Framed

Goodbye Molly

It's the rare person who can combine righteous outrage with humor and grace.  Molly Ivins was one such person, and she died today at age 62 from breast cancer.  I'll miss her unmistakable voice and good humor.

Here are a few quotes to remember her by:

• If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, "Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty." In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean. Children can be horribly logical.

• In Texas, we do not hold high expectations for the [governor's] office; it's mostly been occupied by crooks, dorks and the comatose.

• It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

• The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

• Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

• I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.

• [On Ronald Reagan] If he gets even more sedate, we will have to water him twice a week.

• [On Dick Armey] If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drillin' rights on that man's head.

and from her very last column:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.

Commander-in-Chief

Glenn Greenwald has been doing more of his uncannily excellent work with a recent piece on the creeping tendency of the media to refer to the President of the United States as the Commander-in-Chief.  As Greenwald has noted elsewhere,

while President Bush's supporters are fond of referring to him as the "commander in chief" -- typically to insinuate that he should be beyond criticism or that his authority cannot be questioned, particularly in "times of war" -- the president under our system of government holds that position only with regard to those in the armed forces (see Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution: "The president shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States"). With regard to Americans generally, the president is not our "commander" but instead our elected public servant, subject to the mandates of the law like every other citizen and subordinate to the will of the people.

"Commanders" and "chiefs" don't need to have their orders approved by legislatures.  Their decisions are not to be questioned by the enlisted men.   They give orders and expect them to be obeyed without criticism or explanation.  This is an effective way to run the armed forces, but when those expectations cross over into the civilian sphere, the result is tyranny.  As noted by Jim Henly, one of the bloggers Greenwald cites:

The President is not “our Commander-in-Chief.” He is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. (You can look it up.) . . . If you ain’t in the uniformed services or the active duty militia, you ain’t got a commander-in-chief.

The rather chilling converse of Henly's comment is that if you believe that the man in the White House is the country's commander-in-chief, then you have taken a giant first step toward legitimizing military dictatorship.

Carnival

My piece about how Charles Stimson Hates Korematsu is featured in the new edition of the Carnival of the Liberals, which is being hosted by Pollytics.  There's a lot of good blogging there.  I'll be hosting the Carnival on March 28.

355 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

Here's a joke from Jay Leno, by way of Pollyticks, that neatly presents the paradox of Hillary Clinton:

Vice President Cheney lashed out at Hillary Clinton the other day. He said on CNN that he doesn't believe Hillary would be a good president. I can understand that. I mean, his administration has raised the bar so high.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton would be a better President than George W. B.  She's savvy, smart, and experienced.  She can attract millions of campaign dollars and spend them wisely.  She's a shrewd political tactician who could outmaneuver just about anyone the GOP could throw at her.  She knows a great deal about--and has generally good positions on--health care issues and defense issues, two of the most significant matters of the day.

So why am I not more excited about her candidacy?

1.  She seems to privilege calculation over conviction.  I have a hard time, for example, believing that she thought going to war with Iraq was a good idea, and yet she voted for the resolution authorizing it.  I have a hard time believing that she really thinks it's a good idea for the government to attempt to regulate the content of websites, video games and movies, and yet she has repeatedly taken actions in the name of protecting the children to do just that.  She has taken these and other positions after sticking a wet finger up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

2.  On the issue of Iraq, she has an almost Bushian aversion to admitting that she made a mistake in backing the war.  Even now that she says that had she known then what she knows now she would have not voted to authorize the war, she is still taking no serious steps to stop it.

3.  Her campaign thus far seems far more personality driven than issue driven.  Check out her campaign website and you won't find a section called "issues" or anything similar.  Want to know where she stands on Iraq, on abortion, on the PATRIOT Act, on gay rights, on Afghanistan, on health care, on taxes, on federal spending, on energy?  There's not much there.

