The New Year

I've been unable to post recently due a severely pinched nerve in my neck that has rendered any motion in my left arm and hand excruciatingly painful.

In lieu of posts from me, and probably a far better exchange, I recommend reading the articles of the most recent New York Review of Books. The edition is solid from top to bottom. Among my favorites:

• Where do we go from here? Paul Krugman and Robin Wells repeat the call for a primary opponent to Obama, providing the political and economic rationale for it to happen. Their theme of delinking is one I have tried to work with recently, but have been held back by the nerve problem.
• Why Wikileaks Changes Everything - Christian Caryl delves into many of the same themes I raised early on, particularly the political implications of the indiscriminate release of government data. I particularly like the evaluation of Assange as an incoherent twit, which has been my estimation all along.
• The Concealed Battle to Run Russia - Amy Knight makes excellent use of some leaked diplomatic cables in her review of a book on Russian politics. You want a picture of a truly criminal state? Cheney could only dream of this level of power.
• The Beleaguered Cambodians - Margo Picken provides a look at another criminal state. This one goes into the ways in which imperial & colonial powers have abetted a local elite to rob the nation blind. 
• China: From Famine to Oslo - Perry Link discusses two new novels by Chinese writers in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo. As with the articles on Russia and Cambodia, the author goes into life in a repressive, authoritarian state, discussing the reality of life for people who truly are oppressed, spied upon, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by their governments, and how they respond to this condition. These articles individually and together serve as a useful corrective to the denizens of the Left blogosphere wringing their hands and bemoaning the horrible, horrible behavior of the US Gubmint against Our Hero Julian and who might just be coming after poor little ME next! Get a grip, people.
• Curveballs - Joseph Lelyveld's review of Bush's account of his administration. Cool, almost cold, it eviscerates W's self-exculpation. The final paragraphs on exchanges between W and Bush 41 are particularly good.
• No Thanks for the Memories (access for NYRB subscribers only, but first few paragraphs are available) - Gordon Wood provides a much needed counterpoint to professional liberal pundits' mocking dismissal of the Tea Party by talking about the difference between fact and meaning in cultural memory.

Anyway, I hurt and don't know when that will change. I hope your new year is starting out better than mine.

Anglachel

A Hundred Days

The combination of Hoover, FDR and Obama as a focus of analysis appears to be catching on. I just read Thomas Ferguson's post The Story Behind Obama's Remarks on FDR on New Deal 2.0. He starts with a quote from a transcript of remarks Obama gave to "liberal bloggers":

“We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly.” - President Obama

There are two things that jump out at me from this quote, regardless of the context.The first is the self-exculpation - we didn't get all we wanted because we took a bolder path than FDR, so don't criticize us! - and the breathtaking erasure of history.

Um, hello? The First Hundred Days of FDR? The stuff of Democratic legend and the bane of Republicans to this day? FDR moved on the FIRST day of his presidency and did not stop for 100 days, passing legislation that would become the most stunning reimagining of American society since Lincoln and possibly since the founding of the nation.

Dreams of Our Daughters

Still not dead. I was planning and throwing a baby shower for a friend this last weekend (mucho fun!) plus wrestling the demons of stupidity at work (mucho annoying!). There's not been too much in the news compelling enough to get a post out of me.

Mostly I've been braining about the Democratic Party and the anti-Southern strategy it is relentlessly pursuing. I end up with disturbing conclusions. More on that over the next few months.

At the baby shower, one of my friends who is a high school teacher in a poor and working class district talked about the kids she teaches. She has two young women, Latinas, in her class who are doing a little better this year, getting Cs and trying to improve. One of them can't really afford the fees for the equipment and other extras to be a cheerleader, though she scrapes together the money from sponsors. She really likes the cheer squad. One of her parents is in prison on drug charges. The other she says is dead, but is actually suffering from a (too young, too short) life of drug abuse. An older sister, not long out of high school herself, is caring for her kid sister, which means providing a roof and food and hoping the kid follows her example and not that of their parents. Some might dump on this girl because she wants to be cute and sexy and have the crowd applaud. She should be applying herself! The other girl in the class lives with the first and the older sister. Some kind of family trouble. She's a little more studious. Not much else to say about her, except that she is trying to make the right decisions.

Who thinks about these kids? Where are the interests of the working poor being considered and protected? These girls need reliable, affordable contraception. They need some regular adult attention and guidance. They need decent jobs that can help them pay rent and buy the groceries while they get through their dizzy teen years and get a handle on life. They need to not be punished for having been born to shitty parents. They need to be respected for having enough discipline to get sponsors for cheer squad and to raise their grades, even as they are steadily pushed to do a bit more for their own sakes.

I contrast this to the recent rumors that the secrecy over Obama's birth certificate is not some nefarious secret, like he isn't a US citizen, but something far more ordinary - that his parents probably never married in the first place. I said this in private emails to a few bloggers several weeks ago. To me, it isn't something that is anyone's business. But what does bother me is the dreamy fantasy promulgated in his books, a fairy tale romance that he is able to spin out over years and continents, trying to craft a respectable ending for the family's honor if not exactly for the individuals involved. The truth, ironically enough, is more interesting, reflecting a tough minded, independent and determined woman with dreams of her own who may not have been the person her son wanted her to be.

