As a felon, Jefferson has had equally despicable company: Rep. Andrew J. Hinshaw, R-Calif. (accepting a bribe); Rep. Charles Diggs Jr., D-Mich. (payroll kickback scheme); Rep. Michael Myers, D-Pa. (accepting bribes from FBI agents impersonating Arab businessmen); Reps. John Murphy, D-N.Y., Frank Thompson, D-N.J., John Jenrette, D-S.C., and Raymond Lederer, D-Pa. (Arab businessmen bribery scandal, a.k.a. Abscam).

And Rep. Mario Biaggi, D-N.Y. (extorting money from a defense contractor); Rep. Mel Reynolds, D-Ill. (sex with underage campaign worker, bank fraud); Rep. Walter Tucker III, D-Calif. (accepting and demanding bribes); Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Ill. (felony mail fraud); Rep. James A. Trafficant, D-Ohio (bribery, conspiracy and racketeering); Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (accepting bribes from defense contractors) and Robert W. Ney, R-Ohio (Abramoff scandal). I’m sure readers can name more.

The collective misfortune of these men is that they got caught. Each undoubtedly said to himself, “I am invincible. I am a member of Congress.” They all assumed membership in the biggest-of-all-members-only clubs provided a get-out-of-jail-free card. But the real reason they believed they could get away with accepting bribes and committing extortion is that members of Congress have been doing it legally for years.

Jefferson may serve 13 years. Prosecutors say he probably earned less than $400,000 despite seeking millions in illegal bribes from “oil, sugar, communications and other businesses, often for projects in Africa,” said The New York Times. But he’s raked in about $6.45 million in campaign contributions since 1990, half from political action committees, according to the Center for Responsive Politics database. More than $600,000 came from lawyers and law firms. (Wonder if the sharks will return his calls now.)

Prosecutors focused on the $90,000 federal agents found in Jefferson’s freezer. The public should have been more focused on Jefferson’s legal sources of campaign bucks, in the same way it should have paid less attention to the penis of that other two-faced Louisiana legislative poseur, Sen. David Vitter, and more attention to the sources of his campaign funding.

We the voters, the people who have watched health-care costs starkly climb ever higher, who see taxes rising exhorbitantly at all levels, who witness the quality of education for our children wither, who watch jobs vanish overseas and unemployment rise, and who are frightened that decades-old safety nets are tattered beyond repair, have become so inured to the corrosive role of money in politics that we forget that politicians are continously but legally bribed by monied interests. And it should stop.

Ask Glenn Greenwald of salon.com. In a video for Larry Lessig’s change-congress.com, he explains how Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Evan Bayh, D-Ind., are threatening to filibuster any health-reform plan with a public option. Lieberman, says Greenswald, is “drowning in campaign contributions” from the health-care industry — more than $2.5 million — and his wife landed a cushy job in 2005 with PR flacksters Hill & Knowlton, representing pharma giant Glaxo. Several months later, Lieberman sought to steer incentives to Glaxo to develop vaccines.

“This is the kind of legalized corruption, legalized bribery, that runs the United States Senate,” says Greenwald. “Only in this case it is particularly sleazy and transparent because Lieberman is ready to gut the major initiative of the Democratic Party.”

Bayh’s wife, says Greenwald, “sits on the board of directors of WellPoint, one of the largest health-insurance companies in the nation. [The Bayhs] own, by their own disclosures, between $500,000 and a million dollars in WellPoint stock. … When Sen. Lieberman threatened to filibuster the public option … the value of the stock of the health-care industry skyrocketed … and personally benefited the finances of the Bayh family.”

Bayh’s wife was paid more than $2 million between 2005 and 2008. Bayh, in 2008, received $500,000 in campaign contributions from the health-care industry, says Greenwald.

“It’s really clear corruption,” says Greenwald.

Politicians defend their financial associations with large corporations (and unions) and wealthy individuals. They call it “campaign financing.” Sadly, we’re too accustomed to this shameless dance now, aren’t we?

A member of Congress, or someone who aspires to be one, gets on the phone and calls people who have lots of money. Often those people run very large enterprises, such as corporations (or unions). Those corporations, driven by the dictum “maximize shareholder income” (or, increasingly, “maximize CEO compensation”), would like members of Congress to make those tasks easier. Politicians say such donations only provide access to their ears, not their actions. The big corporate and PAC donors — or their hired lobbyists — say they’re only legitimately promoting the causes of their companies and clients.

Bullshit. It has been known for decades that lobbyists are often in the room, helping congressional staff write — or writing themselves — legislation. Earlier in this decade, tax-law experts from General Electric shaped an export tax reform bill that saved GE hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lobbyists’ dictation of politicians’ words and deeds has become even more blatant. New York Times reporter Robert Pear wrote Nov. 14 that lobbyists wrote and sought to have supportive statements about health-care reform placed by members into the Congressional Record prior to the Nov. 5 vote:

In the official record of the historic House debate on overhauling health care, the speeches of many lawmakers echo with similarities. Often, that was no accident. Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. … Genentech, a subsidiary of the Swiss drug giant Roche, estimates that 42 House members picked up some of its talking points — 22 Republicans and 20 Democrats, an unusual bipartisan coup for lobbyists. [emphasis added]

A lobbyist created the messages and supporting documents and e-mailed them to members. Lobbyists denied any malevolent intent. Said one, quoted anonymously by Pear: “This happens all the time. There was nothing nefarious about it.”

In the past five years, Genentech has spent nearly $10 million on lobbying expenses. In the past decade, Genentech has contributed more than $1 million to federal candidates. Pear reports Genentech’s PAC has made contributions to some of the members who used its talking points and that company officials had hosted fundraisers for some.