4.  Perhaps this is unfair to her, but I am not comfortable with the idea that the Presidency of the United States is a family affair.  Seeing the office swing back and forth from the Bush clan to the Clinton clan makes me feel like we're living in the Egypt of the pharaohs, the China of the dynasties, the Haiti of the Duvaliers, the North Korea of the Kims, or the LA of the Bloods and the Crips.  A republic and a democracy shouldn't work that way.

In the early 90's, I was teaching at a two-year college in Massachusetts and had a wonderful student named Alex.  Alex was conservative and shrewd.  When I asked him who he was going to vote for in 1992--George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton--he surprised me by opting for Clinton.  I was surprised, and asked why.  Alex thought that Clinton was the more genuinely, classically conservative candidate in the race.  He turned out, I think, to be right.  Bill Clinton balanced the budget, declared an end to the era of big government, significantly cut welfare programs, upheld the right of the military to discharge homosexuals, and pushed through NAFTA and other free trade agreements.  These are hardly the actions of a liberal  (even though some of them were correct).

I am amused, therefore, when I hear rabid conservative commentators describing Hillary Clinton as some sort of uber-liberal.  She's not; such comments merely illustrate how much the political center of gravity has shifted rightward since 1980.  Hillary Clinton, like her husband, is a fairly centrist Democrat.  I'll take that any day over the kind of reactionary Christianist leadership being peddled by the GOP.  Still, I'm not at all convinced that a Clinton presidency would bring about the significant, substantive and specific changes that our country so  desperately needs.

Tonight

A reminder to my Northwest Ohio readers: come and drink liberally tonight at Mickey Finn's, 602 Lagrange at Huron, 7:30. 

Demonstration

My fifteen year old son Spencer went down to the demonstration to get his fair share of abuse last weekend.  He took an overnight bus from Toledo, went to the rally, climbed back aboard the bus and was home by 4:30 Sunday morning.

BlondeSense Liz was there too, and the AP had put out an unusually detailed account.  The event was organized by United for Peace & Justice.

Here are the pix:

Nice quote.

Spencer said Code Pink had the largest and liveliest contingent there.

Take heed.

I don't think you even have to be twelve.

Spencer and his message.

Quote of the Day

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity.  As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

--Thomas Pynchon, V.

Pynchon is something of an obsession with me.  I re-read either V. or The Crying of Lot 49 every year.

356 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has an astonishing resume.  Tufts undergrad; Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy for grad school.  Former seven-term congressman, current governor.  Former Secretary of the Department of Energy; former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  Peace negotiator.

This bundle of qualifications seems just right for the times.  Richardson's experience in international affairs would help in starting to repair the damage done to our relations with just about every other country in the world by the current administration.  His experience as energy secretary would position him to do something serious about our fossil fuel addiction and the distortions in our foreign policy that it causes.  His experience in both the executive and legislative branches of government would enable him to move legislation through Congress.

The chief problem with his candidacy is that people don't vote for resumes.   George H.W. Bush had an outstanding resume too, and people turned him out of office after four years.  Richardson is not as well-known to people as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards.  Ironically, though he has far more extensive experience than Barack Obama, I suspect his name recognition is not nearly as high.

Richardson's position on the issues is encouraging.  He favors pulling out of Iraq this year.  He believes in holding direct talks with Iran and North Korea.  He links energy and environmental policies and points out that in New Mexico, "we're requiring that 10 percent of all energy come from renewable sources and we're moving toward 20 percent, we've provided incentives for solar, wind, biofuels and other renewables. . . ."

Richardson may have been what those voters in Iowa and New Hampshire thought they were getting in 2004 when they "dated Dean, married Kerry."  If Obama turns out to be like Dean--an out-of-nowhere candidate who generates tremendous buzz and then crashes back to earth--there could be an opening for a candidate like Richardson who is clearer on his Iraq policy than Hillary Clinton and far more experienced than John Edwards.  Right now, though, at this (absurdly) early stage of the game, Richardson is the best qualified Democratic candidate in the field.  He's fighting the Mod Squad (Obama, Edwards, Clinton) for media attention.