Few of our parents ever manage that trick. Somehow they keep stubbornly being their own people.

The high school girls my friend talked about, one of them has created a story to explain away a parent who won't be there, preferring this person be dead to the fact of abandonment, betrayal, failure. It hurts to have a parent who fails you, and every one of us who has felt such a sting makes up a story to make sense of that unpalatable fact, make it more noble, less painful, displace its shame, deny its damage.

Isak Dineson said that any pain can be borne if you put it into a story or tell a story about it. What matters is what kind of story you tell. Is it a story of reclaiming what never was? Is it a story that acknowledges pain, but makes it a thing that is done and dealt with? Is it a tale that talks about dysfunction with clear-eyed honesty and compassion for all involved? Does it limn an unfulfillable wish, or instead create a foundation on which to build? I suspect most of us recount a mix of such things.

I'm interested in the dreams of our daughters, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how they can frame a future that is not just drugs, gangs, babies, and relentless second-class status. Maybe one of the reasons the lady in the pantsuit connects with so many daughters is the story she can tell us about herself, and about us as well. Maybe what we need are better stories of the indignities and tragedies of ordinary life that don't have Daddy in another country, but permanently incarcerated, or a blow-hard abusive bastard, or wandering the streets as a bum looking for his next fix, and how you are not condemned to a similar fate.

A dream that looks forward, not back.

Anglachel

Sweet Little Lies

Bob's been documenting the atrocities much longer than anyone else, so he knows who has cozied up to the main stream media:

Which brings us to the current problem—the problem of telling/not telling the truth. Do Broder and Toner believe that Clinton made that statement? Because two major journalists, in the past week, seemed to say that their colleagues have been lying when they make this claim.

First to expound was Richard Cohen, in the June 3 Washington Post. Cohen said this, explaining why he’d hated the Democratic campaign: “I hate that Clinton's observation that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June ran on and on when everyone save some indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest knew what she meant.” If Cohen is right, then Broder and Toner were simply lying in yesterday’s Times. (Neither scribe lives in Brazil.)

Second up was Michael Kinsley, who didn’t seem to hate the lying at all. On Sunday, he bravely said this in the New York Times, knowing that Kevin and Josh and Duncan and all good pseudo-liberal house-brokens have accepted this evil conduct for years: “[A]t the end, when her own clumsy comment about Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June was willfully misinterpreted to suggest that she was wishing that fate on her opponent, it served her right.” If Kinsley’s implication is right, then Broder and Toner were “willfully misinterpreting” what Clinton had said.

Do you see the problem that develops when people like Kinsley and Cohen start telling the truth about not telling the truth? Cohen said the dissembling was wrong; Kinsley seemed to approve of the lying. But both men are veteran journalists; they have lived for decades at the top of the mainstream press pack. And both men seemed to think it was obvious that people like Broder and Toner are lying—simply lying in your faces—when they write bullsh*t like that.

Were John Broder and Robin Toner lying on Monday? That’s what Cohen and Kinsley seem to believe. Needless to say, housebroken boys on the liberal web will know they mustn’t discuss such matters. But do you see the problem that quickly arises when major journalists start telling the truth about not telling the truth?

Next question: Did journalists really think something was wrong with Bill Clinton’s statement in South Carolina? Or was that just a “willful misrepresentation” too? Do you see the problem that quickly arises when we’re told, by two major scribes, that their colleagues tell you things they don’t believe? When John Judis tells you what he did about his colleagues’ view of Obama?

Housebroken pool boys will know not to speak. Despite their long-standing willful silence, can you see the problem involved here?

The problem is telling the truth.

A lot of people mistakenly thought my post yesterday was about Obama, but they have misunderstood the point. It is about the so-called left that has forgotten how to tell the truth about politics.

The atrocities, as Bob Somerby keeps pointing out with far greater patience than I could have thought possible, are the lies and the acceptance of them, the excuses made for them and the way in which public figures profit from them.

Blogswarming the few places left that are critical of the campaign and trying to scream and bully the authors into silence does not change the facts. Tying to counter a lie with a lie does not cancel out the first one, it simply reinforces the original need for the facts.

A significant the difficulty the left has when combatting the right is trying to combat the casual lies spread with the voice of certainty by the MSM who get it handed to them on a silver platter by the noise machine. This time around, the left eagerly lapped it up, those claiming to be the most progressive, the most radical, the most hard-core, unwilling to tolerate the bullshit lefties, the first and most eager to get the goods from Drudge.

Does anyone see the political problem when you ally yourself with a media unwilling to tell the truth? And if this media then turns on you with the same methods and brutality it used on your opponent? What happens when the lies that advanced your original cause are exposed as lies and are used to paint you as deceitful and dishonest?

Anglachel

Patterns of Settlement

For interested readers, here is the Wikipedia entry for Appalachia.