And, of course, there’s no quid pro quo, right? Wrote Pear: “Evan L. Morris, head of Genentech’s Washington office, said, ‘There was no connection between the contributions and the statements.’” [emphasis added]

Bullshit again. It is, as Greenwald says, legalized corruption. Imagine if I, as an individual voter living in a rural district, had asked my congressman to insert under his name words I wrote about health-care reform into the Congressional Record. He would say no. (Or rather, the staff member I’d get shunted off to would say no.) But when Genentech said jump, 42 members of Congress asked, “How high?”

Don’t kid us. It’s legalized corruption. Remarks members of Congress revise and extend into the Congressional Record, we now see, have been actually written by lobbyists. So what do the clowns we elect to office do for the $174,000 we pay them (and with very nice health-care bennies, too)?

A handful of Republican senators, led by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C, think they have an answer — a constitutional amendment to limit how long a person may serve in Congress. Apparently, senators would get 12 years, while representatives would get only six years. (Imagine that bill’s conference committee, eh?) On his Senate website, DeMint writes:

As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buy off special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork, in short, amassing their own power.

Don’t be misled. After all, what’s to prevent the current system of lobbyists, legalized corruption, and greed from buying new sets of politicians every six or 12 years? Being new, they’ll come cheap, too.

Members of Congress need mountains of money to obtain and retain political power. They spend hours each day dialing donors and asking for, or demanding, campaign contributions. That’s the extortion part of the equation. Donors demand at least an ear and now, we see, actual words printed in the Congressional Record. That’s the corruption part. All that separates many uncharged and unjailed members of Congress from Jefferson and his imprisoned pals is an FBI wiretap.

Changing the politicians through term limits has little merit. Instead, get rid of the current system of campaign finance. If members of Congress were willing to bail out banks with hundreds of billions of dollars, demand that they allow the public to outbid special interests. Lobby members of Congress (yep, I said lobby) to drastically and dramatically overhaul public election financing. Demand that members of Congress place in the federal budget each year sufficient billions of dollars to pay for every federal and statewide election in the country. Give incumbents and challengers alike plenty of public money. But cut them off at the financial knees if they accept a single dime of corporate, union, or PAC money.

If our politicians continue to insist on being bought, let the public do the buying.

That’s because paid circulation of daily newspapers nationally fell more than 10 percent from a year ago. Some papers suffered truly horrendous daily circulation losses: the San Francisco Chronicle (down 25.8 percent), The Boston Globe (down 18.5 percent) and The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger (down 22.2 percent), reports Rick Edmonds on his Poynter Biz Blog. USA Today, hit by a slump in travel, fell nearly 18 percent. The circulation of 400 daily newspapers has fallen to only 30 million readers.

This hemorrhaging of circulation — the worst ever — will have serious consequences. Expect newspaper staffs, already slashed below the minimum necessary to adequately cover their turf, to be cut further. Expect more shallow, one-source stories. Expect more stories laden with anonymous sources because the poorly paid, younger, inexperienced reporters left on staff won’t have the skill to persuade sources to speak on the record. Expect more wire-service content because local stories won’t get done. Expect corporate newspaper management to continue to stall on finding a business model that enhances the public-service mission of journalism. Expect more style than substance.

Just expect less of what good newspapers used to be. The nation’s newspapers, the constitutionally anointed watchdogs and adversaries of government, can no longer be considered as successful in those roles as they used to be.

Mr. Edmonds lists several reasons for this continuing, massive loss of paid circulation. From his Biz Blog:

• Readers continue to migrate from print to the Internet — sometimes to newspapers’ own sites, sometimes to aggregators.
• Papers, metros especially, are voluntarily trimming circulation to remote areas because they are more expensive to serve and less valuable to advertisers.
• So-called “start pressure,” the selling of new subscriptions to replace lost ones, has taken a hit from cost-cutting.
• Decisions at many papers to aggressively increase subscription and single copy prices has resulted in fewer copies being sold, though circulation revenue has increased.
• This period is the first to include the full impact of the recession, in which some consumers are dropping subscriptions and others buying the paper less frequently.
• Smaller news staffs and news space make the product weaker and less appealing.

In 2008, newspapers shed more than 9,000 jobs. This year, so far, newspapers have cut more than 14,100 jobs. How can such cuts in reporting and other capabilities not have serious social, cultural, and political consequences? Yes, various foundation-funded, non-profit, experimental approaches to independent newsgathering have emerged. Consider the well-intended efforts of ProPublica and MinnPost. (Read Alan Mutter’s excellent two-part take on non-profit news startups.)

Too little, perhaps too late. American journalism sprouted from local printers who became family owners of newspapers — local newspapers. The Founders intended the First Amendment to protect those who owned presses and printed newspapers from interference by the government. But the utility of the First Amendment has been eroded by overt corporate mismanagement and malpractice far more than covert government malfeasance.

At the local level, newspaper staffs have been reduced far below necessary levels for competent, comprehensive coverage of local government. Government didn’t cause this — but it now benefits from the ability to operate with far less inspection by journalists.

No non-profit efforts on the horizon would make up for the quantitative loss of experienced reporters nationally. Fewer reporters means fewer watchdogs.

How is that not costly to a democracy?

Still, this whole “marketplace of ideas” is a marvelous concept. Perhaps the most marvelous concept in history. Drawing on the Miltonian belief that if people are allowed to enter the agora and freely state their cases, then “the truth will out” (that is, an educated and informed citizenry will unerringly perceive the truth and that weaker ideas will be disregarded in favor of stronger ones), our nation’s founders crafted a Constitution that assured people the right to voice their opinions, free from government intrusion. Yes, the formula has its problem spots – Americans have religiously rejected the “educated and informed” part, for instance, and there have been embarrassing questions reagrding who, precisely, got to be a “citizen.” Also, the framers seemed not to foresee that we’d get to a point where governmental threats to the exercise of speech paled next to those posed by private institutions. Still, all that said, it’s hard to argue that Americans have made a lot of hay with our 1st Amendment guarantees since they were enacted, and even an imperfect marketplace of ideas beats none at all.

