouth open in astonishment. And then you
stopped grinning. Is that true?
W:
Yeah, that happened. And the story ran in that little magazine. But it
never really went anywhere. See, it's an interesting thing how you can
deal with reporters. If you hammer the press, I mean really pummel 'em,
pound 'em like meat, they'll roll. They're scared. This crop of
reporters today, they're not like the reporters before. They're not
willing to put it all on the line. They just want to talk to a few
people and get their quotes and write their stories, get on the talk
shows, have books, summer houses. Gamble their jobs? Lose their press
credentials or their White House access? No way. You pound these little
reporters good, let 'em know you're ruthless and you'll drink blood,
they'll roll. Most of them. Karl understood that. Early on, he knew
that. I give him credit. So that story went away. A lot of reporters,
editors looked at that story and said, "We run with that, it's trouble,
it looks personal." They backed off. They almost always do.
BAJ: So how come you and your folks at Fox News are so rabid about how "the bias of the liberal media" is killing
you?
W:
(laughs) You know damn well why. Best defense is a good offense. Again,
that's Karl talking. When you're the biggest, baddest rat, you accuse
the mouse of being a tiger. Works every time. Keeps everybody
off-balance while the rat gets the cheese. (laughs again) And the
reporters? They won't call you on it. Like I said, they're scared. And
lazy. They just want a good quote. Next day the headline will say, "Rat
Says Evidence Shows Mouse Is A Tiger." (laughs again) The press today.
Best thing that's ever happened to rats.
BAJ:
You didn't look so good in the press after Katrina. CNN, all of the
networks but Fox, were all over it. I think even they were shocked that
a government could be this broken. You were a disgrace. Standing there
outside of New Orleans joking about how you used to party in Houston.
Staying away from the poorest, most devastated parts of the city until
the bad reviews forced you back to New Orleans to be seen. Being
careful this time to force your face into that stupid smirking frowning
thing you do for the cameras, pretending to give a shit. Gutting FEMA
the way you did, replacing the career disaster people with political
suck-ups who know nothing, putting that Arabian Horse hack Brown in
charge, for God's sake, cutting the federal funds for Louisiana's dike
repair projects when the Army engineers and scientists kept telling you
it was a disaster waiting to happen. And then here comes the storm and
it doesn't occur to you or to any of your folks to even think about
what's going to happen to tens of thousands of nonwhite,
non-middle-class, non-car-owning people in the middle of New Orleans. I
mean, Jesus Christ. Do you live in another world or do you just not
care?
W:
All right. Look. It was bad luck. We had priorities. Getting a business
foothold in Iraq and those other countries had to happen. The tax cuts
had to happen. Keeping terrorism on the front burner had to happen...
BAJ:
Front burner? Everything about your policies feeds and breeds
terrorism. You've made Iraq a terrorism factory. You've made non-enemy
nations into enemies. You've backed a brutal expansionist regime in
Sharon's Israel. You've forgotten about Al Qaeda. You've under-funded
domestic security...
W:
Duh! Come on. You know how it works. Terrorism's not the thing. The
fear is the thing. The fear is the thing that gets our agenda through.
Okay? Maybe we lose against terrorism -- and we're gonna make sure we
take a good long time losing -- but with the fear keeping the noise
level up the whole time, we win. With the fear bashing in the brains of
good suburban Americans every day, our side wins. We win on taxes. We
win on logging and the FDA and stalling the global warming controls and
keeping our hands on the oil in the Mideast. That's the thing. That's
all there is. I know you know that. You've gotta know that.
BAJ: I needed to hear you say it.
W: Shit, dogging it at Yale doesn't mean I'm stupid. The minute 9/11 happened, we knew it was our ticket. You know who's
stupid? The people who think I'm stupid. Now, those are some real-life suckers.
BAJ: So you just didn't care that so many poor black people in New Orleans would drown or be trapped or starve or die
without their medicine?
W:
Are you listening? Hello? I told you, we played the odds. And if you're
going to gamble big, better to do it with poor blacks who've got no
political capital. Jesus, it's not like we planned the damn storm.
Chances were that this Katrina scenario wasn't going to happen in the
next three years, and that's all we needed. Three more years. To finish
getting our agenda through. Some things had to give. The money was
already spoken for. We have an expensive agenda. So we made gambles, a
lot of them. Any one of them, if you look at it alone, is a decent
three-year bet. Seen a pandemic yet from how we cut public health
funding? Seen a nuclear bomb blow up Boston yet because we're holding
off on port inspection procedures that would cost shippers money? Seen
parents shut down any cities yet with riots after they find out how we
buried military access to their kids in No Child Left Behind? We make
gambles. Okay? Most of them we win. That's all. That's as good as it
gets. I'm sorry New Orleans happened. I am. But, shit. We've got a
country to run. And anyway, the lives of most of those people left in
New Orleans were probably already... well, never mind.
BAJ: Already what? Worthless?
W: I don't know. Ask Barbara. (laughs)
BAJ:
Okay. So this is your version of morality. Right? This is your would-be
theocracy. A thoroughly crooked government based on lies to serve your
"agenda." How do you think this would go over with the devoted
hard-right Christians who put you in Washington to bring God into the
White House?
W:
You mean Clem and Clementine? Those nice scruffy folks with a felt
Jesus taped up on the wall of their double-wide? (laughs) Look, I
believe in the Lord. I'm saved and it's a beautiful thing, grace.
Beautiful. And if seeing me pray and speak up for the unborn and for
marriage between men and women gives good God-fearing churchified
people a glow inside from knowing they have a friend in Washington,
then more power to me. And if they can't figure out that all the
screaming about fetuses and gays is drowning out any talk about raising
their own wages or keeping arsenic out of their drinking water, then,
pardon my French, but fuck 'em. Okay? Let 'em beg Jesus for a raise at
work and for clean water. There was a guy, I can't remember his name.
Somebody German. He talked about free will. The mind being responsible
for what it sees. That goes for religion, too. Caveat emptor. You know
what that means, right, Harvard man?
BAJ: So it comes down to "Let the buyer beware," huh?
W:
I learned that expression in college. You know, there's a big, big
difference between being a slacker in school and being a loser. Never
let it be said that I learned nothing at Yale. (laughs) So, did you
like that curry? This Pad Thai was really good. Nice fresh peanut
sauce. Who's gonna pick up the check?
_____________________________________
I woke up in a sweat. I sat up for a while in the dark, thinking. Then I went downstairs for a snack.
Funny thing is, there was leftover Thai food in the fridge.
(Posted 9/24/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)Next, This News.
So now Pat Robertson, champion of life, has proclaimed that the United States should kill the president of oil-rich Venezuela,
Hugo Chavez.
In
case you missed it, Robertson told a TV audience of about one million
ostensibly Christian viewers, according to the New York Times
[8/24/05]: "If he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that
we really ought to go ahead and do it... We have the ability to take
him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability."
Days
have since passed, and the spectacle has been dutifully reported and
soberly discussed by the press. It has spurred incredulous outrage,
particularly in the non-American world, where billions of shock-weary
onlookers wonder yet again what the friggin' problem is with the United
States and the nut cases it accepts in positions of public leadership.
As with many events involving the excesses of the powerful, major
American reporters have maintained a robotic and sterile demeanor
throughout, it being a breach of corporate journalistic ethics to
report on an outrage in a manner that leads audiences toward the
conclusion that it is in fact an outrage.
