Rogue Columnist

Memorial Day

The origin of Memorial Day was the commemoration of Union deaths after the Civil War, a conflict that cost between 618,000 and 700,000 lives in a nation with a population of less than 32 million. The South had its Confederate Memorial Day, still marked in some states of the old CSA. As this warrior republic, crusader nation has racked up more wars, Memorial Day has added these deaths to the holiday.

Newspapers will again run photos of small flags planted in front of the tooth-like marble gravestones of the war dead. But if ever there was an argument for a "sunset provision" to holidays, Memorial Day is it. Even the deaths of ordinary civilians are observed. Commercialized, trivialized and a venue for cheap patriotism, Memorial Day has been drained of its somber meaning. For most Americans, it is just another day off, another long weekend, the start of summer.

The disconnect is worse than ever. We've been through a decade of war and everybody "supports the troops." But our wars are fought by a professional military whose values are, in both good and dangerous ways, cut off from the mainstream of the country. The ideal of the citizen soldier is gone. This way went Rome.

The fight of our lives

We miss the core issue: liberalism itself isn't strong enough to force them to our side and interests. Where are our armies? Where? We're in the fight of our lives with a well-meaning if irresolute leader in Obama... But he is, for better or worse, the only leader we have. — Soleri

What is this election about? Government that is not broken but "fixed" by moneyed interests to their benefit and the destruction of the public good? Shocking income inequality with average Americans left ever further behind? The American promise of a good job and economic mobility for those who, in Bill Clinton's words, "work hard and play by the rules"? Arresting the continuous expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex and stopping America's endless wars, and with them the huge opportunity costs to the nation?

It is about all those things and much more. At its core, this election actually is about what kind of nation we will be. This is often a phrase tossed out by candidates between whom, as George Wallace would say, "there's not a dime's worth of difference." Or used in times of relative peace and prosperity when the stakes are less. Not this time. So, no, we didn't pick this fight, especially not baby boomers of a certain age who can remember another America, flawed and troubled but on the right path. But we're in it. We're in the fight of our lives.

What we won't discuss

I was tied up Thursday with my Sunday column for the Seattle Times. It was a good thing; otherwise, my head might have exploded. All the oxygen in the mediasphere was taken up by a "Democratic strategist" named Hilary Rosen, who said of Ann Romney on CNN, "Guess what, his wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why do we worry about their future?" Vast condemnation ensued, ending with Rosen apologising. This wasn't just taking up space on Twitter or new-media sites, but the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, among others. A blogger for The Nation argued why Rosen was correct. I can't even imagine the wall-to-wall coverage on the boob tube.

As Evan McMorris-Santaro blogged at Talking Points Memo, "Welcome to the next seven months."

So if it wasn't already obvious, there are certain things that won't be discussed in Campaign 2012. The perhaps-failed launch of a proto-ICBM by nuclear-armed North Korea got short shrift Thursday. It may eventually be used as a cudgel against President Obama, but not today. Look over there — it's Hilary Rosen! Iran is pursuing both nuclear arms and long-range delivery systems, or not. Will we dig deep on this issue in the public square, including how Israel is driving American foreign policy not to our best interests? Don't count on it.

His Waterloo

"If we're able to stop Obama on this (health care), it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." — Jim DeMint, R-South Carolina

You didn't think the best Supreme Court that money can buy was going to let Obamacare go into law, did you? From the questions asked of lawyers and the dismal performance of President Hoover's Solicitor General, it doesn't seem likely. Now the question is not merely whether the court will strike down the individual mandate but also use this as a springboard to go after more, beginning with Medicaid. Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas have waited their careers for this moment. Anthony Kennedy is a Reagan appointee. The Federalist Society and the entire right-wing infrastructure have built themselves for it. Now we will get another lesson in why it has been a calamity to have 30 years of mostly Republican presidents packing the federal judiciary. Activist judges? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The so-called Affordable Care Act has been a trainwreck from the beginning. Mr. Obama didn't make it a centerpiece of his campaign, so he had no mandate to do it. Most Americans don't understand it. Like the Dodd-Frank financial "re-regulation" legislation, it is compromised to appease the plutocrats, in this case the insurance industry. About the only clear benefit I can parse is the prohibition against denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

Worse, he wasted a precious year on "health care reform" that should have been spent in very obvious and effective measures to save an economy in free fall (and loudly claim credit). To address the worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression and reset the economy for a prosperous, sustainable future. "Never let a crisis go to waste," my ass. Instead, Mr. Obama chose health care. Here his constant template was revealed, alternately passive and ineffective, helped along by a spineless Democratic majority in Congress. The result: The triumph of the Tea Party in the 2010 election shellacking. He would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-termer? Were he not running against Willard Romney, he would be consigned to the Jimmy Carter dustbin — and he might yet be, for the Republican, whose health-care program in Massachusetts became Obamacare, has unlimited money.

Our appetites

A reader has demanded that I write about The Hunger Games. I had never heard of the young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins or the new movie until this. I doubt I will see the film; a few years ago, Hollywood stopped making much that appeals to my "demographic." The old entertainment writer in me will simply say that Jennifer Lawrence, the lead, is a remarkable young actress. Her self-assured, perfect-pitch performance in Winter's Bone makes her one to watch.

Of course this isn't that the reader was asking. He's convinced that America is on the brink of mass starvation brought on by a lack of jobs. Here's the deal: Until Paul Ryan and the GOP Boyz defund them, 15 federal food and nutrition programs, including Food Stamps, are offered to those in dire straits. It would be obscene to compare the plight of Americans, however heartbreaking, with people in the developing world who are genuinely starving to death. That said, the Agriculture Department tracks "food insecurity," defined as "at times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food." Nearly 49 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2010, 6.4 million in the most serious circumstances.

A future with lethal, televised gladiatorial games — that I can believe. It wouldn't require the "destruction of North America," only a little slippage in the ratings and a few more miles down the road of national decadence. A situation where the starving unemployed — which is where I think the reader was going — rise up in revolution against the plutocrats and their lackeys in D.C.? Nope.

State of extremism

Arizona may not be competitive in much — cheap housing and hot weather come to mind. But it seems determined to "out-crazy" other states in its rock-ribbed, doubled-down reactionary politics. Almost every day comes a story that speaks to the core concerns of today's right wing. For example, Joe Arpaio, High Sheriff for Life, is "investigating" the "fraud" of President Obama's birth certificate, claiming it is a cover-up "ten times worse than Watergate." Can Arizonans hear America laughing?

Other issues are not so funny. The assassination attempt on Rep, Gabrielle Giffords, inspired by the climate of hate, remains a huge stain. The Legislature long ago went from, let us say, liberalizing the laws affecting firearms to encouraging situations where firearm violence is inevitable. Salon, internationally read, has begun an entire archive devoted to Arizona and the entries are not sunny! Scottsdale! or championship golf! Among the headlines: "How Breitbart and Arizona seized on 'critical race theory' " and  "Arizona's vicious war on workers." The New York Times specifically established a Phoenix bureau to cover Arizona crazy when the anti-immigrant, Jim Crow, voter-suppression SB 1070 debate was emerging. From Daily Kos : "Arizona out-crazies other contraception bills. Use birth control, get fired." Talking Points Memo reports on the violent neo-Nazi groups congregating in the state.

This is not an image problem. It is a reality problem, no matter the many Arizonans who are not crazy or extreme. In a state that already ranks so low on virtually any measure of social or economic well-being, it is a bright red "DO NOT COME HERE" alert, whether to companies deciding where to make quality investments or talented, educated people choosing their home.

Killer nation

The surprise is not that an American soldier walked off his base and murdered 16 Afghan villagers, including nine children, but that it hasn't happened more often, including in the United States. This is what happens when we keep our armed forces at war for an astounding 10 years. No wonder Gen. George Marshall was so eager to finish the Second World War, fearing that a democracy couldn't survive a war that went past five years. And no wonder Americans who now "support the troops" have historically been wary of a standing army and unimpressed by a chest-full of medals.

This is what happens when our wars have no front lines and no conventional armies as enemies. The war is everywhere and nowhere. Combatants are hidden in a civilian population already tired of our occupation, our disrespect for their customs and religion, and willing to supply information to the enemy. Soldiers in these circumstances learn to despise and dehumanize the ungrateful civilians they are supposed to be protecting. Even conventional wars coarsen nations, destroy young people, encourage atrocities.

This happens when Americans have slipped norms of decency, abandoned books in favor of homicidal video games, dress (and act) like adolescents, joined the military because the union blue-collar jobs they once could count on have moved to Asia, and found themselves defrauded and lied to by every institution in our national life. And guns, guns, guns everywhere.