This week presented us with a sparkling case study of the marketplace of ideas at its best. A few days back it was announced that conservative pundit and noiser-without-peer Rush Limbaugh was part of a group seeking to buy the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. The agora fairly exploded in conversation. A number of players and the head of the NFL Players Association wanted no part of a man who’s established a reputation for … racial insensitivity? The owner of the Indianapolis Colts (a Bush/Cheney spporter, as it turns out) promised to block any bid involving Limbaugh. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell finally got around to offering that “Limbaugh’s divisiveness is not what the league needs.” Columnists, pundits and bloggers (including S&R’s own uber-cynic, Dr. Sid Bonesparkle) weighed in with a broad range of takes (mostly anti-Rush, it seems). Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton had things to say, and we’d have felt cheated if they hadn’t.

Many of these voices were informed and credible. Others were driven by prefabricated ideologies instead of facts and reason. And a boisterous debate was had by all. In the end, the brazillionaire heading the investment group, St. Louis Blues owner Dave Checketts, put two and two together. Realizing that Limbaugh was an 800-lb albatross hanging around the neck of his NFL aspirations, Checketts unceremoniously kicked him to the curb.

The wonderful thing about the whole episode? This is precisely how our nation’s founders envisioned our democracy working. An idea was presented. Interested parties, informed or otherwise, had their say. (Remember, the framers knew there would be irresponsible voices in the public debate – that was part of the equation.) Marvelously, it was all enabled immeasurably by the Internet, which Al Gore, love him or hate him, saw as the ultimate tool of Jeffersonian democracy. From a 1994 address:

“And the distributed intelligence of the [Global Information Infrastructure] will spread participatory democracy… I see a new Athenian Age of democracy forged in the fora the GII will create.

The entire public debate was conducted free of coercion from the government. And in the end, the marketplace decided, governed by its collective conscience, that Limbaugh’s participation was not in the best interest of the league, the ownership group or the free market. An idea was tested and found wanting. Dave Checketts made an informed decision.

In theory, we should now be able to tune in and listen as Rush, disappointed though he may be, extols the virtues of the marketplace. After all, that is his core ideological concern – that free enterprise and the marketplace of ideas be allowed to determine the value of products and propositions, right?

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world.

And yet the Supreme Court took the unusual step of ordering a hearing during the court’s recess in order to hear legal arguments over whether corporate money could be spent to influence elections and whether the current bans on most such money in politics were constitutional. And indications are that the conservative majority will likely rule to overturn nearly 20 years of precedent and rule that it is constitutional for corporate money to be spent directly to influence local, state, and federal elections.

According to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the four liberal justices were the ones quoting from the U.S. Constitution to support their questions and arguments:

Justice Ginsburg reminded Olson that it is living persons, not corporations, who are “endowed by [their] Creator with unalienable rights.” Justice Sotomayor, too, picked up on this theme, emphasizing how the Supreme Court had rewritten the Constitution to create the fiction that corporations are persons entitled to the same basic rights as human beings. If we are looking to constitutional first principles to topple precedents, she asked, why shouldn’t we also look at the cases that invented corporate constitutional personhood and “imbued a creature of State law with human characteristics”?

Several of the court’s conservatives are supposed to be Originalists, judges who believe that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at it’s writing (except for amendments, of course) and has not changed since then. Granting state creations the rights guaranteed to flesh and blood people when the Constitution doesn’t mention state creations is hypocrisy of the first order. It’s also an example of the very judicial activism than the Senate Republicans who voted against confirming Justice Sotomayor feared she would bring to the court. Perhaps the most activist judge on the Supreme Court today, defined by being the most willing to overrule Congress, is Antonin Scalia.

At present, corporate profits may not be spent to directly influence elections. This has historically been the case because corporations can live effectively forever and amass financial resources that no individual person could equal, and because legislators and courts have been concerned about corporate influence corrupting the political process. In essence, these are many of the same arguments that federal law uses to ban foreign nationals and governments from donating money to political campaigns. And yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no foreign governments suing for free speech rights to influence elections.

The problem twofold – corporations are presently considered people, and money is considered speech. Corporations were defined legally as people for the purposes of limiting personal liability in the event of a business failure. But one of the results is that corporations have claimed the rights guaranteed to real people in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment right to free speech. And because the Supreme Court declared, in Buckley v. Valeo, that spending money equals exercising the right to free speech, corporations are now claiming that their money should be given identical rights to the money of individual citizens.

There are at least two direct solutions to this problem. The first would be to overturn Buckley v. Valeo. This would make money no longer equal to speech and could be an even more significant change in legal precedent than overturning 100 years of campaign limits on corporate donations to candidates. It would also require the conservatives on the court to go against their known personal ideologies.

The second is to redefine corporations so that they are not considered individual people for all situations. This would certainly require federal legislation and would probably require state legislation as well. It would also require that the economic and political powers at the state and federal levels voluntarily relinquish the power that corporate money (via PACs today, possibly via direct contributions in a few months) brings them.

Neither is particularly likely given the composition of the Supreme Court and the major influence of money in politics today.

Eventually, though, if the laws are overturned, enough companies will corrupt enough politicians with direct donations that they’ll overreach, and the public reaction will be swift and unstoppable. And when that happens, Exxon Mobil’s money and Wal-Mart’s money and Chevron’s money will be as untouchable as money from Hugo Chavez of Venezuela or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Both of which have smaller economies than either Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart.

It’s no secret that I don’t agree with the GOP on much of anything these days, but there’s kind of an odd element to my conversations with Republican acquaintances lately: a lot of them profess significant disagreement with the platform and policies of their party, too.