I
was talking about all of this recently with my renegade Harvard
physicist time-traveler friend -- you might remember my having
previously written about him [5/29/05, 5/28/04] -- who had surfaced for
a few hours to meet me at one of our usual inconspicuous spots. He
listened patiently while I reeled off complaints about liquid-spined
journalists and the paucity of principled news coverage to the left of
Bill O'Reilly. When I was finished, he gave me a small, bitter smile.
"Wait until you see what's coming," he said. I watched, afraid to ask, as he dug for something in his overstuffed
satchel.
"Here," he said finally, handing me a folder brimming with newspaper clippings and papers. "Don't read
them all at once."
As usual, sometime after I began reading, he disappeared.
___________________________________
WASHINGTON POST, SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2008
Vote Nears On Iceland Invasion; President Cites "Proof Of Threat"
Washington
-- A contentious Congress yesterday neared a vote on President Bush's
proposed invasion of Iceland, with holdout Democrats bristling under
White House accusations that they are timid in the face of the Global
War On America.
The
President, on a stop in Iowa stumping for presidential candidate
Rudolph Giuliani, took yet another swipe at Democrats who challenge his
rationale for war. "Rudy Giuliani knows the dangers of the weapons that
underlies the icecap in that uncooperative nation," Bush told a
cheering crowd. "The Defense Department has definitive proof of the
threat. Even if some Democrats run scared, I promise you we will
protect America."
Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, on the defensive after she criticized the Security
Secrecy Act that frees the President from public disclosure of evidence
for war, said yesterday, "Democrats stand with the President for a
strong defense. But I don't think a private review of the evidence is
too much to ask."
Democrats have offered a compromise whereby unnamed senior members of their party would secretly review war evidence before
signing on to invade Iceland. But the White House has steadfastly refused...
______________________________________
NATIONAL NEWS NETWORK, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2087
HOST:
...So, Professor Rodriguez, from a historian's perspective, how exactly
did the Great Avian Flu Pandemic of the early 2000's come to be such a
massive catastrophe in the United States, killing millions of
Americans? Why did the public health system fail so spectacularly?
PROFESSOR:
Well, it's a tragic lesson. It began with the systemic weakening of the
American public health sector in the 1990s by private industry, which
did not wish to be regulated. At that time, private financial
contributions dominated federal politics, and so public policy was
often quite corrupt...
HOST: This was long before private financing of campaigns was outlawed, correct?
PROFESSOR:
Correct. So, despite the warlike policies and rhetoric of the time, the
public sector, including the public health infrastructure, was actually
near bankruptcy and completely unprepared for a true catastrophe...
______________________________________
LOS ANGELES TIMES, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2024
Texas Court Rules Public Beheadings Constitutional; ACLU To Appeal
Austin
-- In a decision hailed by public execution advocates, the Texas State
Supreme Court yesterday ruled that public beheadings are
constitutional, freeing the state to proceed with the planned beheading
of a convicted terrorist in a public square in downtown Dallas next
month.
Opponents,
led by the ACLU, had sued on the grounds of excessive cruelty. But the
court ruled unanimously that public beheadings are "consistent with the
framers' Constitutional vision of public order." Proponents, who have
long argued that public executions are a necessary deterrent to violent
crime, celebrated.
"Last
year's U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing concealed assault weapons
was our first victory for law-abiding citizens. This is our second,"
said Britney Spears, the ex-singer and founder of Avengers for Life...
_______________________________________
NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, MAY 17, 2010
Expert Cites New Evidence Of Hamster Terrorism Risk; Authorities Worried
By Judith Miller
Washington
-- An internationally-known expert on small mammals has uncovered the
most compelling evidence yet of a nuclear terrorism plot involving
hamsters, and top anti-terrorism authorities are deeply worried about
the resulting danger to Americans, a White House source said yesterday.
The
expert, who remains unnamed and is under CIA protection, revealed
detailed evidence of a plot in which thousands of imported hamsters
have been implanted with tiny nuclear explosive devices, created
through nanotechnology, each of which can blow up the equivalent of a
city block, the source said.
The revelation bolsters the White House's ongoing argument for a nationwide hamster security sweep, dubbed Operation Hamster
Hammer, to pre-empt any planned terrorist attacks...
_________________________________________
CBS EVENING NEWS, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2009
ANCHOR: Good evening. I'm Kid Rock with tonight's headlines.
Liberals
reacted with alarm today when Kansas Senator Mel Gibson called for the
arrest and forced lobotomizing of any Americans whose skin color "is
darker than that of a paper bag" or who "deny the reality of Jesus
Christ as our Savior." Gibson, who made the remarks on "The Britney
Spears Show," was unapologetic when he later faced reporters.
(VIDEO
CLIP) GIBSON: Sorry? For what? For serving my Lord? Look, everyone
knows who constitutes the real threat to our country, and I'm going to
stand up and say it. The more the, uh, non-Christian media condemn me,
the more I'm going to speak."
ANCHOR:
Liberal groups, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, called for Gibson to
apologize or resign, while a statement from Christian conservative leaders
pointed out that Gibson's remarks do not target all people of color and
merely pose a "challenge" to nonbelievers. In Washington, Republicans
reacted with caution, while leading Democrats called for Gibson to
explain the intent of his comments. The White House said it had no
comment, citing Gibson's "right to speak his mind as an American
citizen..."
___________________________________________
CNN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2019
REPORTER:
...It's not yet clear how the President intends to win approval for his
controversial plan to assign all adult Americans to corporate work
camps, which he calls "Lifetime Employment Centers." The plan still
faces hurdles from some recalcitrant Democrats. Proponents say that the
plan will strengthen America's economy and quality of life through
guaranteed employment, benefits and enforced standards for diet and
exercise. Critics say that the plan's stripping parents of custody of
their children at age 8, at which time children enter work camps of
their own, will place too great a strain on families. Democrats have
proposed an alternate plan with child visitation rights, but it is not
clear if the White House is willing to go that far.
For CNN, I'm Jenna Bush reporting from Washington...
____________________________________________
I couldn't read any more. I put my head in my hands and looked down at the table. That was when I saw the note my friend
had left for me.
"Look at it this way," he'd scribbled. "If people act fast, there might still be time to head it off."
(Posted 8/26/05
by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Welcome to the Death Squad.
Here's a contemporary story from my home state, Maryland.
Anthony
Deyonko Switzer, 17, was recently convicted of first-degree murder for
what the judge called his "random, sniper-style" shooting of a passing
driver, according to the Baltimore Sun [7/26/05, page 1B]. Switzer was
sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was 16 at the time of
the crime. The stranger he killed, Doray Delonte Jones, was 18 and on
his way to his father's house.
According
to the article, Switzer bragged to his friends (who later testified
against him) that he "wanted to catch a body." They went to Bass Pro
Shops and bought ammo for a stolen shotgun. Later, on the street,
Switzer fired the shotgun at a passing car but thought that maybe he
hadn't killed the driver, and, according to testimony, he didn't want
to go home without shooting somebody. So the group went to the home of
one of their ex-girlfriends in search of better luck. No one answered
the door, so they tried a neighbor's house. The neighbor called police.
Meanwhile, Switzer fired at a parked car while a woman was putting her
9-year-old twins into the vehicle. (There is no evidence that he saw
the children.) He hit the car but none of the occupants. He was
arrested within days. After the murder trial, the father of the slain
driver, wearing a T-shirt bearing his son's photograph, said Switzer
"deserved" life without parole but that it wouldn't make up for the
family's cataclysmic loss. Switzer's father, for his part, offered his
sympathies and said he had had trouble with his son.
Those are the facts of the story, as reported.