The asterisk presidency

Now is the time when all good progressives and people with brains are supposed to line up behind President Hoover. After all, where else can we go? The Republican theocrats and plutocrats have made their dangerous irrelevance clear through an endless series of "debates," and Willard Romney still can't close the deal with his own party. Washington Monthly tries to rehabilitate Mr. Obama in an article that contains this paragraph:

Measured in sheer legislative tonnage, what Obama got done in his first two years is stunning. Health care reform. The takeover and turnaround of the auto industry. The biggest economic stimulus in history. Sweeping new regulations of Wall Street. A tough new set of consumer protections on the credit card industry. A vast expansion of national service. Net neutrality. The greatest increase in wilderness protection in fifteen years. A revolutionary reform to student aid. Signing the New START treaty with Russia. The ending of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

And if you missed it, "he shifted counterterrorism strategies to target Osama bin Laden and then ordered the risky raid that killed him." Another Washington Monthly piece lists the president's top 50 accomplishments. Yet each one requires an asterisk.

The GOP's last stand?

"The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a ­natural-majority coalition for Democrats."

So writes Jonathan Chait in New York magazine, as good a barometer of elite progressive opinion as one will find. His article looks at the fear driving the Republican Party this election season, specifically that the nation is getting less white, more diverse and the GOP is betting everything on a "Hail Mary" pass this year to defeat President Obama — or face being on the losing end of a long-term realignment.

Somehow this piece came to be twined in my mind with a recent New York Times article about how illegal immigration has lost its power as an issue in Arizona. It begins, "The angry protests over Arizona’s tough policies focused on illegal immigrants are mostly gone. The sponsor of the state’s touchstone immigration bill has been recalled, while two sheriffs who championed the crackdown are enmeshed in legal difficulties..." So the state's more interested in, say, real-life economic issues. It's also conventional wisdom in the political press that Arizona could be in play come November.

But is any of this real?

Revolution 2.0

It is starting to dawn on America's press corps that the Arab Spring is not going to usher in Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. The upheaval in Egypt, for example, has not led to rule by educated young Arabs, secularism, women's rights and peaceful pluralism. We find the same military control that has marked the country for decades along with the danger of an Islamic state inimical to Western values, as well as to stability in the region. Nineteen Americans face murky criminal charges. And so it goes. A world with way too many unemployed young men, a world facing scarcity, will fall back on the tribal, brutal and nationalistic.

In America, we await breathlessly the next phase of Occupy. Meanwhile, the super PACs and plutocrats continue to have their way. I return to a periodic theme: What happens here? What happens next? Jim Kunstler thinks we are ripe for a "John Brown moment." Some very smart Rogue readers expect big trouble at the Democratic and Republican conventions this year. And there is endless faith placed in Facebook and Twitter as tools to empower the powerless to overthrow the plutocracy.

I am skeptical but persuadable.

The 50.1 percent

Some readers have accused me of not paying proper homage to the Occupy "movement." I risk being seen as "a grumpy old man." What — and not getting The Google and The Twitter while telling stories about the old days of taking the ferry over to Shelbyville and wearing an onion on my belt...which was the style at the time? Okay, I suppose Occupy raised consciousness of the 1 percent of the super-rich and the 99 percent of "the rest of us." Good intentions abound. We know more about pepper spray.

Meanwhile, in the real world where real policy is made, the right marches on. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure pulled its funding to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screening. The reason given is that Planned Parenthood is "under investigation." Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Florida, chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is auditing Planned Parenthood to see if any public funds were used to pay for abortions. The Komen money, about $680,000, was used exclusively by Planned Parenthood to provide breast screening for the poor and under-insured (and most of the organization's activities are not about abortion). On top of this, Komen recently hired an anti-abortion Georgia Republican politician as a vice president. This is not just about the abortion debate: Many "conservatives" now are opposed to birth control.

The result: A nice bank shot that hurts an organization reviled by the right, makes a loud statement against women's freedom of choice and accessibility to health care, and hurts the poor! Nicely played.

State of the Union

Leave it to Jan Brewer to embarrass Arizona on any national stage given her. When President Obama came to visit Intel a day after his State of the Union address, the governor "greeted" him in a memorable photo: Her mouth angrily open and her finger in his face. Way to go, Jan! Wonder how Intel feels about its day in the sun as a high-tech employer that actually invests in America being eclipsed by you? The governor's whining on Fox "News" about Mr. Obama criticizing her book is a laff-riot. First, did she actually write this book or was it produced by the propaganda machine of which Fox is an integral part? Second, if she did write it (or even has her name on it), there's no such thing as bad publicity. Oh, to have the chief executive trash South Phoenix Rules or Deadline Man. I would be smiling — and use it as a blurb in the next editions.

Brewer's behavior no doubt plays well in places such as Gilbert and Chandler and Alabama. Outside the red precincts of reality denial, this is more confirmation of Arizona's nuttiness and National Laughing Stock/Cringe-maker. What would Barry Goldwater say? Brewer tried to claim she only wanted to give him a letter about Arizona's "comeback" (huh?) and invite him to go to the border with her (uh?), but, as the Republic reported: "It was clear from the moment they greeted one another that this would not be a run-of-the-mill encounter between the president and a local official. At one point, she was pointing her finger at him and at another, they were talking at the same time, seemingly over each other. He appeared to walk away from her while they were still talking, and she confirmed that by saying she didn't finish her sentence."

As Harry Truman repeatedly said, in various ways, You may think I'm a son-of-a-bitch, but you will damned well respect the office of president of the United States. That was then, before the party of "values." Now, to other aspects of the State of the Union address:

Can liberalism be saved?

The only thing that can save America is liberalism. Unfortunately, American liberalism is on its death bed if not in its coffin. Voltaire said, “If you wish to converse with me, define your terms." I'll let John F. Kennedy do it for me:

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

Only liberalism, rightly understood, can stand for the middle class against the plutocracy, for the common good against nihilistic "individualism," for science and pragmatism against theocracy, for fair play against bigoted reaction. Liberalism gave us the greatest, widest wave of prosperity in the history of the world. It broke Jim Crow and let justice roll down like waters. It landed men on the moon. The seminal documents of the republic, the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are liberal creeds. And today? Ashes. The best that can be said of Barack Obama is that he is the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush, and he is at his core a conservative who Edmund Burke or Bill Buckley would be proud to claim. That he is all that stands, even momentarily, between us and national suicide, is astounding.

President Romney? Part I

You'll see a new In-Depth Report to the right, Campaign 2012. With the help of honorary Front Page Editor Richard Silc, I'll compile the best stories of the substance — not the horse race — of the campaign.

It says much about a changing America to compare Willard Mitt Romney to his father. George Romney grew up amid financial hardships and did not graduate from college. During World War II, he worked to better worker conditions, including those of African-Americans, in Detroit; later, he turned around American Motors, was popular with unions and pursued development of small, innovative cars before their time. As governor of Michigan, George Romney was a moderate Republican, fought for civil rights and against Goldwater extremism — and came very close to being the GOP presidential nominee in 1968, before admitting he had been "brainwashed" by the Pentagon over Vietnam.

Willard Mitt Romney never knew anything but wealth. He holds an MBA and law degree from Harvard. He's never held what most Americans would consider a real job, having worked as a consultant and private equity player, most notably at Bain Capital. Although a moderate governor of Massachusetts, the son has readily embraced the extremism of the right in his quest for the White House.

The father was a leader of an America that made productive things and raised the standard of living of the majority of its citizens. Not only that, he had lived hard times and as an adult brought people together. The son is a leader of an America that makes financial deals, often leading to the looting of the productive wealth and destruction of good jobs it took a century to create. They don't use the words "buy, strip and flip" for nothing in private equity. The son is willing, eager really,  to further drive people apart for his ambitions.

Heywood and Giffords

The suicide death of Bill Heywood and his wife, Susan, hit many long-time Phoenicians hard. This is the hour of lead, remembered if outlived, as Emily Dickinson wrote. I heard from so many friends and acquaintances, some of whom hadn't been in touch for years. The Republic did a creditable job telling the story, although it's revealing that the article was closed to comments. Revealing about our age of thugs and haters, not about the Heywoods. I only ran into him twice, long after he had been a giant in radio. But he was a friend to thousands of us, "the bright good morning voice," as Harry Chapin sings in the poignant W.O.L.D.

Long before broadcasting was consolidated, roboticized and ruled by shock-jocks, talk-show screamers or anodyne one-size-fits-all national "easy listening" formulas, local radio was a very big deal in Phoenix. Radio antennas topped the skyline. Jack Williams, who served eight years as governor, started his career in radio. His trademark: "It's another beautiful day in Arizona. Leave us all enjoy it." Barry Goldwater was another radio guy. Older readers can tell those stories, but by the time I came along nobody was bigger than Bill Heywood. He was the morning drive-time man on KOY, historically at 550 on the a.m. dial, the oldest station in Arizona. His voice, as others have said, was velvet. His humor was witty, subtle and gentle. And he spun the popular playlist of the day. His afternoon counterpart, Alan Chilcoat, "sang" the weather. Corporate monopolists such as Clear Channel would never allow such un-focus-group-tested fun today.