Richardson's candidacy resembles that of Bruce Babbit, another highly-regarded and deeply-experienced southwestern governor who ran for President in 1988 and got a whopping 4.7% of the New Hampshire  vote, and dropped out shortly afterwards.  Babbitt was something of a media darling, the thinking man's candidate.  This was the kiss of death for his candidacy.  When a fan told Adlai Stevenson that he would get the vote of every thinking American, he replied "Yes, ma'am, but I need a majority."  That's what happened to Babbitt.  Richardson will have to find some way to generate real popular excitement about his campaign, or it may be his fate as well.  Which would be too bad.
 

Hedges

Books about scary religious people are something of a preferred genre in our house.  Look around and you'll find Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, Sam Harris's The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Dan Wakefield's The Hijacking of Jesus: How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate,  Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Albert Menendez's Three Voices of Extremism: Charles Colson, James Dobson, D. James Kennedy and Kevin Phillips's American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the  21st Century, to name only those I've read or re-read in the last two years.

I suppose I read these books for the same reason people watch horror movies.  There's the secure back-of-the-brainpan knowledge that the really bad stuff hasn't happened, couldn't happen, won't happen, coupled with the nagging doubt that hey, maybe it could.

In a recent post, I mentioned Chris Hedges' new book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  In an even earlier post, I noted that I was put off by the title, which seemed over-the-top, but that I'd be getting to it soon.

I did, and doubts about the title notwithstanding, I recommend it highly.

Hedges doesn't toss the F-word around casually.  He prefaces the book with Umberto Eco's essay on Eternal Fascism.  Eco lists fourteen features of what he calls Ur-Fascism, which I will summarize thus:

1. A cult of tradition.

2. A rejection of modernism.

3. A cult of action

4. A rejection of distinctions.

5. A fear of difference and disagreement.

6. A grounding in social frustration.

7. An obsession with plots.

8. A sense of humiliation by one's enemies.

9. A view of life as eternal struggle.

10. An elitist contempt for the weak.

11. A hero cult.

12.  A cult of masculinity.

13. A selective populism.

14. A use of Newspeak.

Hedges takes his readers on a tour through the wacky world of dominionist Christianity in support of this thesis:

Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power.  It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements . . . .

He convinced me that the dominionist movement is congruent to the features of fascism that Eco describes.  This is, however, not precisely the same thing as saying that religious fundamentalists are fascists.  My guess is that that subtlety wouldn't make for a provocative book title and that Hedges, who is a  calm and graceful writer, was talked into the more inflammatory title by his publisher.  No matter; if we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, then the title of this book shouldn't deter anyone trying to understand the growth of fundamentalist political Christianity from reading American Fascists.

Three points from the book were especially interesting to me.  The first was about the destruction of the manufacturing class:

The loss of manufacturing jobs has dealt a body blow to the American middle class.  Manufacturing jobs accounted for 53 percent of the economy in 1965; by 1988 they accounted for 39 percent.  By 2004 they accounted for 9 percent.

I live in the rust belt of Ohio, so these figures shouldn't come as a surprise to me.  But like so many other bloggers, I haven't worked in an auto plant or a mill and haven't seen the pink slips firsthand.  These numbers are stunning; what are all the people who used to work in manufacturing doing for a living now?  Hedges thinks he knows: they are succumbing to the phony hope peddled by televangelists, megachurches and politicoreligious leaders such as Dobson, Kennedy and Robertson.

The second point concerns architecture and suburban design.  Hedges points to the blight of hideous commercial buildings that cluster in every city and town in America.  He describes our inherently isolating suburban landscape that disconnects each house from its neighbors and its community.  These, he claims, are partially responsible for the despair that drives people into the arms of the religious right.  I've frequently thought that there must be a direct relationship between the amount of space--both literal and figurative--between people's houses and the propensity of the residents to reject liberalism's view of society as a web of interdependencies.  I've also thought that "community" would make a great theme for liberals to organize around.  Hedges shows how the yearning for connection impels people toward fundamentalist Christianity; I still think that these same yearnings could be harnessed by the the right kind of progressive movement.