But here is another way of stating the facts:
A
child is damaged. The damage starts early and goes deep. Maybe it's the
daily emotional bludgeoning of a traumatized household. Maybe it's the
child's seeing too many kids get their brains blown out, seeing too
many friends die, having to run too scared for too long. Maybe it's
sweet chips of lead paint slowly draining the child's brain of empathy
and restraint. Maybe it's the wrong friends and the wrong parenting and
the wrong schooling all at the same time. Maybe it's a traumatic
childhood event, the kind no parent can prevent. Maybe it's plain old
hard-wiring, and the family doesn't know what to do or cannot get the
right kind of help when they try. Who knows what it is? Not you and I,
that's for sure.
But we do know this: a 16-year-old boy who brags about "catching a body," and who then shoots at a procession
of strangers until he bags one, is damaged. We know that for certain.
So
here, then, are the underlying facts of the story: when
horribly-damaged children, particularly horribly-damaged low-income
children of color, do the spectacularly awful things that
horribly-damaged children do, we American adult taxpayers opt not to
try to repair them. We put them, instead, in cages, and we make them
stay there, locked away from anything that might heal them, allowing
their illness to fester and their bitterness to ferment, for much or
all of the rest of their lives. Or else we kill them outright, telling
them that they deserve to die and locking them away for years until we
get around to injecting them with lethal poison.
These are the facts of how we Americans deal with our most damaged children.
This
is a barbaric thing to do, of course, and so a lot of Americans deny
it. We tell ourselves that these children are adults, having reached
the legal age of 16, who have made informed choices for which they must
be punished. We tell ourselves that these kids' problems have defied
the endless efforts of a stream of bleeding-heart social workers and of
coddling juvenile facilities to cure them, and that there is now
nothing left to do with them but put them someplace where they can do
no further harm. We tell ourselves that we are doing the best we can
for these kids and for the wretched communities that create them, and
that no one can blame us for running out of money and running out of
patience.
These are, however, all lies.
It
is a brazen lie to claim that a child of 16 or 17, let alone a child of
14 or 15, who by his or her very behavior has proven that he or she
lacks a vital element of complete personhood, is an adult. I dare any
child-jailer to prove to me the "adulthood" of, say, a fatherless
16-year-old who grew up ragingly starved for male guidance on a
gang-ruled street and who, like the feral children of Lord of the
Flies, seized and brandished the sharpened end of the nearest male
power he could find. I dare any apologist for child imprisonment or
execution to show me the "informed decision-making" of a 16-year-old
who lost all capacity for human empathy when, as a toddler, he was
abandoned by his crack-addicted mother and left at the mercy of a
stream of uncaring and sometimes abusive caregivers. I dare any
avenging right-winger to show me the "legal responsibility" of a
17-year-old who, after a life spent learning that nothing and no one
can be trusted, is utterly devoid of compassion or self-esteem.
It
is, as well, a fantastic lie to claim that our jailed children are the
"incurables" of an overly generous and excessively therapeutic juvenile
justice system. Turn off the talk show blather about "predators" and
head down to your nearest big-city courthouse, and you'll see the
reality no one has told you about: a chronically clogged,
catastrophically underfunded system whereby frazzled, overwhelmed
judges and caseworkers shuffle children between dysfunctional homes,
under-supervised foster care and overcrowded (and sometimes stone-aged)
detention facilities, all gaining virtually no public attention until
some horrific abuse of a particular child in the system elicits spasms
of outraged finger-pointing.
And,
finally, it is a lie of the most vicious sort to pretend that we are
doing anything like our best to fund and support rehabilitation for
children who behave criminally. The best we can? When the billions of
dollars that could build veritable cities of family support and child
rehabilitation are instead being flushed daily into a titanically
destructive war? When further trillions are being scooped from the
federal treasury into the sticky palms of the rich, who have tired of
the taxes on their corporations and their splendid incomes and estates?
With the gusher of cash our government has found to wage a dishonest
and disastrous war and to relieve the wealthy of their tax burden, we
could instead be building halfway houses, family mental health centers,
long-term psychiatric treatment hospitals, day care centers, job
training programs, parenting support networks, drug treatment centers,
and community colleges literally by the thousands, all staffed with
qualified, well-paid counselors and child care workers and doctors and
nurses and educators and trainers.
We
could do it. We have the money, as the war and the tax giveaway have
proven. So we should not lie to ourselves about how much America cares
for its children. The President, despite his ad-slogan propositions and
his recent Boy Scout photo op, does not care. The Republican Party,
despite its scripted chants in defense of "life," does not care. The
choices that our country -- or should I say our government -- has made
are brutally clear. And we are paying for them.
Or, more specifically, children are paying for them. With their lives.
In these days when our draft-dodging leaders evoke more and more of the corrupt logic of the Vietnam War in their policy
directives, it gives new meaning to the term "baby-killer."
(Posted 8/2/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Bush's Left Brain.
Let's say I recently had lunch with my old college classmate Woozy (we called him that because he slept through half of his
classes).
Woozy
works for the unofficial government. You know the unofficial
government: the rightward-tilting think tanks that designed the
political strategy for invading Iraq, helped the power industry to
draft the nation's energy legislation, and did the advance work on the
anti-gay-marriage 2004 scorched-earth campaign. Woozy is now a
higher-up in one of these well-known privately-funded strategy bulwarks
(you'd know it if I named it), an outfit he is fond of calling "Bush's
left brain."
Since
I am continually perplexed by the apparently self-destructive behavior
of the far right wing and its representatives in the White House, while
Woozy and I waited for our food I took the opportunity to quiz him
about his team's doings.
"Tell
me this," I said. "With Iraq being a disaster, and the 'War On Terror'
being Bush's sole remaining playable card on foreign policy, how do you
expect to keep Bush from going down the toilet when the long-term
impact of his policies is to recruit terrorists and to underfund and
misdirect the effort against global terrorism? I mean, out of raw
self-interest, wouldn't you want to pursue anti-terror policies that
actually work?"
Woozy was already grinning. "You make the classic error of a civically-inclined liberal," he said. "You
assume that what we say we want is in fact what we want." He leveled his gaze at me.
"Okay," I said. "Go on."
"What we on the Bush team say we want is to win the War On Terror," Woozy said. "But what we really want
to win is the war for our agenda."
"And what would your agenda be?" I asked.
"It's
multifaceted," Woozy said. "Part of it is our being able to pursue
certain regime changes abroad for their economic and strategic value.
Part of it is our finally gaining the momentum to increase our
surveillance and containment of domestic activists and dissenters who
threaten to take the country off-message when it comes to big-dollar
issues like global trade and the environment. And part of it is
stirring up the kind of consuming international commotion that enables
us to quietly pass the domestic legislation we promised to campaign
contributors: relaxed rules for food, pollution, drugs, mining,
logging, you name it. Notice where those regulatory stories are now?
The back pages of the newspapers."
"All right," I said. "So the War On Terror is background noise. We've heard that before. But it's a war
you're losing. What then?"
"That's the beauty of it," said Woozy. "The more we're threatened with losing the War On Terror, the more
our agenda wins."
"Huh?"
"Don't
you see?" said Woozy. "It's precisely the frightening, unabated threat
of continuing terrorism that gives us our pretexts for wars and our
cover for unpopular domestic policies. My team's mandate is not to
start winning the War On Terror. It's to keep losing it. Constant fear
of losing the War On Terror is what puts the yellow ribbons on the
SUVs. It's what helps Bush to fire up red state voters while he screws
them on the issues. Our job is to milk the War On Terror for everything
it's worth. The longer it lasts, the better. A perpetually struggling
War On Terror is the best thing that ever happened to the American
right wing. Without it, Bush would have been tossed out on his ear in 2004,
with or without Ohio. Get it?"