Phoenix radio in the 1970s featured "mainstream" rock on KRIZ, KRUX and KUPD. The upstart KDKB played entire albums, was fiercely independent, counter-culture and fighting every Top 40 convention. I recall an easy-listening station but not its letters (KBUZ?); it did have some fairly cool promos, keying off locations in the city and ending with "and you've got the mellow sound of...). Speaking of which, a "mellow rock" station broadcast from the old Ramada downtown, including one of the era's few female jocks. Of course, the stalwarts such as KTAR and KOOL were there, too, as well as a classical station.

The American promise

Editor's note: This is an essay I wrote for the Jan. 8th edition of the Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest magazine (it's one of the last metropolitan newspapers to carry its own magazine):

I overhear many conversations about the economy, but the topper came recently in downtown Seattle. As two well-dressed men discussed the eurozone crisis and high unemployment at home, one said, "I'll tell you what I think it is: It's the beginning of the end of the world."

The severe recession and its staggering aftermath do represent the end of a world, if not the world. We live in the new hard times.

People sense it. A Rasmussen Poll last October found that only 37 percent of likely voters believed that America's best days were ahead. In a Gallup survey, 55 percent of respondents said it was very or somewhat unlikely that today's youth would enjoy a better life than their parents'.

Read more here.

The postman

In the 1980s, when in real life we came very close to nuclear war, David Brin wrote a novel called The Postman. His main character lives through the apocalypse and is wandering in the woods of Oregon where he finds an abandoned mail truck. He puts on the postman's coat for warmth and carries a mail sack to a nearby town in hopes of getting food. But they think he is a real mailman, and latch onto him as the embodied hope that the United States survives and is recovering. The book is far superior to the Kevin Costner film. As Wikipedia summarizes, "Despite the post-apocalyptic scenario, and several action sequences, the book is largely about civilization and symbols."

So does it matter if the U.S. Postal Service, facing persistent deficits, private competition and the prevalence of email, intends to kill 120,000 jobs, eliminate Saturday service and shut down 3,600 post offices in smaller towns? I think it matters profoundly, and not least on the level of civilization and symbols.

As MSNBC's Bob Sullivan makes convincingly clear, the Postal Service's alleged financial trouble is largely the result of an accounting swindle from the Bush administration. This is backed up by a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Laying off 120,000 people in the worst labor market since the Depression is nuts, and will fall especially hard on minorities who already face much higher unemployment.

The new isolationism

Back when students were taught American history, they learned about the isolationism into which the nation retreated after World War I. It did not turn out to be splendid. Nobody would accuse us of that now: We're fighting undeclared wars on three continents, maintaining hundreds of military bases in scores of nations, policing the global commons of trade and oil transit with the U.S. Navy, going to great and disadvantageous lengths to manage China's peaceful rise to global power, trying to keep Israel, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan from starting World War III and carrying all the burdens of soft empire.

Yet we have entered an isolationism every bit as dangerous as its predecessor in the 1920s and 1930s. It is an isolationism of the national mind.

How else can one fully explain the vanishing act of climate change from the national discourse? No other event, not even the latest marital/divorce saga of the newest invented celebrity, will more adversely affect life on this planet short of a major nuclear exchange. But the growing costs and enormous future consequences of climate change are absent from our policies and politics. Meanwhile, one of our two major political parties, the Republicans, has been captured by extremism and madness. But the major media, where most Americans get their "news," won't truthfully discuss it. What happens to such a nation?

Hell on wheels

High-speed rail is dead in America. In Slate, Will Oremus does a postmortem that isn't as clueless as most of what one would find in the mainstream media. It makes some points familiar to my readers: The Obama plan wouldn't have been genuine high-speed rail, except in Florida, merely higher-speed; the funds were insufficient and dolled out helter-skelter across the country rather than focusing on corridors likely to bring success, etc. I would add that the Florida HSR was foolish from the get-go, aimed at a suburbianized, car-crazy state, rather than, say, California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor, where train travel is already popular and in demand.

In any event, this is a catastrophe for the nation.

On a general level, it is another sign that America just can't do great things any longer. It's an emphatic indication of the nihilistic paralysis of our politics, with one of our major political parties captured by extremists whose mission is pure destruction. It highlights yet another blow to the commons. It's a lost economic opportunity. High-speed rail would have created tens of thousands of jobs, for operating and not just construction. It had the potential, properly done, to seed new industries here to build the trains. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure spending that would stimulate an economy that as things stand faces years of high unemployment and stagnation. From an environmental standpoint, rail is much less destructive than cars and moves far more people with a small carbon footprint.

Occupy what?

Let's start out with the Arab Spring. Americans know little about the world, especially a place as complicated as the Middle East. This situation has been made worse as news organizations have cut back foreign bureaus and coverage. Thus the uprisings lumped under the Arab Spring have assumed this simplistic narrative: Arabs have risen up against tyrannical regimes and it's a new day of Jeffersonian democracy. This doesn't fit the facts. For example, the military has ruled Egypt pretty much ever since the British pulled out. Deposing Mubarak, whatever the inspiring protests seemed to show, was business as usual. Mubarak came out of the military; the military reasserted control, a fact underscored by the alleged killing of 13 protesters today. The Persian Spring was quickly and bloodily suppressed by Iranian security forces. To make a sweeping generalization, "democracy" in the Middle East will likely be very different than we imagine, leading to regimes that are anti-American, anti-Israel (and the Israelis do themselves no favors here), and installing Islamic law. Juan Cole has the best handle on the region.

Americans hoping for some good naturally make a tie-in with the Occupy movement. The most apt correlation I can see is that the elites still somehow find a way to maintain control, backed by police and the military. Before "Support the Troops," Americans were historically suspicious of a large standing army, and for good reason. With the ubiquitous police violence against Occupy protesters we have seen the militarization of law enforcement that has troubled older cops for some time. Now the oligarchs have the White House, Congress, courts and robocop law enforcement to do their will.

I am over Occupy, a point I first made in a blog post for the Seattle Times, which attracted 120 comments the last time I looked. Some of these points need to be fleshed out.

President McCain

Contingency is the great trickster of history. Let's assume that wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III had picked a serious running mate (say, Florida's popular Gov. Charlie Crist or even Mitt Romney), turned on the fighter-jock charm and not panicked during the financial panic. And won a close 2008 election. What would have happened?

The EPA would have seen its regulatory depredations reined in, especially new rules for greenhouse gases. Indeed, nothing would have been done to address climate change. Science would have been marginalized in policy in favor of the fossil fuels barons and plutocracy. Drill, baby, drill would have gone on in spite of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. American troops would have been added to Afghanistan and that war expanded, while President George W. Bush's timetable to exit Iraq would have been observed. American quiet wars would have been extended, say, into Yemen, elsewhere in Africa and South America. New military muscle would have been projected against China, say basing Marines in Australia. No effort would have been made to cut military spending that is larger than all other nations combined.

The GOP being the party of the wealthy, the Bush tax cuts would have been extended. And, naturally, Wall Street would have been bailed out of its swindles and made whole on the taxpayers' dime, then sent back to resume its sociopathic behavior. He would have picked a Treasury Secretary and top financial advisers determined to sustain the status quo. McCain's Attorney General would have been a corporate lawyer who would not prosecute a single major bankster, much less the war criminals of the previous administration. At the pleadings of Republican, as well as Democratic, governors, a McCain administration would have spent billions filling the holes in state budgets. Otherwise, his answer to the huge demand hole of the Great Recession would have been more tax cuts and spending largely on highway projects. Corporate profits would reach records, but middle-class Americans would see their prospects further dim.

Oh, wait. All that has happened anyway under the presidency of Barack Obama.

Crisis of legitimacy

The best takedown I've read so far of the Joe Paterno/Penn State crime comes from Jim Kunstler. He ends with something I have pondered more than once: "Every new day that dawns lately gives further proof that we are a wicked people who deserve to be punished." As someone who grew up on the razzle-dazzle years of Frank Kush's Sun Devils, playing in the disrespected Western Athletic Conference and having teams such as Penn State, Michigan and Ohio State get all the attention, I never bought into the deification of Paterno. But who would have thought the fall would come from this. Child rape, a cover-up that lasted for years and more rotting shoes left to drop. As I wrote about Bishop O'Brien, he of the hit-and-run should-have-been vehicular homicide, crisis reveals character. The revelations continue to redefine disillusionment.