Finally, Hedges is properly contemptuous of liberals who raise tolerance to such privileged status that they are willing to tolerate anything--even intolerance. Referring to this as "the paradox of tolerance," he calls upon liberals to grow a pair:

Anger, when directed against movements that would abuse the weak, preach bigotry and injustice, trample the poor, crush dissent and impose a religious tyranny, is a blessing. . . .  Liberal institutions, seeing tolerance as the highest virtue, tolerate the intolerant.  They swallow the hate talk that calls for the destruction of nonbelievers.  Mainstream believers have often come to the comfortable conclusion that any form of announced religiosity is acceptable . . . .  Most liberals, the movement has figured out, will stand complacently to be sheared like sheep, attempting to open dialogues and reaching out to those who spit venom in their faces.

I realized a long time ago that ignoring homophobia, racism and irrationality made me miserable and emboldened the people who espoused those attitudes.  By showing us the boundaries of this trap that so many well-meaning progressives fall into, Hedges has done those of us who call ourselves liberals a tremendous favor.

357 days . . .

. . . until the New Hampshire primary.  Really and for true this time.

Why should being a creationist disqualify someone from being President?  I've been thinking about this recently, what with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee now in the running.  Like his compadre Sam Brownback (Christianist - KS), Huckabee believes that students should be exposed to both evolution and creationism in the public school classroom.

On the one hand, this seems to be the silliest issue possible.  As Republican Representative Chris Shays (CT) puts it,

while Rome's burning, we're eating grapes. I mean, the thought that we would have a debate in the Senate about creationism and scientific evolution, and that we would focus on this issue blows me away.

But the debate is there not because of scientific uncertainty, and not even because of religion.  The debate is ultimately about power.

The only episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I forbade my kids to watch when they were youngsters was Chain of Command.  In that two-parter, Picard is captured by the Cardassians and tortured horribly.  There is seemingly no point to the torture; Picard's captor doesn't demand that he reveal Federation secrets.  Instead, he shows Picard a row of four bright lights and asks him how many lights there are.  When Picard answers factually--four--he is subjected to agonizing pain.  His torturer insists there are actually five.  Picard refuses to agree, and the pain is repeatedly inflicted upon him.  By the end of the episode, a degraded, broken Picard is on the verge of admitting that he does indeed see five lights. 

Certainly the scene of torture is not child's fare.  But even after my kids were older and watching scenes that were more bloody and painful, I still denied them Chain of Command.  The idea of being tortured into denying reality was deeply unsettling to me, and I wanted to protect my sons from it for as long as possible.

The whole TNG scene is derived from Orwell's 1984, when Winston Smith wonders what would happen if the state declared that 2 + 2  = 5 and everybody believed it; would it then be true?  Smith writes, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Making people deny reality is the ultimate exercise of power.  In an inversion of Orwell, I would say that once that occurs, all else follows.

Science in general, and evolution in particular, are grounded in observable reality.  Causing people to question that reality--or at least to give unreality equal time--is a first step to the destruction of thought and of resistance to tyranny.  Orwell and the Star Trek writers knew this.

We are now in the seventh miserable year of being governed by an administration that believed itself so powerful that it could create its own reality.  Lately it has begun to get its comeuppance, but only after the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In the background, according to Chris Hedges, is a frightening movement that reaches into all levels of government:

[T]he powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma, has included in his campaign to end abortion: a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina, wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools.

Evolution is the canary in the coal mine of enlightenment, of science, of reality itself.  When it finds it hard to breathe, that is a clear sign that the atmosphere has become toxic. Again, Chris Hedges, from his new book, American Fascists:

The goal of creationism is not to offer an alternative.  Its goal is the destruction of the core values of the open society--the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable.

This, then, is my single issue, and why Mike Huckabee will only get scorn from me.