He took a sip of his drink.
"Haven't
you ever wondered," he went on, "why Homeland Security is chronically
underfunded? Why we put our resources into invading Iraq while secretly
knowing it had no connection to Al Qaeda? Haven't you wondered why
American ports are wide open? Why airline security -- let alone
security on trains and highways -- is a joke? This Administration is
full of smart people. Wouldn't you think they would have made it a top
priority to address the true dangers of terrorism if they understood
this to be in their interest? Well, they've done the math. And here's
the answer: Terrorism isn't Bush's enemy. Terrorism is his job
security."
Woozy sat back in his chair.
"Jesus,"
he said. "Stop looking at me like I'm Satan's valet. This is me. Woozy.
I haven't signed on with the true-believer crazies. I'm a small "d"
democrat just like you. I want a future for my kids free of these
corrupt politicians and perpetual wars. And it will happen. I promise
you. My side's victories will be strictly short-term. Let's face it,
this whole corporate-financed deficit-driven mall-fascism regime is
unsustainable. Our economy can't survive it, poor countries won't stand
for it, and the planet can't take it. Eventually, something will push
the costs over the edge for Americans -- a collapse of the dollar, a
horrible epidemic in the face of a bankrupted public health
infrastructure, some surprise global warming disaster, who knows? --
and soon the good red state folks who've been nodding at our War On
Terror will be stampeding their town halls and screaming bloody murder
for good government. And our silver-haired corporate senators will be
led off for political re-education. And things will change. And by
then, all of us on the Bush support team, from the leaders on down,
will already have what we want: boatloads of assets safely stowed away,
and ample trust funds for our kids."
Woozy
paused, stirred his ice with his swizzle stick, then continued. "So,
when you look at the big picture, it's win-win. We on the right get
what we want. And after things fall apart, ordinary Americans will get
what they want, too."
He looked at me. "Come on," he said. "Say something. Stop looking so depressed."
(Posted 7/1/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Who Hates America?
For a
thoughtful and (thank God) cheerful musing on the future of American
public speech in this age of corporate-sponsored prattle, you might
want to cozy up to Garrison Keillor's "Confessions of a Listener" essay
in the May 23, 2005 issue of The Nation
(www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050523&s=keillor). Not only is it
a fun read, but beneath Keillor's signature fireside storytelling -- in
this case, his tale of the past and future of radio -- are some
insights worth pondering about the mentality of the American far right.
One of the observations that really stays with me is Keillor's take on the rise of right-wing radio and the current hyped-up Republican
frame of mind, of which he says:
Sure, Garrison's having a little fun. But I think he is also onto something.
When
you think about it, beneath their bellicose pieties about the glories
of the homeland and its God-given destiny, many of the most zealous of today's angry American right actually loathe their country. They may crave the
fictional nation of their myths and fantasies. But they loathe their
actual nation, this place where they in fact live. It is a place that
was occupied by other people first, and is now home to an entire
planet's worth of humans who bring all of their histories and hungers
and gods and non-gods to bear in a beautiful riot of coexistence.
Right-wingers hate this. They hate the fact that their neighborhoods
keep changing and that they have to keep adjusting to new accents and
new customs and evolving ideas of what is fair and just. Right-wingers
like to talk about democracy, but they are not interested in living it.
Not in the least. What they want is to be in charge. It curdles their
blood that their assurance of getting their way is obstructed by the
demographic facts and the (theoretical) principles of their nation.
God, do they hate that. Every day while they lock their car doors
against scary strangers and turn to Rush Limbaugh for sour radio
comfort, they hate being in America.
So is it any wonder they are so mean? So insecure? So needy?
Not
long ago I was sitting in a small quick-copy shop waiting for my order.
A 50-ish guy, apparently a regular customer, strolled in and, after a
minute of small talk at the counter, launched loudly into what I took
to be his ritual rant in the general direction of the clerk about 9/11,
the lefty food police and their persecution of McDonald's, and his own
well-planned regimen to protect his family from the imminent threat of
terrorist attack. I found myself staring at him, wondering what would
possess a grown man -- aside from the obvious ailment of overexposure
to the Fox Network -- to behave so antisocially in a store among
strangers. Why was he driven to so feverishly intrude upon other
people's aural space with this personal show of outrage?
Then
it hit me: he doesn't feel at home here. In this store. In this city.
In America. And he's doing what bitter orphans everywhere do: giving the finger to the fearsome and unwelcoming world.
Yes,
I know, by the standards of reason it's certifiably loony -- a
middle-aged white guy, who by both ethnicity and gender is part of the
single most privileged group of humans on the planet, convincing
himself that he and his kind are hapless pariahs who are being shoved
off the edge of the earth by the REAL power elite: the liberals and the
blacks and the gays. If you're laughing, I don't blame you.
It's
both ironic and tragic: this bitter faction of scared and angry white
American men, estranged from their natural allies of working- and
middle-class Americans of color, clasping their Rush-blaring radios
like pacifiers while the corporations that sponsor the furious noise
quietly pillage their nation's tax revenues and flush working families'
economic security down the toilet.
If only such sorry, suffering self-styled patriots would learn to love their country, they might have a better shot at a future.
(Posted 6/26/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Sins of Faith.
I received a chain email recently, of the far-right Christian variety.
In
most ways, it was pretty typical of the chain-polemic genre: a "DID YOU
KNOW?" headline followed by a list of factoids cherry-picked to
reinforce what the intended audience already believes. In this case,
the intended head-nodders are fundamentalist Christians who want to
believe that our government is and should be functionally Christian.
The
email leads historically-challenged readers, with the help of cartoony
drawings, through a list of religious inscriptions on federal buildings
and intemperate quotes from various founding fathers, all purporting to
prove -- in defiance of the substance of the historical record -- that
American government has "always" been Christian. It is typically
weak-minded Internet graffiti. Utterly forgettable. That is, until the
email's concluding tirade, which I'll quote for you:
Leave
aside for a moment the small matter that the alleged 86 percent are not
all Christians. For me, the deeper meaning of this rant, and of the
proliferation of such sentiments among Christian fundamentalists, is
this: Within today's religious right there is a significant minority of
Americans who simply do not care about the viewpoints of others. They
want what they want. They believe that God entitles them to force their
will on the rest of us. And if we don't like what they do with our
country, we can go to hell. Literally.
Consider
again the last sentence of that frothing quotation, with its capital
letters and screaming punctuation: "Why don't we just tell the other
14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!!" That 14 percent being, of course,
non-Godly taxpayers, who for their pains of citizenship and taxation
are entitled to exactly nothing because God's reputed army of 86
percent has the raw numbers to trample the rest of the population. Such
is the reply of devotees of the gentle Jesus to their countrymen's
honest misgivings: "Sit Down and SHUT UP!!! We run the religious racket
around here, and what our boss says goes! Or else. Got it?"
In short, the leading edge of today's Christian far right is not only mean, but also favorably disposed toward certain
kinds of tyranny in service to its vision of the will of God.
This
is a serious point, and one too easily dismissed by those journalists
and politicians for whom the indestructibility of American democracy is
an article of faith. In fact, democracy -- to the extent that we have
it in a nation whose distribution of wealth and power bears increasing
resemblance to a banana republic -- is fragile. And the susceptibility
of scared and demoralized citizens to furious right-wing promises of
reclaimed power and glory is one of a democracy's most profound weak
spots. Right now in our nation, the machinery hacking most effectively
at this chink in the national character is the Christian hard right,
with its tyrannical amorality ("whatever enables us to win for God is
right") disguised as fervent Christian piety. Having a government that
lies about policy, keeps illegal secrets and changes senate rules to
protect its own leadership is all part of the holy mission.