I was most interested by the maps on the page, espcecially this one:


If you compare the areas marked as Appalchia on this map to the US electoral map here on the NY Times, and drill down into the county level information, you will see broad overlap of Hillary's electoral wins with this geographical map. The pattern in South Carolina is hidden in part because Edwards split the vote with Hillary in those counties.

While I'm focusing on this one group at the moment, similar voting patterns can be found among non-Anglo working class whites, those who made up the great post-Civil War immigration wave and who became part of the urban machine politics on the eastern seaboard and throughout the Midwest. These immigrants were from Eastern and Southern Europe, with large numbers of Catholics and Jews compared to the existing populations in the US. They were considered "unassimilable" by many and acceptance of them into electoral politics, much like the inclusion of women, was often mixed in with anti-Black sentiment, i.e., bring them in to vote the Blacks down and out. The use of racism to gain the franchise for women stands out as the lowest point in battle for women's rights.

In the upper Midwest and plains, immigrant populations were more often German and Scandanavian than Scots-Irish or East/South European. These populations, especially the Scandanavian, were the major ethnic groups to settle the Pacific Northwest. This is the heritage on both sides of my family, my father's family being predominantly German (he had cousins who were taught in German speaking public schools), with an admixture of Scots-Irish. His maternal family, however, was French-Canadian. On my mother's side, her maternal family was Ukranian-Germans (settled in the Ukraine by Catherine the Great) plus some Jewish admixture no one admitted to. On the paternal side, pure Swedish. South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska.

In California, it all mixed together. The dust bowl, which blended the Germano-Scandahoovians and the Hillbillies into Okies, sent them all to the Central Valley, especially Bakersfield. On my husband's side, the Portuguese who didn't go off to make their fortunes in Brazil either settled in the fishing and whaling towns of New England and spread inland (New Bedford, Somerville, Fall River), or else decamped for Califonia, where they dominated the tuna industry in San Diego, could be found in every fishing port, and the steadily took over the dairy industry from the Danes in the Central Valley. Yup, there were a bunch of Danes settled in California by the turn of the century. Plus the Armenians. Of course, there was already a large Hispanic population all along the Camino Real, which stretches from San Diego up to San Francisco. Oh, and don't forget the Russians! They settled in northern coastal Califonia for the sea otter fur trade.

After WWII, California in general and LA in particular, became the place to move to - sun, sand and surf. The children and grandchildren of all the previous waves of immigrants to the nation created a new internal migration, looking for the military-industrial complex jobs that dominated the LA region and much of San Diego during the Cold War. If you are a fan of Walter Mosely and the Easy Rollins books, then you know about the AA move to LA at the same time and what happened in the following decades.

In California, there has always been a substantial Chinese and Japanese population (enough of the former to inspire massacres and crushing immigration restrictions, enough of the latter to lock up in concentration camps and steal their considerable property in WWII), plus Pacific Islanders and Filipinos. The Asian migration to the US is very much a West Coast thing, though Hurricane Katrina revealed the substantial and growing Southeast Asian population in the Gulf Coast, badly hurt by the destruction of their fishing industry.

My brother's wife, who is Mexican, has a grandmother who was born in Chicago, part of the long standing migration of Mexican families to meat packing centers, with the men working in the plants and the women working in domestic jobs. The Hispanic population along the Mississippi River and its tributaries may be growing, but it has been there a very long time. While California and Arizona may get the bulk of the spotlight about illegal immigration from Mexico, every growing region of the west has significant Hispanic migrant worker populations, foreign and US born.

No particular point here except to talk about what the US working class looks like and how it got to where it was going.

Anglachel

The Whiteness of the Whale

When historians and political scientists look back at this election, they will not primarily be concerned with who won. The phenomenon to be explained will be the unhinged attacks upon Hillary Clinton from the Left. See eRiposte's write up here for another discussion of this phenomenon. The war being waged against Hillary from the Left goes far beyond the immediate campaign contest – the primary has become the vehicle through which the Left’s hatred of the Clintons can be expressed in a unified manner. That the Right should hate the Clintons is unsurprising, but what can possibly explain the fury of the Left with Bill and Hillary Clinton?

There is nothing in the political acts or policies of either of these people sufficient to explain this reaction. If the segment of the Left assaulting the Clintons was merely the disaffected and inchoate fringes, people with a single issue that no one except their own preferred candidate can satisfy, or obsessed with ethical purity to such a degree that they will not accept that politics are necessary and every political act is looked at as an example of corruption, then there would be an explanation. Cranks tend to glom onto celebrities as objects of adoration or hatred. But the people objecting most strenuously to the Clintons are politically indistinguishable from them. The alleged political sins of Bill and Hillary are shared by other politicians who are not subject to the scorched earth assaults the Clintons endure. Among the power brokers, the attackers are often colleagues, appointees and protégés. At a policy or philosophical level, these are differences of degree, not of kind.

It is a phenomenon uniquely demarcated by class. Upper-middle and upper class professionals with significant amounts of college education are the overwhelming majority of the people launching broadsides against the Clintons. It has a distinct geographical structure as well, being more likely to appear north of the Mason-Dixon than south of it.