The study of history makes one wary of claiming something new or unprecedented. Monsters have always roamed in our midst. But the rotting corruption in nearly every important national institution is unlike anything I've come across in our history. In the American exceptionalism argument, I tend to come down on the side of exceptionalism, but today what makes us extraordinary is our criminality, ignorance and decadence. D.H. Lawrence wrote, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer." Maybe so. But it was once capable of grand and good things, especially through the collective institutions it built. No more.

Look anywhere. The Air Force can't be trusted to handle the remains of dead soldiers brought home, from wars our leaders lied us into and maintain and expand for the profit of defense contractors, as well as to lock up oil supplies because they won't come clean with us about future scarcity. The Great Recession is a product of corruption taken to stratospheric levels.

A new day in AZ?

The evil that men do lives after them. — Shakespeare

I don't mean to sun on the parade. I really don't. Nobody is happier to be wrong about Russell Pearce's recall election than me. He becomes the first legislator in Arizona history to be successfully recalled. But what does it mean? In the flush of victory Tuesday night, state Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who was my legislator when I lived in Willo and is the smartest person at the capitol, tweeted, "Voters sent a message tonight: focus on practical, common sense solutions to our state's challenges. Stop the ultra-partisan nonsense." What does that mean? My common-sense solutions include commuter rail, passenger rail between Phoenix and Tucson (and LA), land-use reform to focus on the existing urban footprints, a serious economic-development strategy, raising the revenue needed to support a populous, urbanized state, funding universities and K-12 education, etc. To much of Arizona, common-sense solutions mean more guns and less taxes.

When I asked Sinema if the election of Jerry Lewis would mean he might be more moderate and work across the aisle, her response was more pragmatic: "We're not sure yet. One must be judged by performance not campaign speeches. Here's hoping Rs moderate instead of 'double down'! ". Indeed.

Pearce may be gone, but the edifice he created lives on: SB 1070, Jan Brewer as governor who's formed a political action committee to "fight against illegal immigration and the new federal health care law nationwide," an extreme state Legislature owned by the NRA and the Real Estate Industrial Complex, and copycat laws nationwide, including the most extreme on in Alabama. Will any of that change with Pearce's recall? Or will he just be back again, running for another office, whether it's the state Senate or Maricopa County Sheriff when the Badged Ego decides to step down. Oh, yeah, in the "new Arizona" on the morning after, Joe Arpaio remains more popular than ever. Jon Kyl is blocking any progress in the "super Congress." Wealthy Republican John Sidney McCain III keeps his incoherent/bought-and-paid for blather. Terry Goddard is still defeated in the governor's race, an election season of madness that turned on the fulcrum of hatred built by Russell Pearce.

Say you want a devolution?

Remember when the Republicans were "the party of ideas"? Not birtherism, hastening the End of Days, denying the settled scientific facts of climate change or that the earth is 4,000 years old. No, this was the fumes, at least, of the intellectual conservatism that was built by William F. Buckley Jr. It was a philosophy not inured to facts or changing circumstances; indeed, it celebrated its suppleness compared with the rigid ideologies of the left. To be sure, it co-existed with reaction, racism and paranoia, but it was better than what we see in today's GOP presidential "debates." One idea was devolution, grounded not only in the proposition that the federal government had far exceeded its constitutional limits, but that it had become too big to be effective in many areas.

The answer: Devolve power to the states. Thus, if California wanted to have stringent environmental laws, for example, that was up to Californians. If Mississippi or Arizona envied the non-existent protections of air and water in the Third World, it was the business of those states, with no mandates coming from Washington. The same could be true for old-age pensions, health care, business regulation and subsidies, etc. etc. Let there be 50 laboratories of democracy.

This elegant idea faces practical problems. From the Progressive era through the Great Society, from Theodore to Franklin Roosevelt and beyond, most Americans realized that big challenges and needs could only be fulfilled by the federal government, with its size and power. Only the federal government could stand up against big business — this was a Progressive article of faith. Nor is it new. We tried the Articles of Confederation and they didn't work out well. Hamilton always argued for a robust central government, and although Jefferson is presented as his philosophical opposite, he didn't hesitate to employ federal power beyond the strict wording of the Constitution when it suited him, as in the Louisiana Purchase. The Confederacy started out to break away from the "tyranny" of the central government in Washington, yet Jeff Davis ended up creating every bit as powerful a (con)federal government in Richmond. There had never been a continental democracy before in history, and the American experience shows the need for a strong central government and a Constitution that can adapt.

Occupy

What is Occupy? According to the Occupy Wall Street Web site, "We are our demands. #OWS is conversation, organization, and action focused on ending the tyranny of the 1%. On Saturday we marched in solidarity against corrupt banking systems, against war, and against foreclosure." To Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, the protests transcend "left vs. right," despite the efforts of right-wing provocateurs: Instead, it is "a populist and wholly non-partisan protest against bailouts, theft, insider trading, self-dealing, regulatory capture and the market-perverting effect of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks." Justin Elliott of Salon writes that you can't understand the movement without also understanding its "radically decentralized structure."

OK.

One thing that's clear is that the various Occupy protests have showcased the militarization of law enforcement, something that has long troubled my older cop friends. Billions of your tax dollars have gone into equipping a nationwide paramilitary force to protect the "homeland" from terrorists — and conveniently from citizens who might be seeking to change the status quo, even through peaceful assembly. A friend emailed me an evocative photo (above, taken by Mauro Whiteman for the Downtown Devil) from Occupy Phoenix showing a phalanx of robocop-looking  PPD officers confronting sitting demonstrators. Cal Lash, a distinguished retired officer and assistant to two chiefs of police, was among those deeply troubled. We all should be.

He is (not) The One

David Axelrod's soothing words and the desire of the media for a horse race notwithstanding, I don't see how President Hoover can win re-election. He won't win Scott Walker's Wisconsin, nor destitute-crazy Ohio, nor "I got mine" geezer Florida that elected Marco Rubio and Rick Scott. Pennsylvania is rightly styled as Alabama sandwiched between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, so do the math. Virginia and North Carolina? Forget it.

As I have written before, Barack Obama does not deserve a second term. Two-term presidencies should be rare, not the rule. The wasted and toxic second terms of Bill Clinton (repealing Glass-Steagall, for example) and George W. Bush are instructive. And while Mr. Obama was a gifted orator, his election the first time was also a vote against Bush, against the recklessness of a John McCain who would put Sarah Palin on a national ticket, and, in a fleeting moment of clarity, against the GOP, The Party That Wrecked America. It won't happen again.

Crazy is an easier default setting for an ignorant empire in decline. So we must begin to consider the Republican field.

The continuing crisis

Before Rogue resumes its regular commentary schedule next week, here are a few things that couldn't help but distract me from book-writing (and this was before I saw the New York Times' shocking story today on deforestation and climate change). Our perpetual state of war continues, moving more into Yemen and Somalia with secret CIA and DOD drone bases. Now American citizens can be targeted, without due process, for hellfire missiles. And while we may say al-Awlaki had it coming, one must wonder if hellfire missiles along with the entire security apparatus erected since 9/11/01 will not eventually be used in the streets and even cul-de-sacs of America. We're still leaving Iraq on George W. Bush's timetable. Did we "win"? Tom Ricks writes that somebody did, and it wasn't us, except for the "us" that's involved in the Military-Industrial Complex and D.C. real estate. We have become such a moral beacon to the world that Iran cited Gitmo in holding those U.S. "hikers" in solitary.

The economy is worse now than a month ago, and more analysts, economists and commentators are realizing a point I made some time ago: We're in depression territory. We don't have to be, but the cowardice of the Obama administration combined with the nihilism of the Republicans, all under the umbrella of the quiet coup of moneyed interests, have left us paralyzed and bewildered. The Occupy Wall Street movement is noble but small and mostly ignored by the corporate media. True, if the same numbers were Tea Party members, they would garner nationwide coverage.

Friends keep telling me of the coming working-class revolt (Mark Thoma writes about such here). I'll believe it when I see it. Civil insurrection is certainly likely as America continues its downward course, but it will play out with minorities burning their own neighborhoods and the whites and other better-offs retreating even deeper into suburban apartheid. The Revolution in a nation of dolts could only be caused by taking away television, video games, smart phones and cheap gasoline. Then, to the barricades!