Taken in a vacuum, this is hardly surprising. After all, America is the land of disagreement, and there aren’t any parties out there that are acting in significant accordance with my views. So individual Republicans at odds with their party and with others in the party? Makes perfect sense.

We don’t live in a vacuum, though. We live in a complex series of interrelated contexts, and in context the reservations of my Republican friends merit further scrutiny. For starters, those who aren’t on the bus with our current media-enabled popular revolution seem to be the majority.

For these folks I have a word of advice: you have some ugly problems, and they need confronting today.

Republicans vs. the Republican Party

We recently had a little round-and-round here over Sara Robinson’s article on “Fascism in America.” Sara argues, persuasively and with detailed evidence, that the Republican Party represents a looming fascist threat for the United States. She doesn’t use the term “fascist” as a casual pejorative; she uses the word in a specific way and she defines precisely what she means by it. A couple of our readers took exception, with our friend Lara Amber (a very smart, progressive mind, by the way) finding something personal in the analysis:

Most Republicans are nice people, they aren’t “racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage.” (Nice way to shut down any discourse with anyone across the aisle by the way, way to go Sara! -sound of head hitting desk).

My response there, which I stand by, was that Robinson wasn’t talking about the individuals who comprise the party, but was instead describing its official apparatus. To be sure, the GOP has members who are guilty of everything Robinson says in that passage, and probably more, but I don’t read her as overgeneralizing to the extent that Lara believed. Still, Lara is like me – there are Republicans in her life, good people whom she respects and cares about. So the tendency to say “hey, wait a damned minute” is perhaps understandable.

But herein lies the proverbial rub: as Lara herself notes, the GOP is currently experiencing something of a leadership crisis. Right now its visible leaders are (to Party chair Michael Steele’s dismay) primarily media nutbags and hatespewers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It’s also being “led” by a variety of well-funded astroturfers and “activist” organizations – these are the invisible hands manipulating the strings of the teabagger revolution, the birther conspiracy and the faux-ragers who have invaded the townhall health care “debates” – and fueled by the Fair & Balanced^® press. You have occasional appearances by political luminaries like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman (who’s now saying she’ll run for president if Jesus asks her to – where’s Sam Kinison when you need him?) and plenty of yammering by Congressweasels in the pockets of the insurance industry who are desperately trying to distract us from opinion polls showing that a vast majority of citizens want real health care reform built around a public option. And so on, and so on.

If you were asked to rebut Robinson’s characterization of the GOP – “racist, sexist, repressed, exclusionary, and permanently addicted to the politics of fear and rage” – there’s not a lot of evidence out there in the public eye this summer that would serve you very well. So let’s take all this and see if we can summarize in a way that we can more or less agree on. How about this:

The Republican Party leadership is currently dominated by reactionary and corporatist voices that are not in line with the beliefs and values of a significant percentage of the party’s members.

(Yes, I’m more than aware that the Dem leadership is corporatist and out of step with what a good number of its members believe, too. We’ll deal with that another day.)

The second problem facing my GOP friends is even more troubling. In short, your party, your voice and your official political agenda are being hijacked by the most ignorant, unsavory, hateful and toxic elements in American society. Some examples:

• A woman yells “Heil Hitler” to an Israeli describing the benefits of his nation’s health care system.
• Gun-packing thugs “exercising their rights” near Obama rallies. (Thanks to Brandon for this link.) Here’s some more armed intimidation.
• By the way, that last dog-and-armored-pony show was orchestrated by a radio host with militia ties. This particular patriotic’ approach to defending the Constitution apparently involved plotting to blow up federal buildings. You know, like that other patriot, Timothy McVeigh.
• Former GOP Congressman Virgil Goode is making the rounds speaking to hate groups.
• Let’s not forget the murder – in church, no less – of Dr. George Tiller.
• And let’s not forget that other right-wing media consumer (Hannity, Savage, BillO) who walked into a “liberal” church and opened fire.
• By the way, these folks have the Constitutional right to carry guns and intimidate you, but you don’t have the right to put a bumper sticker expressing your beliefs on your car.
• Gordon Liddy is still roaming free, by the way.
• More examples of the cradle-to-grave crazy here…
• God wants gays, Barney Frank and Barack Obama executed.
• Just remember, violence is inevitable, and it’s Obama’s fault.

I could go on. But do I need to?

If you’re a reasonable Republican, all this has to trouble you (and I’ve heard enough Republicans say that it does to know that  I’m not imagining things). The issue isn’t that all GOPpers are like the fruitcakes running loose here in the Summer of Hate. In truth, this silliness is the work of a minority that isn’t big enough to do much damage at the ballot box. So since they can’t win using the techniques prescribed by law – you know, campaigning, voting, that sort of thing – and since their opinions are shared by so few (again, national polls on health care say over 70% of Americans favor a public option, for instance), they’re trying to get their way by being the loudest. By resorting to rhetorical misdirection and deceit when reason and fact are so thoroughly stacked against them. By pitching the most obnoxious tantrums. By resorting to base terror, intimidation and thuggery. By playing on the media’s insatiable thirst for noise.

The worst part, from the perspective of the rational Republican, is that a lot of these barking loons probably aren’t even members of the party (although the money behind their organized, choreographed hissy fits certainly is). Of course, at least one GOP lawmaker seems more than willing to welcome the lot of them aboard, and the average citizen may not expend the energy necessary to differentiate all the players aligned against Obama.

The Mandate

If you don’t control your image, your image will control you. – Dennis Green

If you are, in fact, an educated Republican who prefers to deliberate your way to conclusions thoughtfully, these are dangerous times. Because thanks to the way the system is rigged – and let’s understand who rigged it this way and why – most of what you hear through Big Journalism channels is inaccurate, at best, and most of what you hear through alternative channels is noise, at best. And those who do have something intelligent to say? Well, there aren’t many cameras pointed in their direction. Reason and fact aren’t as exciting as townhall cage matches.