It
is exactly this sort of faithful public deference to rule by force --
an attitude of "whatever the ruler does is okay because he's on our
side of God's issues" -- that the Bush Administration and the
Republican Party are counting on among supporters as they ignore public
accountability to sledgehammer through the policies of their choosing.
What
strikes me as most insidious about this kind of advance work for
authoritarianism is that it appeals to so many decent and well-meaning
people. The person who sent me the "SHUT UP!!!" email, for instance, is
someone I know: a sensitive, well-intentioned person who was surprised
and genuinely pained to learn how offended I am by this kind of
ruthless groupthink. That, I think, is the dirty secret of charismatic
tyranny: it works not only on the wild-eyed misfits but also on a good
chunk of the rest of us, the middling people in need of some kind of
passionate assurance in scary times. Ask anyone who was in the vicinity
when another furious presidential demagogue, underestimated by the
press and by the intelligentsia, rose to power in Germany in the late
1930s on a platform of reclaiming God and glory. To be sure, those
times and their uniquely horrific implications are not ours. But the
similarities, and the horrors already evident on our present course,
are galvanizing enough.
That
is why I suggest that when we see this kind of holy-stampede,
tyrant-friendly thinking among people we know, we ought to take it
seriously as a political force. It is not harmless. It does not deserve
mockery or indifference. It deserves to be challenged.
It can do more damage than we know.
(Posted 6/15/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
The Secret NPR Tapes, Reel Two.
My Harvard physicist time traveler friend is back.
You
might remember my having told you about him: the frazzled genius
classmate of mine who went underground after working out the equations
for time travel, and who now surfaces every so often bearing some
troublesome shred of the future. His latest whispered phone message
instructed me to meet him at a certain basement cafe. When I got there,
he was even more agitated than usual.
"It's worse than we thought," he hissed. He slid a sheaf of paper across the table. "Transcript from NPR.
February, 2008. Don't ask. Just read it."
___________________________________________
(MUSIC)
HOST:
From National Polite Radio, this is Double-Talk of the Nation. I'm Namby Pamby.
More
controversial political news from Washington this week. In a move that
liberals are denouncing as discriminatory and conservatives are hailing
as a boon to national unity, President George W. Bush has issued an
executive order that moves the church even closer to the center of
public policy. Known as the Faith and Security Act of 2008, the
President's order requires, effective immediately, that the first-born
child of every Muslim American family be converted to Christianity,
forcibly if necessary, before his or her fifth birthday. Details of the
policy are reportedly being debated in private by Democratic and
Republican party leaders, but sources tell NPR that the conversions
would be carried out by government-backed representatives of Protestant
and Catholic churches, with armed federal agents standing by to enforce
the conversions if some Muslim families fail to comply with the new
law.
Flanked
by a Baptist minister and a Catholic priest at a press conference
yesterday, the President declared that the Act is "a vital necessity in
order to embrace our Muslim brethren in the American tradition of
faith, and to protect and unite our homeland under God's love in the
tradition of the founding fathers."
What
are the limits to linking government policy with religion? Do
first-born children in America's Muslim families show a
disproportionate risk of developing sympathetic feelings toward Al
Qaeda, as a group calling itself Front Line Clergy for Truth has
claimed in its national TV ad campaign? Where do we draw the public
line protecting the personal sanctity of faith?
Here to help us grapple with these questions are Lucy Snowden, a White House reporter for the Baltimore Sun... Welcome,
Lucy...
LUCY:
Hello. Nice to be here.
HOST:
...and Jarrett Foley, political reporter for CNN... Welcome to Double-Talk of the Nation, Jarrett...
JARRETT:
Thanks for having me.
HOST:
So, Lucy Snowden. Mandatory religious conversions? How did we get to this? What's going on here?
LUCY:
Well,
Namby, this is the logical culmination of the brutally partisan state
of politics in Washington today. It's "take no prisoners" on both
sides. Take this issue, for instance. The hard-line Republicans are
absolutely insistent that every Muslim first-born child in America be
forcibly converted to Christianity. And the hard-line Democrats are
saying, "No way under heaven we're going to allow that to happen." So
you have these two totally inflexible, hard-line positions on both
sides, with the moderates in the middle trying to broker some kind of
realistic deal. It's not just playing hardball; it's more like two
armies fighting to the death.
HOST:
So it's partisanship gone wild. Jarrett, do you agree?
JARRETT:
Absolutely.
A senior Democratic senator said to me the other day, "I've never seen
it this ugly. A lot of Democrats and Republicans in the Senate won't
even speak to each other any more." There's been broad bipartisan
support for the President on key measures, like our bombing of Iran
after Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the House about an imminent
nuclear attack. But on a lot of issues, like this forcible religious
conversion debate, it's pure partisanship. Neither side will give an
inch. The entire two-way process has broken down.
HOST:
Hmm. Let's see what listeners think. Todd in St. Louis, you're on the air.
TODD:
Hi.
I'm listening to this, and I can't believe what I'm hearing these
journalists say. Do they seriously think this is just a matter of
equally extreme partisanship on both sides? I mean, come on. Isn't it
much more of a hard-line extreme to try to mandate forced religious
conversions than it is to oppose them? And look at the entire record of
Republican versus Democratic positions in recent years. Sounds to me as
if you journalists are afraid to call it like it is.
LUCY:
Well, as a journalist it's not my job to pass judgment on the Republicans' and Democrats' positions. I just report the
facts.
TODD:
But
you're NOT reporting the facts. By treating both positions as equally
hard-line and extreme, you're actually distorting the facts. You're
creating an untrue story. You're actually stepping in and altering the
picture that we readers and viewers get. So why not take a stand
reporting the real deal instead of making up this "it's all equal"
story?
HOST:
Doesn't the caller have a point? Aren't the facts unbalanced sometimes?
JARRETT:
Sorry,
but that's for the public to decide. If journalists got into the
business of saying, "Forced religious conversion is an extreme policy,
and being against forced conversion is a more balanced policy," then
what kind of society would we have?
HOST:
Thanks
for your call, Todd. Well, speaking of balance, let's get into the
politics of this. There's talk on the Senate floor that moderate
Democrats and Republicans are close to a compromise, perhaps one that
would allow first-born Muslim children to keep their religion in
exchange for their being required to serve fours years in the U.S.
military once they turn 18...
___________________________________________
My hands were shaking. I looked up from the transcript to ask my friend where the hell he got this and what he expected
me to do with it.
But he was gone.
(Posted 5/29/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Erring While Black.
You
could say a lot of things about the group of more than 100
Bush-supporting black pastors who, as detailed in a February 1 Los
Angeles Times story, are pushing a "Black Contract with America On
Moral Values" that includes opposing civil rights for gays, breaking
down the separation of church and state, and attacking what they call
the "America-hating black liberal leadership."
You
could say that these would-be moralists are bigoted throwbacks who have
learned little from the long and bloody struggle fought by many
(including some gays) for the civil rights of blacks. You could say
that they are smarmy opportunists who are cashing in on the money and
power (essentially a bribe) offered to the black church leadership by
the Bush Administration in the form of funds and support for
"faith-based" initiatives. You could say that they are shills for
corporate power who cynically embrace the fear-mongering vocabulary
(with such epithets as "America-hating") of the Bush propaganda
machine. You could say that the sheer ugliness and injustice of their
alleged stance of faith makes a dirty joke of the best traditions of
American Christianity.