9/11

Some of the best reading (worth your time), ten years later:

NEW: A nation that no longer knows itself || Washington Post

NEW: Mission accomplished — for bin Laden || Talton/Seattle Times

Ten jobs that barely existed on 9/10/01 || Wired

Sept. 11th: The day that never ends || Washington Post

Can the United States move beyond the narcissism of 9/11? || The Guardian

Putting the question to Dick Cheney || Harpers

The true cost of 9/11: A weaker America || Joe Stiglitz in Slate

Men don't read

Come to one of my book signings and 200 people might be in the crowd (or five people). Except for my de-facto bodyguard, maybe only a handful will be men. On a good night. Men don't read anymore. This is one of the most frightening of the many express-elevator-to-the-dark-ages changes that have happened to America in my lifetime. Of course there are outliers, on this blog for example, or the new head librarian in Seattle, a man who said he fell in love with libraries as a fourth grader. Men read technical manuals and comic books. But the well-read American male of the past is mostly gone. Although all Americans are reading less — one survey found that the typical citizen reads only four books a year and one in four reads none at all — men are the biggest drop outs. They account for only 20 percent of the fiction market.

I can't imagine living in this mental poverty. When I turned nine years old, one of the first things I did was get a card at the Phoenix Public Library (the earliest age one could qualify). Before that, the one pure joy of Kenilworth School was the well-stocked library. I grew up around readers and books. My great aunt had an especially impressive library, and it made up for otherwise dull visits to her acreage on Seventh Avenue. My childhood reading wasn't highbrow: I was especially entranced by C.B. Colby's military books (Our Space Age Navy, etc.). But I read. These included comic books, too, but by age ten or so, comics were boring (not so for people today). Books have taken me places I would otherwise never have visited, from Plato's Athens and hell with Dante, to the Battle of Berlin. Books changed my mind and made it changeable. I never intended to be a journalist or author. I just assumed that experience was one a well-rounded person should have. Books used to be sexy. Really desirable women expected well-read men, and reading to one's lover is a sensual delight.

No longer for most. Aside from the polls, anecdotal evidence comes my way constantly: My son doesn't read books...My husband never reads...I don't read books...Never did like books. Is it any wonder that this has accompanied our society's collapse into widespread anti-intellectualism and aggressive ignorance (because to understand that, one would have read, say, Richard Hofstadter).

'Entitlements'

The first modern social security program was begun by that notorious bleeding heart Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s. With it, the Iron Chancellor successfully undercut the socialists and communists, kept peace with the working class and helping Germany become a major power until he was dismissed by Kaiser Bill and the fuse was lit on the bloody 20th century. American Social Security began in the New Deal after a long fight with reactionaries and they've never let go of their dream of destroying it. Social Security is one of those "entitlements" we keep hearing about from our leaders in politics and business, as well as in the media, that must be "reformed."

I don't know about you, but I've worked full time since I was seventeen-and-a-half, paying for the Greatest Generation's Social Security. It is hardly an "entitlement," a word loaded with welfare for the undeserving. It is a social insurance program where younger generations pay for the retirement of older generations, and it's worked fine for 70 years. But no small amount of oldsters now want to break this foundation of the social compact. They got theirs. Now the dastardly baby boomers will "break the system." Well, no. Social Security is fine and needs, at best, modest modifications. Unfortunately, even President Hoover, the supposed leader of the supposed Democratic Party, accepts the premise that broad "entitlement reform" is a sine qua non of fixing America.

Tell me how this ends?

So went the famous 2003 quote from Gen. David Petraeus concerning the Iraq war. More about him later. But as the Great Disruption once again sends us further down the mountainside, it's an apt question for the American experiment in self-government, the economy, our society.

One way it doesn't end is with a great backlash against the extremism that now controls the Republican Party. Wisconsin gave its best shot with fierce protests and recall elections but failed. Reactionary Republicans still hold power in the home of Robert La Follette. When this week's recall contests were over, it was clear that corporate money will have its way. Not only that, but majorities in suburbia, which is most of the country, will vote GOP no matter whether this is in their economic or civic interests. Whatever the polls say about Republican unpopularity, not much will change in the next election. For that to happen, America would need a viable opposition party.

It doesn't end with President Hoover "finding his voice." The listless recitation of pleas for balanced approaches and bipartisanship we heard on Monday, as the stock market was panicking, is his voice. He is weak. He is passive. He is a creature of the Robert Rubin/bankster wing of the Democratic Party, which shares the dream of "reforming entitlements." He will not fight for the middle class, for jobs, for fair play. I think of the late Jeff MacNelly's brutally on-target political cartoons of Jimmy Carter, who became smaller and smaller in the presidential chair.

Depression 2.0

As I write, the Dow is down 350 points and the stock market has given up all its gains for the year. Never fear: The rich have already moved into safe havens — and those with some exposure are a little less rich. Everyone seems to agree that "the game is up," as one financial analyst told me. But which game? That America and Europe are "broke" and must dismantle their "lavish public sectors and entitlements"? Or that crony capitalism, imperial overstretch, failure to invest in education and job-creating infrastructure by the richest nation in history is the losing game? The former have won the argument with barely any resistance from President Hoover and the Democrats. The results will be a catastrophe. The Tea Partiers are cleverly, or stupidly, claiming this austerity doesn't go far enough. That way, when it fails, they can claim victory and demand more ideological purity, rather like the apologists for Soviet communism.

We may not be looking at another recession. We may be in a Depression. For many, if not most, Americans, the recovery was chimerical. Their troubles began in the '00s, with stagnant incomes and the worst record of job creation since the real President Hoover. When the housing bubble crashed and the stock market followed, the were financially ruined. Now 24 million are unemployed or under-employed. And that was all before the federal government embarked on an austerity plan that might please Robert Rubin but otherwise guarantees more recession.

So how will Depression 2.0 be different from the Great Depression?

Go down hard

As the planet warms faster than the most fearful scientists predicted, as peak oil stares us grimly in the face, as the full faith and credit of the United States government is put at risk in order to bring down that (black) man in the White House, as the middle class craters and all the good in the America in which I grew up is looted, profaned and destroyed, McDonald's will make Happy Meals more healthy. The right moves in disciplined lock-step, seeking and winning a few large victories. The "left," such as it is, remains distracted by innumerable enthusiasms. So the health Nazis win one and gay people can marry in New York. Smokers, but not extremists, have been made second-class citizens. What does this matter compared with the real game that is taking place horrifically before our cow-like stares?

As expected, President Hoover and the corrupt/enervated Democratic Party gave away any tax increases in the debt-ceiling stand-off. The results of this "balanced approach" will be years, if not decades, of economic and social destruction. The Republicans have a partner in their cherished ambition to dismantle Social Security, the Great Society and the New Deal in the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As with the 24 million un- or underemployed Americans in a nation of 301 million, the damage will begin at the margins and not be fully felt for years.

The dysfunction in Washington may be felt much sooner, if the debt ceiling is not raised. Count on the fearsome deficit and debt to go away the moment that President Romney or Bachmann is sworn in. And depend on the right to have ready-made explanations for the chaos and destruction that are now guaranteed whether we get a deal or not. Their superstition and dogma will call for even more government cuts. Unions and public workers are the problem. Business isn't hiring because of too many regulations. Climate change is a hoax. All this will be dutifully reported by the media as if it is a perfectly legitimate response.

Eating our future

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. — Franklin Roosevelt

It's true I give a good speech. What can I do? — Barack Obama

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism. — Herbert Hoover

 

We do not need clairvoyance to predict the general outcome from the protracted and ugly debt-ceiling negotiations between President Hoover and the House Republicans. This is because, contrary to the the mainstream media narrative, Washington is not composed of equal parts of hardcore conservatives, hardcore liberals and centrists, with the only trick being for them to get along and "stop acting like children."

In reality, one of the two major parties has become totally captured by extremist ideology that would make William F. Buckley turnabout his sailboat and head for France. The other party, the Democrats, are leaderless, captured by corporate interests and lacking any major liberal lions. Liberalism is essentially dead in America as far as governing is concerned, a development with far-reaching and unexamined consequences. Over all this, and interlocked with the right-wing machine, is unprecedented corporate control of the government, from the statehouses to Washington, D.C. More than $50 million has been spent this year alone in lobbying Congress to further weaken regulation of Wall Street and the big banks.

Finally, President Hoover is not willing to fight, much less for liberalism or for the American middle class. He seems desperate to grasp at virtually every "deal" that floats daily before his finely chiseled face. The latest, according to Talking Points Memo, is that good ole "grand bargain" that would involve massive spending cuts "set in stone," with maybe "revenues some time in the future." Whatever the final settlement, this is the trajectory. It's time to consider how this will play out.

William Howard Taft Obama

I have reached the point where I say enough. Would Ronald Reagan be sitting here? I've reached my limit. This may bring my presidency down, but I will not yield on this.

So said the president in Tuesday's "stormy" debt-ceiling meeting with Republican leaders, according to news reports. No, Ronald Reagan wouldn't be sitting there. He would have already worked out a deal with his fellow Irishman, Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill. The debt ceiling was raised repeatedly and uneventfully during the Gipper's deficit binge. Will Mr. Obama yield? Of course. He's already surrendered to the fraudulent assumptions of the right-wing radicals: That government "must tighten its belt" during the worst economy since the Depression, that spending and the dreaded deficit/debt are our biggest problem, even that Medicare and Social Security must be on the chopping block.