I spent a lot of years (beginning in the early 1980s) saying, to any coherent Christian who’d listen, that they’d better get serious about taking back their religion from the jihadists on the right. Now I’m saying it to every Republican who was offended by what Sara Robinson wrote and who is watching the Summer of Hate unfold with a little unease.

You need to find a leader and take back your party – either that or walk away from it in ways that make your disapproval unmistakeably clear. You may think these people don’t speak for you, but they are speaking in your name, whether you like it or not. And at the moment, nobody is doing anything to correct the notion that everybody to the right of Barack Obama is a rabid hyena.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.

In this young century, however, Americans have suffered increased assaults on their rights — especially privacy — by their own government, all in the name of the proclaimed need for “national security.” Because of fear, government continues to attempt to foreclose on constitutional protections.

Government may erode constitutional guarantees in the absence of the watchful eye of the governed. Rights not exercised may become rights lost. It is an obligation of citizenship for Americans that they continually critique and comment on the actions of their government. That is how we shape our government. Failure to do so allows government to shape us and our rights instead.

At the moment, America has a slew of problems confronting it — record unemployment, a shrinking economy, two foreign wars, a two-party system run amok, and an enormous fiscal deficit, just to name a few.

As we toss the steak on the barbecue and watch the fireworks today, let’s keep in mind the rights and riches we do have, the historical cost of attaining them, and the future risk of losing them if we fail to speak up when government displeases us.

Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death. Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job. How about them apples? Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into.

The warmongery that controls the Pentagon and Congress never did take any of that Iraq withdrawal timeline jive seriously. Defense secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser James Jones, “King David” Petraeus and Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno are all on record as having said withdrawal timelines are a bad idea. Odierno has, through Petraeus publicist Tom Ricks, broadly expressed his desire to see 35,000 or more troops in Iraq through 2015, Status of Forces Agreement and Obama campaign promises be damned. Early in April, Odierno put out the word that he might ignore the June 30 deadline for U.S. troops to leave Iraqi cities, and it looked like another domino was about to drop in the Pentagon’s “hell no, we won’t go” strategy. Then Maliki said “not so fast,” and told Babe Odierno to have his troops out of Mosul and the rest of the cities by the end of June and that they couldn’t go back without a hall pass.

Two aspects of this event should shock every American. First is that Odierno, who is four levels down in the chain of command (under Obama, Gates and Petraeus) announced he might unilaterally abrogate an occupation arrangement agreed to at a level higher than his. Second, and perhaps more alarming, is that the only guy who threw the bull plop flag about it was the prime minister of the occupied country. Nobody in the White House or Congress did anything but put palm prints on the seats of their pants. The military’s take over of America is now so complete that the Buck Turgidsons and Jack D. Rippers can do whatever they want and the rest of the body politic demurs as if it’s the Pentagon’s Constitutional right to dictate policy to the executive and the legislature.

There’s one political journalist, though, who’s willing to pretend the Obama administration hasn’t been rolled flat by the military industrial cash caisson. With his article in the May 14 edition of Rolling Stone, Robert Dreyfus has become for Team Obama what Tom Ricks is for Team Petraeus and what Joseph Goebbels was for you-know-who. “Obama’s Chess Masters” is as a stunning a piece of White House propaganda as anything Dick Cheney’s minions ever filtered through the New York Times. “The president has assembled a trusted circle of advisers to oversee all aspects of national security from the White House,” Dreyfus blares in the lede. “It’s the most centralized decision-making I’ve ever seen,” one source tells him. G.W. Bush let Cheney and Rummy run the show and make all the decisions, Dreyfus reports, but not Obama. No sir. Obama is the, uh…decider in this administration.

Dreyfus manages to make Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller of the New York Times look like real journalists in comparison. His sources include “a well-connected defense and intelligence consultant,” “a senior Capitol Hill staffer,” “an insider,” “several insiders,” “one veteran of both the State Department and the Pentagon” and—perhaps the most credible voice in the article—“the Washington rumor mill.”

The piece’s named sources are so blatantly sleeping in the commander in chief’s tent that Dreyfus might as well have just asked Michelle who she thought was running the show. Leslie Gelb, who hasn’t been right about a single aspect of U.S. foreign policy from Vietnam on, avows that, “They’re making decisions there, at the White House. On everything.” Dreyfus paints National Security Adviser Jones as the kind of hard-boiled hawk the neocons better not mess with. “He’s pro nuclear” Dreyfus relates. “He likes oil drilling.” As if those right wing crackers credentials weren’t sufficiently malignant, Dreyfus throws in “He was on the boards of Boeing and Chevron.” Shudder.

William Cohen, whose chief accomplishment as Bill Clinton’s defense secretary was to hide in his office while his generals cocked up the Kosovo War, testifies that during his tenure he wanted James Jones on his team because “he knew where the bodies were buried, and I wanted to make sure that mine wasn’t among them.” It sounds like Cohen is still afraid enough of Jones to play ball with Obama’s spin merchants and make the guy sound like a Cheney-class leg breaker. Scary, huh kids?

From Dreyfus himself (supposedly) we hear that “The foreign policy vision that animates Obama and his team might be described best as a ‘Goldilocks’ approach: not too hot, not too cold. It’s a just-right philosophy.” Jesus, Larry and Curly. Do you think they had to waterboard Dreyfus to get him to paste that piffle into the article?