You could say all of these things. And you would be right.
But the one thing you cannot truthfully say is that the position taken by these small-minded, short-sighted pastors is
not sufficiently "black."
It
is tempting, as we watch these power-scavengers-of-the-cloth scurry for
scraps of raw meat from the Republican table, to hold them up as
traitors to the black American cause. Among some black liberals and
progressives right now, there is abundant righteous outrage (as well as
slack-jawed astonishment) at the audacity of these black hard-right
Sunday warriors and their links to Newt Gingrich and the Heritage
Foundation. You can almost hear the unspoken charge: How dare these
turncoats call themselves black leaders! How dare they claim to align
themselves with black interests!
But
that is where we make our mistake. Truth is, from the day of the first
agreement between an African power broker and European slave raiders
for the provision of human chattel, there has never been any such thing
as a single "black" agenda in the New World. And there never will be.
If there is one universal truth about blackness, it is that under the
right conditions it is utterly compatible with greed, hate, evil and
hypocrisy. As is also true of whiteness, brownness, yellowness and
redness. (Ask the citizens of Nigeria, whose black government works
ruthlessly in the service of Chevron and other oil companies, about
this.)
Of
course, what has made Americans want to believe in a single set of
"black" interests is the long procession of laws and customs (and
whips, ropes and guns) that have, over several centuries, treated we
blacks as one single set of targets for white schemes and fears. It
wasn't hard for us to buy into an official "black" agenda, as
represented, say, by the N.A.A.C.P., when the law of the land dictated
that blacks tolerate lynchings and sit in the back of the bus. Even
then, of course, there were blacks who enabled, or personally
exploited, the suffering of the rest. But those complexities pale
beside today's realities, when members of the black middle class, now
millions strong, flee for the suburbs and lock the doors of their SUVs
against the glances of young black men at downtown stoplights.
Which
brings us back to the previously-mentioned faith-fund-coveting African
American ministers of the hard right. The point here is that these
pastors have not "abandoned" some universal black agenda. They are
simply pursuing a black agenda of their own. It happens to be one that
is at odds with the economic and political interests, as well as the
moral and spiritual well-being, of most black Americans. It does,
however, exploit some very real sentiments in some black communities,
including a fervent desire for self-empowerment and a resentful
perception that homosexuality poses a threat to black manhood. It is no
less black an agenda than any other: the vantage point of an elite
group of black religious entrepreneurs whose personal incomes and
assets likely lead them to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Bush
regime is their golden goose.
How
successfully the ministers can preach this foul gospel to their black
congregations remains to be seen. But there is certainly no reason to
expect them to be any less successful than their charismatic, telegenic
white counterparts on the far right, who have already made meanness and
homophobia a billion-dollar religious industry.
So call these African American pro-Bush pulpit crusaders exactly what they are. Call them black. As black as Condoleezza
Rice. As black as Clarence Thomas.
Call them black. Call them wrong. Call them mean-spirited, foolish, bigoted, and un-Christian.
That should about cover it.
(Posted 2/12/05 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Let's Get Moral.
Let's get moral for a moment, shall we?
I am
sitting here with a newspaper clipping on my desk. It tells the story
-- one you may have heard recently -- about a television commercial,
currently airing, that was produced by the United Church of Christ, a
Protestant denomination looking to shore up its national membership.
The
commercial shows two burly bouncers guarding the entrance to a church.
They turn away a succession of would-be worshipers: a gay couple, a
Hispanic man, a black girl. The bouncers do, however, admit a
heterosexual white family. Then onscreen text comes up that reads:
"Jesus didn't turn away people. Neither do we."
It's
a simple message. It says, in effect, 'Our church honors God's love for
everyone.' It's an affirmation of simple, inclusive faith. Whether
you're religious or not, what's not to like about a TV spot such as
this?
Well,
as it turns out, plenty, at least according to the Taliban wing of
Christian fundamentalism and the corporate decision-makers who quiver
in fear of its bullying and boycotting. CBS and NBC refused outright to
air the spot. Their reasoning? The commercial's message is too
controversial. It advocates a position, the two networks claim, that
might offend or upset too many viewers.
Hmm. Interesting. Networks that rush to entertain you with dramatized murder
and physical harm, networks that eagerly feature the meanest possible
rituals of personal warfare in staged competitions for sex or money,
networks that spent an entire year uncritically repeating a president's
brazen lies to start a war with nary a blush, are now shocked
at the potential public harm of a message that says God doesn't
discriminate.
So
let's get moral for a minute. Let's dare to poke around in that
allegedly conservative-ruled domain of morality, where presumably
high-minded Red-State outrage is running amuck and scaring the bejesus
out of the agnostic accountants who run major media conglomerates.
Let's go on a hunt for good and evil on both sides of the
political divide, and see what we find.
Let's
start with the agenda of the President and his allies in segments of the Christian
right, who bellow bloody murder about how the country is on its
deathbed and how we had better nurture the family before it's too late.
Except, these moralists remind us, "the family" doesn't include gay families, who
choose to burn in hell. And, actually, it doesn't include poor
families, either, whose dire need for living-wage laws and well-funded
health and family services is either vilified or ignored by the right.
Come to think of it, nor does it include middle-class families, many of
whom simply have to gut it out without health coverage or solid jobs or
well-funded public schools, thanks to an agenda that the Christian
right supports. Nor does the right's purported championing of the
family extend to law-abiding American Muslim families, who will simply
have to learn to live with the right's policies of contempt, scrutiny
and the threat of secret imprisonment while flag-waving churchgoers
cheer the President and turn their backs. But if you're a prosperous
white heterosexual family with kids in private schools, take heart:
you've got an army of angry fundamentalist Christians fighting for your
benefit.
But
there is also the other chief moral complaint of the Christian right:
that our nation has lost its decency and must reclaim essential moral
values. Well, some moral values, anyway. Not honesty, to be sure, since
so many fervent Christian Americans felt fine about voting for a serial
liar whose personal history also makes him a spectacular hypocrite on
the issues of drug abuse penalties, hard work, and personal
responsibility. And certainly the moral virtues of compassion and
thoughtfulness don't rank high with Bush backers, since, with their
support, he is milking tragedy for all it's worth as a cynical excuse
for kicking pre-emptive ass with or without supporting evidence. Nor
does a basic reverence for life seem to register with the hard-core
Bush faithful, many of whom appear to limit their love of humanity to a
public spectacle of fetus fetishism while mustering no public outrage
-- zero, none, nada -- about the physical and emotional carnage of
unwanted and abused children, effectively orphaned inner-city
teenagers, and domestic and global AIDS. In fact, true Christian faith
itself appears to mean little or nothing to Bush and his belligerent
band of prayerful crusaders, who blaspheme the Good Book by
cherry-picking a few literal Biblical verses to use as ammunition
against chosen targets (gays, for instance) while outright ignoring
other verses that don't suit their political purposes.
"Moral" is not the adjective that comes to mind to describe the hard-right lifestyle.
And what stances and values do we find on the political left, among the allegedly morally bankrupt, family-hating God-bashers
of the cosmopolitan Blue State set?
Well,
let's see. Progressives said it was wrong to go to war in Iraq on so
little evidence, since war must always be a last resort. Progressives
said the civilian casualties in Iraq would be unconscionable, and that
we would live to regret the invasion. Progressives insist that
presidents be held accountable to tell the truth not just about oral
sex, but about starting wars that kill tens of thousands of people.