Some of you are offended when I refer to him as President Hoover, the self-made man who started as a progressive but became trapped by his gratitude of reaching the elite and his own mental limitations at a time of tectonic change. Perhaps you're right. Other examples come to mind: Jimmy Carter without the Southern Baptist sanctimony. And William Howard Taft.

Peak Crazy

If you missed the news, the new San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being built in China as modules to be assembled in California. Fourteen million Americans are officially unemployed and the U-6 (real) rate of unemployment in the Golden State is 22 percent. The project is, according to the New York Times, "part of China’s continual move up the global economic value chain — from cheap toys to Apple iPads to commercial jetliners — as it aims to become the world’s civil engineer." The original Bay Bridge was built during the Great Depression by Americans, employing thousands and, along with other infrastructure investments of the era, stimulating numerous American industries. We used to do these things and do them well. But no more. We buy plastic tubs from China at Wal-Mart to fill with other stuff we buy from China at Wal-Mart while working, if we're lucky, at stagnant- or low-wage jobs. We're crazy.

The last space shuttle mission is scheduled to begin Friday. After that, we cede space low-earth orbit to the Russians, who I guess won the space race after all, and more important exploration to China and India. In my lifetime, we put men on the moon, not because it was easy but because it was hard. NASA has been neglected since the Nixon administration, with the inadequate shuttles our only manned program. Now, nothing. We're told the private sector will take over. And it will do this...how? Why? Corporate America is sitting on its profits, not hiring Americans, not investing in America. I don't doubt some or another space boondoggle using federal corporate welfare, but Boeing is not going to take us to Mars. Where's the profit margin? We once did great things. Now we're crazy.

The Republicans are playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun on the debt ceiling. President Hoover is busy, as usual, negotiating against himself, begging for a few hundred billion in tax hikes while conceding trillions in budget cuts. These will only slow the economy at a time when the federal government should be aggressively investing in infrastructure (and not "roads and bridges"). Last I checked, Mr. Hoover has put Social Security on the table. Who needs John Boehner when the nominally Democratic president will give the social compact the coup de grace by himself. The nation sits cow-like as this transpires. The richest nation in history is "broke," we're told. Taxes can't be raised. It would hurt those precious "job creators," even though the Bush/Obama tax cuts have been an abysmal, demonstrable failure. Average Americans vote to protect the interests of the oligarchs. How else to explain it but...crazy.

His to lose?

I've tweeted Al Gore's must-read "Climate of Denial" several times. This eloquent piece goes in depth about the media's complicity in keeping climate change out of the degraded public square. Yet nobody re-tweeted it. People have stopped listening to the former vice president (even as his vile successor's policies remain in place). Yet I wonder if there's anything more important than this for progressives.

Gay marriage? A historic victory in New York, but the cultural right has been losing this one for some time. Wall Street contributions helped, and why not — gays are a very lucrative demographic. Some of Seattle's anarchists trashed Capitol Hill early Sunday, ahead of the Pride Parade, to protest the co-option of gay rights by commercial culture. So it's an easy gimme by the oligarchy, while it continues to destroy the planet. Should climate change be for the left what "tax cuts" are for the right?

President Obama is happy to let it lie. He's the best Republican president since George H.W. Bush. Yet he faces re-election in 2012 and I don't buy the meme that he's a shoe-in because of the craziness of the right.

Rules of engagement

Last night, I finished the late Alan Bullock's magnificent book, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. It's a reminder that no matter how much one has studied a topic, he or she can have vast new landscapes opened by the best historians as tour-guides. The book was completed just as the Soviet empire that Stalin built was falling apart, and the moment was marked by the greatest hope. Yet Bullock also reminded us of the bloody paths that contingency can create, particularly when broad social, economic and cultural forces and destabilization ("history from below") are harnessed by evil genius ("history from above"). The book ends with a deeply moving coda of promise. But that comes after a thousand pages examining the two greatest mass murderers in history; worse, men who could move nations to do their killing.

I think about all this as we sit seemingly becalmed, summer opening. Americans could be forgiven a moment of desire for, as Frank Fukuyama put it, the end of history after the long standoff of the Cold War. But this is not 1989-90. Now we are a nation of simpletons in denial. Thus, President Obama could make a speech about Afghanistan where the media report it as if we're actually leaving this hopeless morass. He can say, "it's time to focus on nation-building here at home" but he lacks the conviction to build even one — just one — segment of true high-speed rail. We treat Randian ravings as serious policy options and allow the cruelest policies to be passed by those who also brandish their "Christian" values at every speech. One of our two major political parties' platforms is essentially based on returning America to the 1880s, without a frontier and with more than 300 million people in a complex society.

As I write this morning, I see headlines for stories saying the United States and its allies will "release 60 million barrels of oil to offset supply disruptions caused by unrest in Libya." And presumably also to help keep gas prices down for the trip to Wal-Mart (recent acquisition: the U.S. Supreme Court). And they note oil prices fell. I want to scream, "America uses 20 million barrels of oil every day and China is fast catching up, you fools! Prices are falling because of fears of a new recession!" But, in a calmer state, I think, maybe it's me. I don't understand the new rules of engagement:

Prudish please, we're Americans

Toward the end of my time on the ambulance, we got a young rookie whose last name was Weiner, pronounced like the hot dog, the vulgar grade-school slang or the congressman from New York. Into this den of testosterone, black humor and hazing landed poor EMT Weiner. As "Buford" said at the time, "If he were smart, he'd at least pronounce it VI-ner..." For all I know, EMT Weiner went on to become a Nobel physicist. And we know, dear lord, how we know, about Rep. Anthony Weiner. He was sending women online photos of himself garbed only in what my parents' generation would term his skivvies.

Paralysis in Washington as the nation hurtles toward potential default. Fourteen million unemployed and the economy slowing, again. Wars without end — indeed, a new one in Libya. Further consolidation of power by the Oligarchy, where Elizabeth Warren and a (real) Nobel laureate Fed nominee are left twisting in the wind by a cowardly President Hoover. The national security state grows unchecked, no matter that bin Laden has assumed room temperature and been tossed into the Indian Ocean. Climate change consequences before our eyes in eastern Arizona. Further warnings of the Great Disruption with OPEC owning up to the fact that it can't fill the gap between demand and output this year. Posh! It's all about Weiner's weiner.

Some might say, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, we can enjoy a mini-sex scandal involving a Washington poltroon while still addressing real issues. And that might be true for Rogue readers and a minority elsewhere. I'm not so sure about the rest of America, the place where a majority of citizens always scores so embarrassingly low on basic history and civics questions, and watches on average 34 hours of television a week. I didn't want to write about Weiner's weiner. But let me be, well, straightforward (because, as Weiner has shown again, the coverup is worse than the "crime"). The media carpet-bombing is not a coincidence. Keeping Americans ignorant and constantly distracted, preferably by sex, is an essential part of taking away our republic. With Weiner, it will help deflect voter buyer's remorse over the Republican House. Then there's the central contradiction in our national madness: A deep prudishness combined with an insatiable appetite for everything sexual.

The fire this time

As I write, the Wallow fire in eastern Arizona is at 607 square miles — larger than the city of Phoenix — and zero containment. I haven't been to Eager or Springerville in more than 30 years, but Google Earth confirms that this is still a part of the state that has not been consumed by the Growth Machine. All of Apache County has less than 72,000 people and grew only 3 percent from 2000 to 2010. It is magic country.

Unlike the Rodeo-Chedeski fire, which consumed 732 square miles along the Mogollon Rim, this doesn't appear to have the added risk of hundreds of tract houses built amid pine trees on land made private by secretive federal land swaps. It also lacks Valinda Jo Elliott, the accidental arsonist, who stalked away from a fight with her boyfriend carrying the essentials for the wilderness that every Boy Scout learns to carry: Cigarettes, a lighter, flip-flops and a towel. And be sure to light a "signal fire" in dry, windy country when you get lost. She is the perfect Arizona voter, if not member of the Legislature.

This is pure tragedy. It is also a taste of the future.

Rome or Weimar?

You know me: I am more of the school that sometimes history rhymes (Mark Twain) than history repeats itself. Nevertheless, as the Great Disruption continues and, as a conservative commenter wrote on my Seattle Times blog, "How's that hopey-changey thing working out for you," we are required to take stock. We face a mammoth debt and deficit, mostly because of the Bush/Obama tax cuts, the wars and the Great Recession. Speaking of which, no major criminal prosecutions have resulted from the greatest assemblage of frauds in history leading the world financial system to the brink of collapse. In fact, the banksters, hedge-fund boyz and other Wall Street playerz are doing better than ever. The 14 million "officially" unemployed, along with tens of millions of others, not so much. The middle class is imploding as the social compact is badly damaged. President Hoover, like his namesake, has surrounded himself with agents of the plutocracy — the difference being that the real Herbert Hoover never would have remained embroiled in two simultaneous wars and ruinous defense spending.