All this smoke about Obama’s national security team being large and in charge would be well and good except that they’ve already revealed themselves to be a team of bus riding Bozos. Their most spectacular pratfall has been their mumbling, bumbling, tumbling, fumbling Bananastan strategy. Get this:

During the campaign, Obama screws up and says that whatever success the surge in Iraq might have had (it really had none), it got in the way of putting enough troops into Afghanistan to “get the job done.” The Pentagon’s long war mafia chortles with glee, and the next thing you know, David McKiernan, the general in charge of the Bananastan bungle, says he needs at least 30,000 more troops for five more years or so. Gates and Mullen and the Joint Chiefs say, Yeah, yeah, he really, really needs those troops, give them to him, okay? So Obama asks the Joint Chiefs what they see as the “end game” in Afghanistan and they start staring at something a thousand yards behind Obama’s head. Obama calls McKiernan in Afghanistan and asks him what he plans to do with the 30,000 extra troops and McKiernan says, “Hey, somebody’s at the door.”

Then Obama hunkers down with his chess club, and they decide that the best compromise between doing nothing to doing something stupid is doing something half-baked. Obama agrees to send McKiernan a little over half the troops he wants—17,000—and tells his team to come up with a strategy for the generals who are apparently so busy fighting wars they can’t be bothered with planning them.

On March 17, Obama’s national security team releases the new strategy for the Bananastans; it’s an eye-watering compendium of fog, friction and humbug. It features an array of “realistic and achievable objectives,” none of which are realistic or achievable or particularly connected to national security.

The New York Times quoted “A dozen officials who were involved in the debate” as saying the new strategy does not involve nation building, even though its aims include things like “promoting a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan” and “developing increasingly self-reliant Afghan security forces” and “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan.” You know—nation building. The strategy also speaks of denying al Qaeda and other Islamofabulists “sanctuary” from which they can launch terror attacks. The notion that evildoers need a physical sanctuary is quainter than a tea cozy. Given the global proliferation of cheap communication equipment and even cheaper extremists eager to blow themselves to smithereens, the top terror guys can plan and execute attacks from a bleacher seat in the Himalayas or the Cannes Film Festival or the far side of the moon.

As Obama transitions from his 100-day honeymoon into his permanent bubble, I can’t help but wonder whether he knows he’s surrounded by fools and fanatics or if he’s been in the puzzle palace long enough now to have become as puzzled as everyone else in it.

Does he take what his loonies say seriously? I really want to think he puts on an elaborate show of listening to what they say, then shoos them out of the office, and calls up guys like al Maliki and says, “Listen, I need you to do me a favor.”

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

But this week, it gave its product to me for free. I would have gladly paid up to 5 cents to read just one of its stories. But the JS didn’t charge me. What kind of business model allows me to consume a product for free?

I learned of the story through an e-mailed version of Romenesko, the legendary (or infamous, depending on your POV), media news page at Poynter. org, the Web site of the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.

The Poynter e-mail contained this tease: “Wisconsin university football coach bans student reporters (http://www.jsonline.com/business/43539347.html).” I clicked on the link and —ta da — there it was, a story written by JS reporter Don Walker. Free. Didn’t have to pay a penny. And I would have. Gladly.

I know this isn’t a rare phenomenon. I suspect you’ve read news for free online, too. Bet you kinda expect it to be free, even demand that it be free. Perhaps you think it’s some kind of birthright. But in the long run, if you do not pay for the product of professional journalists, you will lose one of your best defenses against secrecy, corruption, and tyranny.

Those who wish to keep information from you, those who demand or offer kickbacks and bribes to get what they want, those who wish to secretly manipulate the levers of power unfairly for selfish financial advantage, those who wish to attain and maintain power over you … they’re winning. They’re winning because fewer and fewer journalists are keeping an eye on them, holding them accountable for their words and actions. Remember, that’s the deal the Founders gave the press: Hold government accountable, and we’ll protect you from government intervention.

If you don’t pay for the product produced by professional journalists who cover the “eat-your-spinach” stories bloggers don’t, won’t, or can’t, then don’t complain if the powerful and influential take advantage of the lack of scrutiny formerly provided by the 5,900 journalists who lost their jobs last year.

In 1990 America’s daily newspapers had 56,900 staffers, very close to the historical high, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Newspapers were cash cows for investors, with profits north of 20 percent. In 2000, the population of journalists at dailies was still high — 56,400. Then the Internet came, folks say, and stole all the advertising revenue. Profit margins have been halved — as revenue has dropped precipitously. (Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, bad management and arrogance had much to do with the decline of circulation, and hence the declining advertising revenue, of daily newspapers. In effect, corporate newspaper management shot itself in the foot as it bad-mouthed the Internet as an irrelevant upstart.)

To attempt to maintain the profitability of that now-highly suspect business model, newspaper managements whacked jobs — the very jobs that produce the product those executives presumably want to sell. This has to be among the dumbest responses to economic stress in corporate history.

At the end of 2008, only 46,700 journalists were left at the America’s daily newspapers. 2009 is off to a rough beginning: The Web site Paper Cuts reports that about 8,500 newspaper staffers (including journalists) have been laid off or bought out as of mid-April. (Paper Cuts is a Web site by Erica Smith, who has been tracking newspaper layoffs since 2007.) It is possible that by 2010, the number of daily print journalists will have been halved in only a decade.

Surely that’s not a positive development for the democratic health of the Republic.

Interestingly, the nation’s premier journalism graduate programs are seeing marked increases in applications: Columbia, up 38 percent; Stanford, 20 percent; and NYU, 6 percent. But these new students are not necessarily seeking to become journalists. Says Jim O’Brien, director of Northwestern University’s Medill Career Services office:

Corporate communications is a growth area in terms of opportunities for jobs for our MSJ grads. Both corporations and nonprofits who are interested in communications, where they had typically looked at an English major before, are now thinking that a journalism grad might have leg up on those candidates because of their training.

This is a two-pronged blow to “eat-your-spinach” news. First, newspapers are shedding the very people trained —and paid — to do that. Second, former journalists and others are seeking graduate journalism degrees to become corporate communicators.