It differs this election cycle than when Bill ran for President in that it is voiced more openly and because the vitriol is being poured onto Hillary Clinton voters as well as on the candidate herself. The attack upon rank and file supporters is, I think, the major way in which CDS on the Left differs from that on the Right. I cannot name a time in all the past presidential elections I can remember (1976 being the oldest) that entire blocks of voters were so thoroughly condemned for their candidate choice. It is a battle within the party, not against external foes, and it is about class. Or, rather, it is about a fantasy of class and culpability.

It is not a mistake that racism is the charge being thrown at Hillary, despite the utter insanity of the claim, despite Obama admitting in the Nevada debate that, yes, his campaign was deliberately spreading the lie that she and her campaign were engaging in racist attacks. In the liberal imagination, racism is the marker of “white trash”, itself shorthand for the organization of the white world into the superior educated class and the inferior hicks. All southerners are hicks, even the educated ones. All southerners are simply Trent Lott, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond rolled into one. All “uneducated” (i.e., lacking at least a BA or BS from a notable school) white northerners are “Bunkers”. Anyone appealing to such people is a not-so-closeted racist, and their entire agenda is to reinstitute Jim Crow, if not return to slavery.

Why this psychotic and self-defeating projection onto the working class? It is the deep guilt of the liberal upper class that we know, every last miserable one of us, that our privilege is due to centuries of white supremacy and to the informal, unspoken, but pervasive advantage our skin color and behavioral patterns gives us in this society. It is our Moby Dick, the whale we pursue obsessively through political seas, frantic to have material proof that we are innocent of the crimes of our nation.

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and civil war in the 19th century. It was the party of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. The New Deal set it on the path to renouncing that legacy through the mid-part of the last century, and it was a brutal passage. Instead of reimagining the South and what it could become, the Northeast elite who had taken over the leadership simply renounced it – you will be like us or you can get out. When desegregation came to the Northeast and the Midwest, the contempt for “The South” was transferred easily to the working class ethnic whites who resisted this change. Archie Bunker became an eternal truth rather than a thought exercise, a denunciation of the unchangeable cretin in front of the TV instead of a call to reflect on how we become what we are and how, despite ourselves, we can find our common humanity. Most of all, the determined demonization of working class whites, especially those with Southern connections, allows the upper class elites to turn a blind eye to the way in which they are the biggest beneficiaries of the centuries of racism in the nation. There is a growing group within the liberal elite who wishes to jettison “The South” entirely, leaving the working class immiserated and isolated, rather than face up to the obligation of the party to complete the task before it. That task is to create the conditions under which racism is no longer something that can be exploited for electoral gain or needed as a survival tactic in deteriorating and demeaning socio-economic conditions.

The violent rejection of the Clintons on the Left is a rejection of “The South” and the working class by the Stevensonian elite, who see the success of Bill the “Bubba” as both a threat to their power and a repudiation of their policies and actions since 1968. They want to see themselves as simultaneously co-victims with AAs of white supremacy and also as the moral(istic) saviors of the oppressed, redeeming their part of the white population from the sin of racism. (Read the incomparable Bob Somerby’s write up of this phenomenon in his latest post.) Bill Clinton provided a different vision of how to move the party and nation forward, one that refused demonization, and this shook them to their ineffective foundations. The Clintons unsettle the comfortable arrangement between the northeastern elite and the southern revanchists (the Democrats and the Republicans having exchanged those roles since the New Deal), insisting on the need to materially improve the lives of the bulk of the nation and not sit around waving a moralistic finger at people who like to shoot guns and go to church every Sunday.

The assault on the Clintons has no basis in policy or political philosophy. It is an attack on uppity white trash who dares to succeed in the world without assimilating into the ruling elite, and for the added insult of being adored by the nation precisely for their common connections. The only thing I can compare to the single-minded determination of the liberal elite to destroy the Clintons regardless of the collateral damage to party and nation is George W. Bush’s obsession with talking out Saddam Hussein, though lacking even the level of justification collected for that vendetta.

Reading the increasingly unhinged and incoherent ravings of the elite against Hillary Clinton, the calls for her murder, the fabricated videos “proving” the racism of her campaign and associates, the hysterical screams that she must get out now before she inflicts more damage on the party, and the assertions that anyone who votes for this candidate is nothing but a racist, I am reminded of one of the great descriptions of obsession ever set down:

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge. …

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. …

How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be- what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.

Ch. 41 - Moby Dick

And we all remember how that story ended.

Anglachel

Much Better Than I Can Say It

Two articles today get to the heart of what I've been trying to say for the last month, but haven't been able to pull together. I'm offering extended quotes because what these two have to say is important.