Progressives support not just their own civil rights, but also those of
others. Progressives believe that working people need medicine and good
schools more than rich people need a tax break. Progressives say that
effective drug treatment should be available to all drug addicts, not
just to radio talk show hosts and future presidents. Progressives think
that a child's life is too precious to be lived in hunger, deprivation
or preventable illness, and progressives actually act to do something
about it. Progressives believe that a well-informed teenager in a
society that truly supports families will make a more moral decision
about sex than an ignorant teenager in a society that ignores the needs
of families. Progressives believe in respecting other people's beliefs.
Progressives understand that the universe doesn't revolve around them
and their own opinions. Progressives do politically unto others as they
would have others do unto them. Progressives are not mean by doctrine.
And progressives would not wish eternal damnation on any human being,
or dog, or earthworm.
So now who's got the moral high ground? And whose offensive extremism should be cited by network television executives?
I tire of watching the
meanest among us masquerade as the most godly; of hearing selfish, piggish
bully-worshippers use a perversion of Christianity as an excuse for
their own know-nothing swagger; of witnessing the
self-indulgence of those who are faithful above all else to a use of
religion as a kind of personal fascism.
If you tire of this as well, I have a suggestion. The next time someone gets in your face with some variety of mass-produced
egoism disguised as religion, do what someone I know once suggested.
Tell them you hope God will forgive them.
(Posted 12/30/04 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
Condoleezza Rice, Underachiever.
It's an old story, a scenario that has become all too familiar, and painful, to many an African-American parent, teacher or
neighbor: squandered brilliance.
Be
it in Washington, Memphis or Los Angeles, our hearts break every time
we watch yet another bright, talented striver fall off the path of
promise and into a life of disrepute and destruction: Running a street
corner drug operation. Or fencing stolen SUVs and cartons of DVDs.
Or brazenly lying to Americans on behalf of a corrupt presidential administration.
It breaks our hearts every time we see it happen. And it's no different with Condoleezza Rice.
Look at her. What a colossal, screaming-out-loud waste -- of talent, of brains, of ambition.
What
went wrong? She seems to have come from a good family; they pushed her
early to achieve and to excel. As a young woman, she became a standout
figure skater and an extraordinary pianist. Then she took the academic
world by storm, becoming the youngest provost in the history of
Stanford University.
But
somewhere along the line, the thugs came calling, singing the siren
song that thugs always sing to the good kids: Come on Condi, you've got
the stuff but we've got the power, don't be a sucker, get on the right
side. The next thing anybody knew, Condoleezza Rice, geopolitical
expert and proud descendant of ex-slaves, was helping the corporate
right to engineer a hostile takeover of the global economy while she
sat on the board of an oil company, Chevron, that was profitably
devastating a West African nation. And now here she is in the thick of
dishonest policies on both terrorism and Iraq, dispatched like a
steely-eyed Mafia consigliore to tell the cameras whatever tales will
carry the day.
It breaks your heart.
Just
think of who she might have been had she gone straight. Imagine:
Condoleezza Rice, global political expert, running an international
school where young diplomats from poor nations could learn how to
negotiate trade deals that would actually help to nourish their own
economies instead of simply serving them up as markets for global
corporations. Or: Condoleezza Rice, scholar/athlete/pianist, founding a
billion-dollar national program (funded with foundation contributions)
to train star student athletes and artists in the skills of political
and social leadership. Or: Condoleezza Rice, eloquent speaker and
organizer, touring the corporate circuit to drum up support for a new
movement of "Responsible Profit" whereby far-sighted companies would
eschew sleazy legislative favors and tax breaks and instead step up to
pay their fair share of an investment in a stable global future.
She had so much promise. So much potential.
But
the thugs got to her first. And now Condoleezza Rice is lost, another
sneering lieutenant in the brutal regime of the latest street corner
lord, her purse bulging with blood money, her "friends" immersing her
in a code of utter ruthlessness. Even if she wanted to get out now and
come clean, she couldn't. And she knows it.
And as with all of our fallen children, the question is always the same: Who let Condi down? Was it the parents? Was it
the schools? Was it the economic and political system? Was it all of us?
We see good, talented kids go bad every day. And every new case hurts just as much as the last.
It breaks your heart.
(Posted 4/11/04 by Bruce A. Jacobs)The Media Dream Version of Dr. King.
Oh, no. It's that time of year again, when major newspapers and TV news
shows trot out the usual montage of clips from Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech in honor of the great man's birthday
(January 15) and Black History Month.
I
have come to dread this once-a-year replay of Kingbites, not because of
the way it claims to honor him, but because of the way it succeeds in
diminishing him. Gone is the Dr. King who condemned the Vietnam War,
who helped to plan the Poor People's Campaign, and who died while
visiting Memphis in support of striking sanitation workers. In his
place, once every winter, we get those few carefully-chosen poetic
nuggets about a dream of little black and white boys and girls and the
content of our character. Beautiful and moving, yes. But what about the
rest of King's vision? You know, the stuff that scared the FBI into
trying to, well, ruin his life?
So,
as a counterweight to the warm and cuddly King who will once again soothe you this February, I am reprinting here a few
excerpts of speeches by the censored King, the dangerous and gutsy and
visionary King, whose words you will rarely get to see and hear.
Let's begin with "Beyond Vietnam," a speech King delivered on April 4, 1967
at Riverside Church in New York City. The speech -- denounced at the
time by both Time magazine and the Washington Post -- is eerie in its
foreshadowing of the Iraq war and the War on Terror. In it, King called
Americans "strange liberators" for having sided with French colonizers
against Vietnam's attempts at independence, and for backing the hated
Diem dictatorship prior to becoming mired in an ensuing guerrilla
rebellion (sound familiar?). King also criticized the American
presidency and media for misinforming the public about the history and
nature of the Vietnamese situation during the run-up to war (also sound
familiar?).
In King's own words:
'Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.'
"If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.
"The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways...
"Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment... When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
Next, here is King on the costs of war, from his "Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution" speech in Washington,
D.C., on March 31, 1968:
"Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet, when they come back home, they can hardly live on the same block together."
And finally, here is King on what we now call globalization, from his "Conscience and the Vietnam War" essay
in his 1968 book The Trumpet of Conscience:
And
that is just a small sampling of what King had to say. Infuriating,
isn't it, that the man's legacy has been shrunken to the billboard-friendly "Dream" snippet we now see every February. But it
makes an obvious point: Most American media did not like the real King
back then. And they do not like him now.
By the way, for the full text of King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech, go to http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
(Posted 2/19/04 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
A More Perfect Union.
On a recent trip through the Midwest, while leafing through The Blade, Toledo's daily newspaper, I ran across an op-ed piece
about gay marriage.
I'm
glad I did. In the op-ed's 900 or so plain-spoken words, an Ohio
political consultant named Dale Butland -- a former Chief of Staff for
U.S. Senator John Glenn and a certifiably mainstream kind of guy --
soberly dissects and discredits each of the major histrionic objections
to allowing gay Americans to legally wed.
What
struck me about Butland's piece wasn't just that his thinking makes
good sense -- after all, gay rights activists have been making good
sense about this for decades now -- but that it shows once again just
how heartily mainstream a notion gay marriage is, and how radically
anti-democratic an impulse it is to try to prohibit it.
Butland
takes the three most commonly-heard objections to gay marriage and lays
them to waste faster than Halliburton can invade a sovereign state. His
point-by-point rebuttal of the anti-gay platform goes basically like
this: Gay marriage threatens the sanctity of heterosexual marriage?