That means fewer professionally trained and experienced journalists are digging for information corporations and governments wish to hide, and more smart people are being trained — and, eventually, paid handsomely — to do the hiding.

They’re winning. Democracy is losing. Please consider that next time you read a news story online — for free. It may be, in the long run, a very costly read.

We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas. – Natalie Maines

I don’t even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all the men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching. – Merle Haggard

Last night over dinner the subject of The Dixie Chicks came up, and I got mad all over again. Which is unfortunate, because when you think about artists that talented the last thing on your mind ought to be anger. But still, it’s been six long years now since “the top of the world came crashing down,” and I can’t quite free myself of my rage at the staggering ignorance that led so many Americans to piss on the 1st Amendment by attempting to destroy the careers of Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Robinson. Frankly, I don’t know how Natalie can make it through a performance of “The Long Way Around” or “Not Ready to Make Nice” because I can barely listen to the songs without wanting to take a folding chair to every goddamned corporate radio executive and program director in America responsible for driving them from the airwaves.

No doubt that this makes me a lesser man than I should be. I can’t imagine that the Chicks would approve of my violent impulses (which, I have to admit, are a little too literal for my own comfort), given the grace with which they have navigated the turbulence surrounding their lives in recent years. In truth, they haven’t taken the long way around so much as they have taken the high road, and I regret that I’m not quite worthy of the example they have set for those of us trying to lead civilized lives in the midst of so much willful ignorance.

In recognition of their willingness to risk their careers speaking truth to power and for their courage in facing the backlash (which included death threats, let’s remember) that’s all too frequently aimed at uppity women in the less advanced corners of our nation, Scholars & Rogues is proud to honor The Dixie Chicks as our latest Scrogues and accord them a place in our masthead of fame.

And, if it isn’t obvious, then I’ll apologize in advance for not being up to the standards that Natalie, Martie and Emily have set. They’re not to blame for my tribute to them.

What Did the War on The Dixie Chicks Teach Us About Our Freedoms?

Some time back I read a story in the international press about the rise of fundamentalist Islam in one of Europe’s leading nations – I believe it was the Netherlands, but can’t recall for certain. They’re apparently facing the prospect that one day this minority could grow to the point where it could go to the polls and, using the legitimate engines of the democratic system available to it, vote to eradicate the nation’s religious freedoms. A politician was asked what should be done in this case. His answer was that nothing should be done – it must be allowed, since it would be the result of a democratic process.

Quite a conundrum, that. What to do when democracy is used to dispose of democracy? Obviously America is under no immediate threat from organized Islamist voters, but we do have our own Christian Taliban problem, don’t we? What should we, here in the Land of the Free^®, think about those who do not value actual freedom of religion? How many Americans would we send off to die to preserve the free speech rights of those who’d squelch the free speech rights of their fellow citizens? What should a true patriot do when confronted with the reality that the tools of liberty are being used against Lady Liberty herself?

My own code of ethics has always said that you cannot allow a barbarian to use your civilization as a weapon against you. A man who insists on fighting according to a set of honorable rules while his opponent is using a tire iron to liquefy his testicles deserves what happens to him. In my angrier moments I’ve said that no, you don’t fight fire with fire. You fight fire with a flamethrower.

But that’s just me, and you’ll recall from earlier that I’m perhaps not to be taken as a role model. Still, we do live in a nation with many who do not share our respect for Constitutional freedoms. Exactly how many I can’t say, but I feel comfortable with “millions and millions.” It’s certain that without such people we’d not have had to endure eight years of Bush/Cheney thuggery.

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over

I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should

This was the message – “shut up and sing.” You’re not being paid to think, you mouthy little bitches, you’re being paid to entertain us. Now dance, girlies. God Bless America.

History will validate, with a minimum of controversy, the sentiments Natalie Maines expressed at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire theatre on March 10, 2003. Hopefully the record will point to our present moment and note that already the momentum had shifted and that within a generation people would have an impossible time imagining how such an affront to freedom was ever possible. Hopefully.

For the time being, “mad as hell” doesn’t begin to describe the indignation that those of us working to move this culture forward by promoting genuinely intelligent and pro-human values ought to feel, even now. I won’t tell you how to think and act, of course – you have a conscience and a brain, and you can be trusted to take in the information and perspectives around you and form an opinion that you can live by.

But for my part, I have a message for the “shut up and sing” crowd: I’m not ready to back down and I never will be. Your values are at odds with the principles upon which this nation was founded and true liberty cannot survive if your brand of flag-waving ignorance is allowed to thrive. You will not be allowed to use the freedoms that our founders fought for as weapons to stifle freedom for others.

You have declared a culture war, so here’s where the lines are drawn: I’m on the side of enlightenment, free and informed expression and the power of pro-humanist pursuits to produce a better society where we all enjoy the fruits of our shared accomplishments.

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you happen to be the owner of a unique piece of art, say the Mona Lisa, and you decide to set fire to it, then that is a terrible tragedy, but it is your property.  No government should ever have the right to intervene.

Apartheid in South Africa was a crime against humanity.  You can argue the reasons.  Some say that it was racial prejudice translating into attempted genocide.  Others that it was a violation of human rights of equality and justice.

My take is that Apartheid got its start with the denial of property rights; that one group of people gave themselves a greater right to property than they did to others.  This spurious belief was used to boot black South Africans off their land and replace them with politically chosen beneficiaries of “land reform”.

The new South African government, after 1994, began a tortuous process of their own “land reform” in which the original owners of land – often dispersed and with limited proof of title – would be able to receive a fair hearing and just compensation.  So far so good.

However, the new government, at pains to bring about a transformation of the economy, chose to use this process as a way of ensuring that the majority of agricultural land should be owned by black people in toto.