First is Michael Lind's brilliant piece in Salon, The Rubes and the Elites. He engages in some reasonably straightforward political science cross-cut with sensible sociology and comes up with a calm explanation of the voting patterns we are seeing in the campaign. If you don't subscribe to Salon, you may need to sit through an ad to read the article. Believe me, it's worth it. Some key paragraphs:

The events of the past few days are additional evidence of a profound rift in the Democratic Party, one revealed in the differing constituencies of the two remaining candidates. One story, told by Obama backers and the mainstream media, holds that there is a white racist problem: The Democratic Party is deeply divided between anti-racists (that is, supporters of Barack Obama) and racists (Democratic primary voters who preferred Hillary Clinton or any candidate other than Barack Obama, particularly the working-class white men who are often described, in zoological terms, as "white males"). The other story, which has yet to be told, holds that the difference between the constituencies of Obama and Clinton has little to do with race and reflects instead long-familiar regional and cultural splits among whites in the Democratic electorate. The prospects of the Democratic Party in the fall depend in part on whether these rifts can be healed.

The path of least resistance for liberal journalists and bloggers is to respond to these disturbing numbers by demonizing less-educated white Democrats. That is easier for them than to grasp the idea that these voters might actually like Hillary Clinton. One theory holds that "low information" voters, ignorant of the candidates and the issues, favor Clinton because of name recognition. But contrary to the progressive mythology about "low-information voters," a March Gallup poll shows that "both Obama and Clinton have near-universal name identification across all educational levels."

Even more common has been the claim by many supporters of Obama that the Clinton campaign, by means of subtle appeals to white racial prejudice, has attracted a large number of bigots who oppose Obama because he is black. The "race baiting" is alleged to have consisted of Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama to Clinton's friend Jesse Jackson, and Hillary Clinton's praise for the civil rights efforts of Lyndon Johnson, which, it was said, denigrated the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. Since when have white race baiters praised Jesse Jackson and LBJ?

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.

Whether the "bitter" controversy helps Hillary Clinton win enough votes in the final primaries to beat the odds and win the Democratic nomination remains to be seen. At press time, she was surging in the polls. One thing is certain: In the fall election, John McCain, whoever his Democratic opponent might be, will portray himself as the candidate who defends the dignity and pride of working-class and lower-middle-class Americans of all races against the disdain of elite liberals. Unfortunately, many progressives will make that task much easier by repeating the litany of contempt: Rubes. Rednecks. Retro.

The other post of the day is from the incomparable Bob Somerby. A blogger before the term existed, Bob takes no prisoners on the electoral impact of elitism on Democratic Party prospects:

Truly, it has been embarrassing to watch some liberals attempt to come to terms with this matter. Just as an obvious matter of fact, condescension toward average people has plagued progressive movements at least since the late 1960s, when Dr. King stopped being the public face of progressive change and various Middle America-trashers took his place in the public imagination. (Abbie Hoffman, for instance.) In his brilliant public ministry, Dr. King confronted people who turned dogs and hoses loose on children; blew up churches where children were praying; threw him in jail on tortured pretexts; and eventually chased him down and killed him. But quite aggressively, Dr. King refused to deny the soul of the Bull Connors—of those who behaved in such fallen ways. Within a few years, it became possible to tag progressivism with the face of those who loudly showed the world how much they hated the mores and life-styles of their horrible mommies and daddies. From that day to this, progressive politics has been damaged by a sometimes-accurate perception—the perception that progressives and liberals are a bunch of snooty snobs

In fact, progressives sometimes are snooty snobs. We love to display our cultural and moral superiority to those whose values or instincts may differ. We love to call them xenophobes, vigilantes and racists. We love to ridicule their religion (just read the comments whenever Amy Sullivan posts). Indeed, Bob Herbert starts off this morning’s column by giving vent to this very instinct. This is exceptionally sloppy exposition—and it’s probably very bad politics:

HERBERT (4/15/08): Maybe Barack Obama felt he couldn't afford to give the correct answer.

He was asked at a fund-raiser in San Francisco about his campaign's experiences in the run-up to next week's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. One of the main problems, of course, is that he hasn't generated as much support as he'd like among white working-class voters.

There is no mystery here. Except for people who have been hiding in caves or living in denial, it's pretty widely understood that a substantial number of those voters—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and elsewhere—will not vote for a black candidate for president.

“There is no mystery here,” Herbert says, betraying the confidence of the elitist. (In his first sentence, he modestly acknowledges that he knows “the correct answer.”) And then he makes a sweeping (if imprecise) assessment of the souls many people; “a substantial number” of Pennsylvanians won’t vote for Obama because of his race, he says. Later, he leans down from the mountaintop, saying this: “No one has an obligation to vote for Mr. Obama, and it's certainly not racist to vote against him.” Gee, thanks! But wouldn’t you know it? Right at the start of his piece, he seems to say something quite different.

Are there people in Pennsylvania who will vote against Obama due to race? Presumably there are—although, in fact, there’s plenty of “mystery” about how “substantial” the “number” might actually be. But at least since the late 1960s, many progressives have behaved just as Herbert does here. It’s our first instinct! We start by attributing the worst possible motives and attributes to wide numbers of everyday people—people whom we’ve never met. What exactly does Herbert mean when he says “a substantial number” of Pennsylvanians won’t vote for Obama due to his race? There’s no way to know for sure—but his formulation seems to take everyone in. This formulation—the first thing he offers—quickly makes everyone suspect. “There is no mystery here,” he says—although, of course, there is.