Yeah, right, as if admitting gays into the marriage club will somehow
force straight couples to wed gay partners or to cheat on and abuse
their spouses more than they already do. Marriage is for procreation?
Okay, so let's require that all straight couples have children, and
let's forbid elderly people from marrying. Legalizing gay marriage
undermines the sacred union between man and woman? Well then, let's
just rewrite the Constitution so that the government's civil function
of sanctioning marriage suddenly becomes a religious command that
discriminates according to the biases of faith. (Don't say this loudly
near some folks on the religious right).
The
man from Ohio is, of course, entirely right. But the irony, it seems to
me, is the fact that we need to re-learn any of these lessons at all.
Because, if you think about it, we've been here before. All of this
wailing and knashing of teeth over "threats" to the "sanctity" of
tradition should sound distinctly familiar to all Americans who are
over 40 years of age. Can you see where I'm going with this?
Remember,
in the 1950s and1960s, when the idea of admitting black children into
white schools and black families into white neighborhoods posed a
"threat" to the way of life of panicky American whites who saw
legalized segregation and wanton discrimination as birthrights?
Remember when a black student sitting at a lunch counter or a black
seamstress refusing to yield her seat on a bus constituted an attack on
the "sanctity" of traditional white public life? Remember when most
respected American priests and ministers casually accepted the belief
that God thought it was okay for blacks to be subordinate -- or, a
century earlier, to be slaves?
We've
been here before. Then as now, we've seen American presidents mutter
moralisms about the need to respect tradition by preserving the status
quo. We've seen civic leaders talk evasively about the importance of
preserving stability, and the need to not rush into rash social
reforms. We've seen journalists file tepid stories about protestors'
"controversial" demands for civil rights, and their "disputed" claims
for equality. We've seen reactionaries froth at the mouth about the
"destruction" of modern society by the "radical" advocates of change.
We've seen millions of average Americans calmly watch as a segment of
the population suffers abject discrimination and begins to fight back.
For
black Americans and others who remember the 20th-century black civil
rights movement, none of today's sound and fury over gay rights is new.
It's the same story in 2003 for gay Americans as it was in 1963 for
black Americans: there are those who understand the rightness of the
cause of equal rights and full citizenship, and there are those who
embrace bigotry in denying these rights according to some
characteristic of human difference, and there are those who pretty much
don't care. It was true for blacks who were fire-hosed and denied the
right to vote, and it's true for gays who are beaten on streetcorners
and denied the right to rent an apartment or to marry. It was true for
Emmett Till and it was true for Matthew Shepard.
When
I was a child in the 1960s, I couldn't understand what it was about us
as black people that gave us such power to intimidate white people. Did
we have super-powers that made our mere proximity a deadly threat to
whites? Were we like kryptonite? Of course, the toxin, as my mother
explained to me, was not in us. It was in bigoted whites and their
ideas. Just as the problem with gay marriage is not gays; it is certain
self-proclaimed heterosexuals whose experience of the meaning of their own
marriages is so flimsy and so based on exclusion that it
falls apart -- in their eyes -- when they have to be good citizens and
share the concept.
But, as with racially prejudiced whites, they will simply have
to learn. Bigotry is bigotry. And when John Glenn's former chief of
staff goes on record in the heartland to testify to this fact, I take
it as a good sign.
(Posted 12/22/03 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
The Secret NPR Tapes, Reel One.
Sometimes
the wide-eyed, uncritical nature of media coverage of the
Bush presidency seems almost surreal to me. I look at the media's
bland, shrugging response to W's dizzyingly brazen succession of lies
and abuses, and I wonder if I'm still on the third planet from the sun.
Lately, with Bush's Iraq policy falling apart, it seems more reporters are committing acts of journalism. But then, a
few nights ago, I had a horrible dream. In it, I was listening to the radio:
____________________
(THEME MUSIC UP, THEN UNDER)
HOST:
From National Polite Radio, this is Double-Talk of the Nation. I'm Namby Pamby.
At
a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush announced yet
another controversial White House initiative: the formation of a
federally-funded Department of White Privilege. In the face of
criticism from liberals, the President defended this new
multi-billion-dollar federal initiative as being "necessary for the
protection of our nation's millions of white citizens and their
traditional way of life," which he said has been threatened by
affirmative action and other race-based gains of people of color during
the past century.
Has the President gone too far? His liberal critics say so. But his supporters say he is simply honoring a legacy.
Here
to discuss this remarkable new development are my two guests: Bernard
Lewis Stanford, Professor of History at Yale and winner of the Nobel
Prize for his more than 30 books on American history... Welcome,
Professor...
PROFESSOR:
Thank you very much, Namby.
HOST:
...and writer Steve Stone, author of the new book, "Why I Think White People Are Better Than Black People."
Welcome to Double-Talk of the Nation, Steve.
STONE:
Glad to be here, Namby.
HOST:
Professor,
let me start with you. According to the President, the new Department
of White Privilege will have broad powers to legally re-segregate
neighborhoods and schools, set limits to property ownership by people
of color, declare higher wages for whites, and define crimes and
punishments according to race. The President insists that this is not
favoritism, but simply "a return to solid traditions that are good for
America." Is there any reason to doubt the President's sincerity?
PROFESSOR:
My
God, there are centuries' worth of reasons. Even the most basic
understanding of American history will reveal this to be an absolutely
barbaric return to our nation's most wicked racial policies. We haven't
seen anything like this since the sabotaging of Reconstruction. The
human rights violations in this decision are unprecedented in recent
American history. The rest of the world is watching with utter horror.
HOST:
Strong words, Professor. Steve Stone, do you agree with that?
STONE:
No way. Look, this is a white man's country. Whites made America, and we should benefit from what we made. Fair is fair.
I support the President.
HOST:
Hmm. What about those who say people of color were instrumental in building this country?
STONE:
They weren't. It's a lie.
HOST:
It's a lie?
STONE:
Sure. For one thing, slavery never even existed. The whole slavery thing is a lie. Blacks who worked on plantations in
the South were actually free the whole time. They were just poor because they were lazy.
HOST:
Well, Professor, what's your answer to Steve Stone's argument?
PROFESSOR:
His
"argument?" This is ludicrous! This man has no knowledge whatsoever of
American history. He is a rube who has written one crude book,
completely fictional, and he knows nothing but his own opinions. He is
a thoroughly ignorant racist...
HOST:
...Now, Professor...
PROFESSOR:
...and
I am flabbergasted that you would take his point of view seriously! How
in the world can you, as a journalist, dignify an outlook so devoid of
facts by putting it on the air as if it were respectable? This is
utterly irresponsible!
HOST:
Professor,
I must remind you that our job as journalists is not to define the
facts. Our job is simply to let both sides of any issue be heard. It's
up to our listeners to decide what's true and what isn't. Our show has
to be balanced.
PROFESSOR:
That
is complete nonsense! What if the facts themselves, as they are
unearthed, are not "balanced?" What if delving into the factual record
leads to clear and overwhelming conclusions? What if there is no
serious "argument" to be had? Good Lord! Isn't it your job, as
journalists, to stand up for what the evidence indicates is true?
HOST:
Well, Professor, maybe that's what journalists did back in the Watergate days. But today it's not in our job description.
I mean, hey, I want my agent to return my calls.
Anyway, let's take some phone calls. Huck in Hannibal, you're on the air...
__________________
Like I said, it was a bad dream. Am I awake yet?)
(Posted 10/3/03 by Bruce A. Jacobs)
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