Every day the question grows louder for those paying attention: What the hell is happening to us?

Cullen Murphy, an editor at Vanity Fair, took it head on with his book, Are We Rome? As a review in Salon put it, "He argues that America, like Rome, is threatened by self-inflicted wounds — in particular our mania for privatization, our fading belief in government and the ensuing decay of civic society, our vast and unsustainable military, our ignorance of the outside world and our short-sighted attitude toward immigration and assimilation."

Palin in Scottsdale

Just when we thought the Arizona Freak Show couldn't get any more grotesque, Sarah Palin buys a $1.7 million house near Hayden Road and Dynamite "Boulevard" in north Scottsdale. Apparently the title release came through a robo-signed (fraudulent) procedure. The Kooks write better real-life material than I could invent. The New York Times did a whimsical piece on "neighborly advice for the Palins," including wear sunscreen and watch for rattlesnakes. But it made north Scottsdale sound like a real community, which it's not. In fact, she'll fit right in with the white-apartheid culture there, where people don't want to know their neighbors, fear going south of Bell Road, shout down opposing views in city council meetings and live somewhere else for most of the year. The shocker would have been if she had bought a hundred-year-old bungalow in the Phoenix historic districts.

She will find simpatico "neighbors" who believe the banking panic was caused by the socialist Community Reinvestment Act, that America is under siege from Mexican immigration, which somehow just happened despite the resistance by the God-fearing Anglos, and the Patriot Act is too politically correct. Her motorcade can take her to outer-belt chain book stores for signings. Maybe Russell Pearce can get an audience. Maybe she can get an audience with the Badged Ego. One must wonder what Sen. John McCain, R-Fox News, must think. From the authoritative reporting of the presidential campaign, it seems the two didn't get along. McCain is rarely in the state anyway. Not for nothing did daughter Meghan flee to a bachelorette pad in west Hollywood.

Will Palin run for Jon Kyl's Senate seat? She could win it, no question. She's with her base now, far more than in Alaska where her half term as governor left much bad blood. Will she use Arizona as a base from which to launch a presidential campaign for 2012? Why should we care? Alas, we must. She is able to galvanize the white-right in a way no other Republican can. The fact that she has no accomplishments and plays up her arrogant ignorance makes no difference (here's a recent example). Far from being a liability in today's America, it is an asset.

Tornado country

I taught at a small college in Oklahoma years ago, then started my journalism "career" there. One of the first things I learned is that Oklahoma, along with Singapore, has the most intense thunderstorms in the world along with their attendant tornadoes. Nearly every day in the spring and early summer, they form atop New Mexico's spookily beautiful Caprock bluffs and then move east. So many days I would see a black line along the horizon in the morning. In the middle of the day, the darkness might be so complete that the streetlights would come on. Tornado watches were routine; warnings and sirens things to dread. Drenching rain, golfball-sized hail and then violent wind were commonplace during the season. People watched carefully for the formation of a funnel — if they could see the sky in the darkness and rain. Major damage was more rare in the rolling woods of the eastern part of the state; west of I-35, watch out. The movie Twister, for all of Helen Hunt's considerable charms, doesn't even begin to capture the terrifying majesty of an Oklahoma storm.

All the old-timers had Tornado Alley lore. About pieces of straw driven through telephone poles. About the freak contingency of the storms: How one side of a street might be leveled and the other look as if nothing at all were amiss. About cars picked up and put down yet the occupants lived. And the little towns that once existed before being swept off the map. Every town has a section that is prone to get hit. Soon you learned your own storm wisdom, such as the strange color of the sky after a twister-laden front had moved past. Before coming to Arizona Territory in the late 19th century, my great-grandparents lived in Indian Territory, the eastern half of what became the state of Oklahoma. A tornado was my grandmother's earliest memory: Of being carried into a shelter before the monster leveled the little settlement, killing one of her sisters.

I think about this in the aftermath of the Joplin, Mo., tornado. The region suffers through the occasional bad year, where the most intense level of tornadoes can even destroy brick buildings. The so-called "super outbreak" of 1974 is the prime example, where 148 twisters struck 13 states on April 3 and 4. There was Terrible Tuesday in 1979, when an EF-4 — reportedly five-miles wide at one point — lethally struck the suburban edge of Wichita Falls, Texas. It was part of a storm that ravaged the Red River Valley, coming way too close to the little college town where I lived. Now we're living through another super outbreak year: Nearly 1,000 tornadoes and 500 dead. Or we're entering something different.

The new thought police

The Kooks have caught up with me. The trolls come with the position of columnist and blogger. Still, and even after all those years at the Republic, I'm still struck by their level of vitriol. Someone is never merely misinformed, misguided, or holds a position worth debating on a complex issue. No, to these folks, one is not merely "stupid" and "ignorant," but acting in bad faith and allied with evil forces if not one himself. They learn this from talk radio and Fox "News," of course, and some right-wing organizations actually pay people to post talking-point comments. What's most arresting is that they don't merely want to disagree — they want you fired.

On a recent innocuous economy blog post, I got this comment: "I just read the rest of the comments, I'm glad I'm not the only one that has figured out that Jon Talton is a total idiot... Mr. or Mrs. Editor... This has been going on for a long time now, why is he still here??? Do you not read any of his articles??? He's as white and male as it gets you can fire him in a heartbeat and you won't even get sued..." Again, the rocks come with the farm and the trolls come with the blog. I'm not the shy and retiring kind, and newspapers once didn't want this with their columnists. Columnists run a range of opinions, including many from the right. So why would you want to take away a person's job because you disagree with him? Why would you want to do it in this economy particularly? I paid the price for antagonizing the powerful and Kooky in Phoenix, even when mine was one dissenting voice in an otherwise right-leaning, boosterish newspaper. Take his job. Shut him up. It's a fascinating phenomenon.

So I kind of feel for Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and presidential candidate. On Meet the Press, he was asked about the Paul Ryan plan to replace Medicare with vouchers. Gingrich responded: "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering.  I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate." He added that the Ryan plan "is too big a jump.  I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options, not one where you suddenly impose upon the — I don't want to — I'm against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change." The attacks from the right began immediately.

The Giffords test

NASA keeps putting off the final launch of space shuttle Endeavor, so who knows when it will finally lift off. It's a media event because Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived a grievous injury, flew to Cape Canaveral to witness the first attempt which was scrubbed. President Obama was another guest. I'm sure she'll try to return when her husband and his crew finally make it off the pad. And America — and Arizona — have written an inspiring, inoffensive narrative of the affair: Plucky heroine fights back from adversity to see her heroic spouse fly into space. What happens next? Is she, some ask, the natural replacement for Sen. Jon Kyl when he retires?

Little of this is real, but it's a test of our collective blast-off from reality. No one but family and close friends really know how she's recovering from such a traumatic injury. There's no chance that a Democratic congresswoman from Pima County who barely secured re-election could win the statewide Senate race in an Arizona that is one of the reddest places in America.

Most horrendous in this Lifetime movie version of events is the Soviet-style airbrushing of the most important fact: Giffords was the target of an assassination attempt that grew directly out of the extreme hate- and gun-filled rhetoric of the Tea Party election season in 2009 and 2010. Almost immediately after the shooting, which claimed six lives and injured 12 others, the rewriting of history began. Why, this was just the work of a deranged individual. So what if his reading included Ayn Rand? And what possibly could be the connection between Jared Lee Loughner and, say, repeated death threats to Giffords, the widely televised gun-toters at the president's appearance at the Phoenix Convention Center, Sarah Palin's gun sights on Democratic candidates (including Giffords), lines such as "Don't retreat, reload" (Palin) and "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous..." (Michele Bachmann), and the weakest gun laws in the country. Nothing to see here, move along.

Moronistan

I've been reading too much lately about Stalin and Hitler. Nobody, least of all Marx, thought communism could succeed in such a backward country as Russia. Lenin woke up too late to Stalin's menace (not that Leninism didn't inevitably lead to mass murder), and Trotsky sulked in his tent while the Man of Steel took over. And how could the civilization that gave us Bach, Beethoven, Goethe and Mann also have voted in, and widely supported, the deranged former corporal who would shed so much blood? We look back and say, "Of, course!"