Unfortunately, many “progressives” simply can’t understand the nature of this decades-old problem. They can’t understand why it’s bad politics (and basically foolish) to ridicule people for being religious. They don’t see why it’s bad politics this week to build jokes around the word “gun-toting.” A few months ago, they didn’t understand why it was morally obnoxious (and vastly stupid) to accuse everyone in sight of being a slobbering racist. Sergio Bendixen, for example—so accused for answering a question he’d been asked about a delicate subject. They could tell that Bendixen was a big vile race man—and that others had conspired with him!

To all appearances, some men get into comedy so they can ridicule women from a stage. Similarly, some people seem to become progressives so they can forever parade about, telling the world about their moral superiority to all the unwashed rubes. For them, progressive politics is about name-calling. A movie is playing in their heads. In this movie, they and their friends are the very good people. Mommy and Daddy are not.

We’d be inclined to say that this political/moral problem began to afflict progressive movements in the late 1960s. And uh-oh! In the last few days, conservative columnists have sometimes shown that they know this terrain rather well. This morning, George Will goes back to FDR to illustrate this liberal problem. We won’t necessarily go along with his assessment of Adlai Stevenson. (He works from a few offhand comments here.) But as a general matter, we think he’s uncomfortably close to the mark as he describes “liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt:”

WILL (4/15/08): What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture—the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Many “shirts-and-skins” players will reject any words spoken by Will and Barone. But in this matter, Will and Barone are uncomfortably close to right—and Robinson and Cohen seem largely clueless. But then, conservatives have long understood these matters better than “progressives” have, thereby gaining electoral advantage. Often, they have overstated or misstated particular claims, with mainstream journos playing along. (How dare Kerry go wind-surfing?) But they seem to understand the terrain better than liberal counterparts.

Elitism isn’t about what you do. It isn’t about how much money you have. (FDR was wealthy.) It’s about the things you think and say about those small-town or working-class rubes. Some progressives have shown, again and again, that they simply can’t understand this distinction. Will Obama’s remark cost him votes? We don’t know; we hope they won’t, although we’re beginning to get concerned about his rookie mistakes. But if they do, it will be because there have been so many such remarks, by so many other people, remarks which often weren’t off-hand comments. This has been a major problem for many years; some liberals still seem to lack the first clue about what the problem consists in.

What so many Obamacans fail to get from the SF statement is that the truth or accuracy of whether people are bitter isn't electorally significant. The impact is whether those so described believe the Democratic candidate is the one who is going to do something concrete to aleviate their situation, and whether they will do so with respect for the humanity and dignity of the person in need of help.

So far, the answer appears to be "No" where The Precious is concerned.

Anglachel

Truth and Cultural Memory

Pat Oliphant hates the Clintons and has created some of the most offensive political cartoons of the primary season, crudely reproducing the most misogynistic slurs against HRC. Even so, when not blinded by Clinton Derangement Syndrome, he has a way of cutting to the political heart of controversies that has no equal. This cartoon about Michelle Obama's cynical and narcissistic statement about the nation is brilliant. It also undermines most of the BS Oliphant has thrown at Hillary.

In the early days of the blogosphere, a phrase you read quite often was "down the memory hole," a reference to 1984 and the way inconvenient historical facts about the Bush/Cheney regime were routinely erased or disappeared from the public record. One of the purposes of Left Blogistan, it was said, was to save these bits of inadvertant truth and keep them from going down the memory hole. Then, the A-List Blogger Boyz decided that they wanted to be political power players, too, just like the MSM, and truthiness became hip, especially where the Clintons were concerned.

One of the hallmarks of the Obama campaign is truthiness and a deliberate denial of cultural memory. It is shown in self-indulgent, self-referential comments about how there was only dreary darkness in our nation until The Precious rose like the Sun (Son?) above the horizon. The aggressive denial that anything good came out of Bill Clinton's administration is part of it, all repeated by the "Yeah, yeah, that's right!" chorus of Blogger Boyz and Media Whores (but I repeat myself). There is the facile lauding of Reagan. There is kissing the asses of Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay and the rest of the Republican leadership by saying only the Republicans have been the party of ideas in the last two decades. There is the dismissal of historic Democratic leaders, such as LBJ on Civil Rights and FDR on the New Deal.

In his hamfisted attempt to suppress the very real affection ordinary Americans have for Bill and Hillary Clinton and the concrete material gains people enjoyed during Bill's administrations, Obama and his adualtory Geek Chorus have performed acts of violence upon the cultural memory, aggressively trying to shove the past deeds and successes of the Democratic Party down the memory hole so that there is nothing against which to compare The Precious and his insubstantial record. He wants to accrue to himself to the emotion of the rhetoric of our great leaders without having to commit himself to the causes that they fought, and in some cases died, for.

"Maybe somebody should instruct you about the Civil Rights times, and how completely this country has turned itself around from the 1960s onwards."

The polite chiding Oliphant has the ghost of LBJ hand over to Michelle Obama points to the other historical elision being committed for the sake of The Precious. The advances of this country towards equality for all (not just upper class white males), towards responsible social services, towards access to higher education, towards environemental awareness and responsibility, towards cooperative and constructive international relations, have all been made because of the Democratic Party and because of dedication to democratic causes. We need candidates who will campaign on the record of the party with pride and no equivocation. The divisions that have happened, such as the reconstruction of the Republicans as the party of racism, are the results of political battles that materially benefitted the less well off in this country.

Obamacans (far closer to Republicans than to Democrats) say opponents of The Precious are just haters or are shills for Hillary. NO. Some of us have supported Hillary from the start of the campaign, but many have come over to Hillary's side because of the dissing of and pissing upon the true legacy of the Democrats, such as my mother, who was an Edwards supporter. We resent that Obama is using right-wing talking points to dismiss the fights we have engaged in for decades in order to attract a few "Democrats for a Day" in the primaries.

The damage done here is not to Hillary. She will, as she assured us, be fine no matter the outcome. She is a woman of amazing talents, with depth and strength of character we can only imagine. She has never turned her back on us and she will be on our side no matter what.

The damage done is to the party and to progressive, liberal causes that are being effaced from our cultural memory for the sake of Obama's narcissistic campaign.

Anglachel

United to What End?

One of the things the spousal unit and I have discussed about Obama's mesage of unity is what exactly is it in the nation that requires unification?

Paul Krugman has consistently pointed out since W's election that the right wing movement conservatives want no part of unity. They want complete and utter authority. The overriding message of his book The Conscience of a Liberal is simply this: There's no working with these people. On the right, they make no secret of their contempt for liberal democratic rule (and I mean that in the formal, political theory sense of the term), far preferring autocracies like Franco's Spain.

As Bob Somerby pointed out over and over, the problem with Obama's Reno talk with the conservative newspaper editors wasn't really the overly adulatory comments about Reagan. It was his airy dismissal of the turmoil of the 60s as something the left got wrong. Wrong about civil rights? Wrong about women's rights? Wrong about protesting the Vietnam war? Just what national political contests were wrong? The other half of the uproar was his claim that over the last 15 years (which covers all of Shrub's presidency and much of Bill Cinton's) it was the Republicans who were the party of ideas, with the clear understanding that these were somehow good or commendable ideas.

Rick Perlstein has an op-ed in the Washington Post today, "Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen", getting to the heart of why unity for unity's sake is not just gaseous, it is simply ignoring the fact that there are divisions in this nation that cannot be mediated - they can only be contested:

One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."

No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.
...

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.

Born myself in 1969 to pre-baby boomer parents, I'm a historian of America's divisions who spent the age of George W. Bush reading more news papers written when Johnson and Richard Nixon were president than current ones. And I recently had a fascinating experience scouring archives for photos of the 1960s to illustrate the book I've just finished based on that research. It was frustrating -- and telling.

The pictures people take and save, as opposed to the ones they never take or the ones they discard, say a lot about how they understand their own times. And in our archives as much as in our mind's eye, we still record the '60s in hazy cliches -- in the stereotype of the idealistic youngster who came through the counterculture and protest movements, then settled down to comfortable bourgeois domesticity.

What's missing? The other side in that civil war. The right-wing populist rage of 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, who, referring to an idealistic protester who had lain down in front of Johnson's limousine, promised that if he were elected, "the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it'll be the last one they'll ever lay down in front of because their day is over!" That kind of quip helped him rise to as much as 20 percent in the polls.

...

A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as "the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation" do not separate us from our "actual problems"; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s,'30s, '40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn't healthy. It's repression -- the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.

At least there's some comfort in knowing that our divisions aren't what they once were. Heck, in the 1860s, half the nation was devoted in body, mind and spirit to killing the other half; in the early 1930s, many sage observers presumed the nation to be poised on the verge of open, violent class warfare. We'll manage to muddle through again -- even burdened with mere flesh and blood human beings, not magical healing shamans, as our leaders.

There are decisions that face the nation, and anyone who leads it, that cannot be resolved through good intentions or thoughtful mediation or any other Kumbayah mechanism. These are divisions that are rooted in a constitution that declared part of our population to be less than fully human, and which will never be resolved as long as part of the population fundamentally does not regard that proposition as wrong, that entire categories of people (Blacks, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, etc.) can be declared as less than fully members of this polity, and that it is right and good to do so. This is what the Movement Conservatives have laid bare in their march towards their goal - they simply do not believe in the promise of America that I and the majority of the nation hold dear, and that they have no compunction about destroying it root and branch as long as they remain in power.

Our divisions are not what they once were because of the contests that the Left won when rooting out the social, economic and political institutions that maintained the divisions in the first place - such as chattel slavery, legal apartheid, denial of full citizenship to women, and so forth. The last thing we need is to compromise those victories so that no one has to be exposed to public contestation of who we are and how we shall conduct ourselves as Americans.

Which is another reason why I support Hillary Clinton.