I think about all this as President Hoover, apparently under pressure from a serial failed businessman with a bad comb-over, released the long-form of his birth certificate, hoping to stop the birther "silliness." It won't. Nearly half of the members of the Party of Lincoln don't believe the president was born in the United States. Does anyone think this would have traction, much less enough to cause the president to sully the dignity of his office by addressing it, if his name were Barry O'Bama and he were white? But with any Democrat in the highest office, it would be something. When George W. Bush won the 2000 election under highly questionable circumstances, Al Gore was a class act and most Democrats went along with a radical Bush agenda despite the close division of the electorate. But with Republicans, the very idea of a Democrat as president is illegitimate, any progressive or liberal idea is accursed. Here's a Tweet from Arizona state Sen. Jack Harper, R.-Surprise: "If Jon's socialistic friends gets our guns, will they turn 2 communism 2 redistribute the wealth? #UnitedNations" No, he's wasn't kidding.

The nation that indeed brought a "new order of the ages," built the transcontinental railroad, landed men on the moon and made countless contributions to the arts and sciences now can't do anything but hope for a new housing boom and cheap gas. Our exceptionalism has devolved into ignorance, hate, denial, swindles and madness. We have made a retrograde move into television-addled peasantry, into self-inflicted serfdom. Many Americans believe things every bit as absurd, and dangerous, as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For them, "the stab in the back" of 1918 is illegal immigrants, taxes and people of color having babies. Who knows where this will lead? Only 25,000 Bolsheviks carried off a revolution in a nation of about 160 million. Is all we're lacking the right scheming Georgian or failed painter to take us to full darkness? Will those surviving will look back and say, "Of course"?

Go down easy

Gonna come a time when we all gonna hafta ante up. Ante up and kick in like men. LIKE MEN! — John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) in the movie Glory.

It may not matter that the polls are against Paul Ryan in his attempt to replace Medicare with meager vouchers. He and the Republicans in Congress are setting the terms of the debate: Roll back the Great Society. Roll back the New Deal. Weaken and eliminate the foundations of the social compact. President Hoover is a weak tribune for such a battle. What "middle ground" will he find in his journey of compromise and community organizing in the far right of center, aided by the guidance of his tax-dodging economic mandarin Jeffrey Immelt? It's astounding that any of this is even happening. Yet it is.

Want to deal with the debt and deficit? Stop the wars. Pull out of most of those 150 countries where we have a military presence. Stop the corporate welfare, especially subsidizing fossil fuel extraction. Raise taxes on individuals. Go after the tax evasion of the big corporations. Tax the gambling on Wall Street. Invest in productivity-enhancing and job-creating infrastructure, universities, research and public education. If  big business wants to get cute and threaten to leave, or hold a capital strike, fine. Play like the Chinese: Want entry to America's market (which is still the largest and richest in the world)? Play by our rules or else. Even that wouldn't be necessary if we returned to the checks and balances of healthy American capitalism. Anyway, do all this before you talk about putting your Grover Norquist drowning hands on my Social Security and Medicare (which, by the way, are not entitlements).

None of that's going to happen, for reasons we've discussed many times on this blog, including this recent post. So the question before us is, what next? What happens when the GOP gets control of the Congress and White House in 2012 or 2016 and is able to implement the Randian vision already in play in places such as New Jersey and Wisconsin?

Inflection points

It is no secret that a faction of the Republican Party has always dreamed of rolling back the part of the New Deal that survived FDR's eventual reconciliation with big business, as well as laying waste to LBJ's Great Society. When America had two mass parties, each with real liberals, moderates and conservatives, this was not the program of Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or George H.W. Bush. It was not even the aspiration of Ronald Reagan, who went to his dotage holding Franklin Roosevelt as his hero. But now it is in change. It sets the parameters of the debate. America is headed into truly uncharted territory and it's not going to be pretty. Last week's cowardly deal on the part of President Hoover to keep the government open is just the start. We have hit multiple inflection points that make this unavoidable. Put another way, the chickens are coming home to roost, and they're lethal.

Revenues: Thirty years of tax cutting has snowballed into disaster. Combined with two wars that have lasted longer than World War II, military deployments in more than 150 nations, corporate welfare and the cost of the Great Recession, voodoo economics has left America with a substantial deficit and debt. Tax cuts have not delivered on their promise of job creation or widespread prosperity. Quite the opposite. But the American mentality now is that taxes can only be cut. In fact, at every level of government taxes are too low. The United States has the lowest taxes among advanced nations, and in this survey only Mexico and Chile are lower, nations that are hardly analogous to America or role models. Contrary to the widespread propaganda, the deficit and debt are not an immediate emergency. Yet they are serious enough to attract attention, and become useful ammo for demagogues on the right who peddle the notion that we face disaster because of spending on poor gay union people of color seeking foreign-aid abortion earmarks. That the solemn obligations of Social Security and Medicare are the root cause. Our supposedly liberal/socialist/Islamofascist president has bought into the right-wing narrative: America has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. In reality, low tax rates are most to blame. They have finally been reduced, at every level of government, to crisis-inducing levels.

Ignorance. The condition above would not be possible without the rise of broad illiteracy in citizenship, history, economics and critical thinking. It it no coincidence, as the commies used to say, that our troubles have worsened amid the widespread death of newspapers and a shallow, "good news" focus in too many of the survivors. Indeed, fewer Americans read newspapers or anything at all. Men are especially prone to not read and fewer men go to college. Even most college graduates lack grounding in the liberal arts. Despite the right-wing pose of defending Western Civ, we have a nation of grads from business and professional silos, including from the for-profit "college" flimflam, with no sense of the obligations of citizenship or American history. Thus, the issues we discuss on this blog are either unintelligible or "depressing." They know nothing of the delicate balances and pluralism that created the best of modern America. They wants to be entertained, to be told comforting fables and, as things head south, to be fed easy (even if the wrong) villains. Too many have thus been easy pickings for the corporate media and talk radio that promulgate and pass on right-wing propaganda. Like tax revenue, this situation has been deteriorating for years. We have finally hit the wall.

Four. More. Years.

So President Hoover wants another term. I ask, why? None of the major banksters has gone to jail. The too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger and back to risky business. Nearly 14 million are unemployed, millions more underemployed or have given up looking for work. A record number of Americans are on food stamps. We have not merely two wars but three. Gitmo is still open and corporate lawyer Eric Holder made a cowardly about-face from trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the criminal he is in New York. BP committed the worst environmental disaster in our history, but deepwater drilling is back. Income inequality is at record highs. I could go on, and will shortly.

Most progressives are either defending the president, still hoping he's "playing chess" and all will work out, or will hold their noses and support him for fear of a worse Republican alternative. Perhaps anticipating my antipathy, commenter Koreyel made a post a few weeks ago that deserves to be quoted at length:

You go into the future with the population you have and not the population you wish you had. Look at the population we have. We don't know much about anything. Do we? So much so, I've thought of starting a blog to capture every news item that begins  "half of all Americans don't know." Steve Allen saw it coming years ago. He gave it a name. He called it Dumbth. It's now here in the flesh and running for president in 2012. And you too can become a fan of it on Facebook.

War (huh!) what it is good for

In trying to understand what seems to be, well, I don't know a delicate way to put it, the growing goatfuck in Libya, I turned to Professor Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog is one of the best sources of analysis on the Middle East. He lists ten ways that the Libyan intervention is not Iraq 2003. Among them, the action has UN Security Council authorization; the Libyan people "had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds"; civilians were being massacred and worse was to follow, and the Arab League calling for action.

Maybe. But I can't help this nagging feeling that Uncle Sucker has once again been lured into a Wilsonian/Bushian "make the world safe for democracy" swindle, while more complex, hypocritical, realpolitik, cynical and sinister forces are at work. It is no surprise that France pushed hard for action, not wanting to be on the receiving end of a million impossible-to-assimilate Muslim refugees, but Mr. Carla Bruni will publicize this with Liberté, égalité, fraternité. No surprise, either, that Arab League members started to squawk once the cruise missiles began landing. It's reminiscent of the days when the United States would take out some dictator in Latin America, bringing instant public condemnation of "imperialism!" by leaders in the region who were saying, sotto voce, "Thank God they got him!" And how nice to make our Chinese debt-holders squirm even a little at the prospect that the next popular uprising just might show up outside their politburo meeting. 

Still, what's the end game here? No Fly Zones are well and good and militarily...what? Actually, the only NFZ I know that was working was the one we maintained for a decade against Saddam Hussein. Otherwise, the intervention must expand or fail, for the good colonel is not committing most of his civilian killings with air power, but with ground forces. So, as Sir Sean Connery's character demands of Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, "What are you prepared to do?" One can't escape the conclusion that President Hoover and Mrs. Clinton didn't really think that one through, and Bob Gates was just too damned tired or distracted to intervene. Instead of World War III, we'll just have three wars in the world, sapping America. Forgive me for imagining the cynical Europeans and Perfidious Albion (the Royal Navy fired one cruise missile on the day the attack began) are just itching for a way to hand the mess off to us.