Anglachel

It's the Facts, Stupid

Reagan once opined that facts were stupid things. They do tend to get in the way of what you want the world to be. Poor little Golden Boy Barry is running head first into facts these days and he probably echoes Reagan's sentiment. Why won't those darn facts just melt away before his incredible awesomeness and bow down to the Golden One? Dont' they know he is the second coming of Jesus, Ghandi, MLK, and JFK rolled up into one because of his mad speechifyin' skillz?

Paul Krugman tosses a cold bucket of facts over Barry's uncritical Reagan worship:

One thing that struck me about Obama’s apparent assertion that Reaganism represented a justified reaction against the excesses of liberalism.* Obama said that Reagan offered

a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been
missing

So here’s my question: did Reaganism bring a return to a sense of entrepreneurship? Not that I remember. I think Obama is confusing the 80s with the 90s, the Reagan expansion with the Clinton expansion.

The point is that the quintessential business figures of the 80s weren’t creative entrepreneurs. They were big-corporation executives (Lee Iacocca) and takeover artists (Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky). The gazillionaires who started in garages came later. ...

I understand why conservatives want to backdate the good things that happened in the 90s, and pretend they happened in the Reagan years. But why is Obama playing along?

*In my next life I want to have legions of devoted followers who will fiercely declare that I didn’t really mean what I seem to have said, and that anyone who thinks I did must be a paid shill.

Entrepreneurship

What do we learn from this? Barry doesn't know the facts on the ground and doesn't understand the real economic history of the nation, which gives a lovely follow up to Barry's pitiful statement in the last debate about how he isn't a detail guy. This is why details matter, so you can counter the claims of opponents. It also shows a certain lack of connection between The Golden One and the large mass of Americans (like the women I spoke about in the previous post) who darn well know when they did well economically and when they didn't, and it wasn't under Reagan. True Democrats all hated Reagan.

Krugman's ending snark is also illuminating. We're learning more and more that Obama's campaign and supporters are committed to a (dare we say it?) pattern of intimidation of critics and opponents. They flood online critics with nasty comments and accuse them of being shills for the opposition. They purposefully race-bait to try to portray Barry as some kind of victim of racism, and accuse anyone who contradicts their frame as being racist. They bus in people from other areas to try create the appearance of local support at rallies (talk about Reaganesque stage management). Their operatives engage in intimidation of potential caucus voters. In the primary where his campaign could not physically intimidate voters, he lost decisively.

The fact is that polling of all types shows that Obama does not have solid support from core Democratic constituencies, and that those who do support him do so more out of opposition to HRC than out of committment to Obama. In order to win primaries, he is left begging for Republicans and Independents to cross over and cast a vote for him as a way to thwart Hillary, not because of anything Obama himself has to offer them. The continual appeal to the myth of Reagan and some bipartisan, Kumbayah never-never land shows a contempt for the facts of how the conservatives came to power (appeals to racism, nativism, sexism, militarism) and how they have remained in power.

The fact is that Obama is running against progressive policies and goals, is disrespecting the Democratic base and is lauding the Republican rape of this nation in order to eke out primary victories.

If you don't understand and reject what Reagan and the conservative movement has done (and continues to do) to this nation, you have no business running as a Democrat.

Anglachel

Knowledge and Democracy

Eric Alterman published a speech given by E. L. Doctorow at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007. It is angry, beautiful and true in the best Enlightenment sense of demonstrated by facts. Here are key paragraphs:

What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
...

From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.

It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.

...

Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.

Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.

...

The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.

A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.

To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.

Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.

What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.

I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.

And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.

When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.

Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.

...

To temporize human affairs, to look not up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion. ... If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.

We are called to no less than a new covenant with the true and foundational religion of the United States.

Anglachel

Living Memory

I've found a site online that is endlessly fascinating: Shorpy.com.

Their own explanation is best - "Shorpy is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating."

There are photos both more and less old than 100 years, and together they create an amazing narrative of pre-WWI America.

The big push of the Rethuglicans right now is to destroy the New Deal built under FDR. In practical terms, this means that anyone who is not a white, Protestant upper-class male has no defensible rights to life, liberty or property. Everyone else lives at the whim and pleasure of this elite group.

This sounds incendiary, even insane, in this day and age. We look around at the wide-spread prosperity of the nation, and shake our heads at those who make such ridiculous claims.

What Shorpy does through its images is show us that Amerca WAS that kind of nation less than a hundred years ago, where the majority of the population - even the white population - lived hand-to-mouth, and where poverty reigned across wide swaths of the land.

This is what George W. Bush and all the fucktards who support him want America to look like. The fact that the majority of the people who voted for him had grandparents living in this kind of poverty and are on the way to returning to this kind of desparate life is little solace. They pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for their "strong morals" (hating blacks, hating gays, hating non-Xtians, hating women who have sex, etc. Anti-morality, in short) and their "patriotism" (Let's gut the Constitution!) and their "faith" (rampant nihilism wrapped up in the blanket of lil' Baby Jeezus), all the while hacking away at the social and economic structures that keep them out of dirt-floored one-room shanties.

Why do they do this? I think in part it's because they have no idea of what it was like and why people so strongly supported FDR for bringing them out of it. The US was a better nation for all after the New Deal. Shorpy helps to remind us how far we've come.

Anglachel