The government is purchasing land for this purpose and then settling people on it.  Instead of just receiving restitution for the property that was stolen from them, victorious claimants were set up as small-scale cooperative farmers.  These new farmers are not allowed to sell the land they have been given.  They have no title to it and have become no more than indentured peasant farmers; slaves at the pleasure of the state.

The government pegged their success on the financial success of these subsistence farms.  It has been an abject failure.

The people being settled on these farms are now several generations away from the original land-owning farmers.  They have no experience of agriculture, or of how technical the profession has become.  Many of them don’t even want to be there.

“More than 21 properties in the Empangeni and Eshowe districts, and reportedly many more across KZN bought by the land affairs department, lie fallow, producing only weeds, dead trees and choked sugar cane,” according to the Natal Mercury.

The response from the Minister of Agriculture, Lulu Xingwana, has been total fury.  “I have instructed my directors-general to implement, with immediate effect, the principle of use it or lose it,” Xingwana.  “Those who do not use the land must immediately be removed and the land must be given to emerging farmers and co-operatives.”

In other words, people who had their land stolen from them by one government, who decided that they weren’t deserving enough of their property, are to have their land stolen from them again by another government which has decided that they are still “not worthy”.

The first and only objective of land restitution is just recompense for people who had their property stolen.  It was a mistake forcing land as compensation on people who did not want to own land.  They should have been given money.  Whatever they chose to do with that money would have been their own choice.

Instead of accepting the restitution process for what it is, government wants a trophy.  They demand that beneficiaries of the process demonstrate their gratitude to the state by performing and delivering successful agricultural businesses.

That is an outrageous demand and entirely unacceptable.  What’s next?  Snatching private businesses from entrepreneurs who fail to employ an appropriate number of people?

Enough.  Government made the mistake of conflating two independent objectives and is now compounding their error by abusing property rights.  Farmers will always be in the minority of both businesses and land-owners.  Whether those properties are owned by black-skinned people or white-skinned people is immaterial, and should be immaterial to a liberal democracy.

The only matter of importance is whether their property was acquired without force or fraud.  Something that governments are supposed to ensure.

On February 2, foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter revealed that in a January 21 meeting, Petraeus, Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Mike Mullen and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were unable to dislocate President Obama from his 16-month redeployment policy. Porter also reported that a group of senior retired officers were preparing to support Petraeus, General Ray Odierno and their allies by mobilizing public opinion against Obama’s decision. I estimated that support to be part of the larger information campaign that was an integrated effort of the surge strategy from the outset.

D-Day of the latest phase of that information campaign arrived on February 8 when Pulitzer Prize winning Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks launched a series of TV interviews and Washington Post articles to promote his new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. It’s not pleasant to call Ricks out for prostituting his credentials, but you can’t sleep in a general’s tent for years the way Ricks has and pretend not to be a camp follower. Ricks has become for Petraeus what Ned Buntline was to Buffalo Bill Cody: his official legend maker.

In his 2005 book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Ricks painted Petraeus as the only division commander who got it right in post-invasion Iraq. By January 2007, when Petraeus became the new commander of forces in Iraq, Ricks described him in an interview as a “force of nature,” and recalling the sight of the general doing one-arm push ups with teenage privates sent Ricks into a breathless arrhythmia. With The Gamble, Ricks promotes Petraeus to five-star deity. Both Brainiac and action figure, Super Dave defies the establishment and changes the course of mighty strategies to save America from the agony of defeat in Iraq. He’s got a PhD from Princeton, he wears Kevlar, he’s a complicated man—but no one understands him but Tom Ricks, can you dig it? By the time you finish The Gamble, you’ll pray on your knees that Dave Petraeus runs for president in 2012.

Ricks used a crate of lipstick to make Petraeus’s sidekick, General Ray Odierno, look presentable in The Gamble. He savaged Odie in Fiasco: ox-like Odierno is “confused by criticism” that his 4^th Infantry Division, the “worst outfit” in theater at handling prisoners and civilians, is a virtual corps of “recruiting sergeants” for the insurgency. Odierno himself denies an insurgency is in progress, and is the epitome of the dysfunctional leader who doesn’t want to hear the “bad stuff.” But in The Gamble, Odierno has experienced an “awakening.” It is Odierno, more than anyone else, who is responsible for the surge’s success. “White House aides and others in Washington…had nothing to do with developing” the way the surge was executed. Odierno made all those decisions. You can trust Ricks on that score because he got the information straight from source: Odierno.

In fact, almost the entirety of Ricks’s surge saga is told from the perspective of Petraeus, Odierno and the rest of the surgin’ safari. If Ricks picks up another Pulitzer for The Gamble, the inscription should read “best stenography.” Petraeus and Odierno are assisted by crafty retired Army general Jack Keane. Big Jack wields his mighty influence to break down the doors of the Washington bureaucracy, and helps his protégés maneuver around their chain of command to place their surge concept before young Mr. Bush himself. The three wise warriors vanquish a host of fakes, liars, fumblers and meanies, and put their enlightened counterinsurgency scheme to work in Iraq, so gosh, we can’t just give up now that things are going so good. Well, better. Sort of.

In his book, his Post columns and his interviews, Ricks manages to run through the gamut of neocon talking points on why we still need to stay the course, a compendium of doublethink mantras that in real-speak boil down to “Buy our war or we’ll shoot this soldier’s dog” and “Don’t forget to be afraid of Iran.” At the same time, remarkably, Ricks generates a mountain of fog in an attempt to cover the neocons’ tracks.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Ricks absolved the neocons, saying they get “too much credit and too much blame” for Iraq. Nothing was the neocons fault, really. It was that mean old Dick Cheney who duped the public into supporting the war, and that grouchy old Donald Rumsfeld who ran the war so badly. Never mind that Cheney and Rumsfeld were charter members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that first publicly called for an invasion of Iraq in early 1998. Ricks makes a single passing mention of the PNAC in The Gamble. That’s a stunning omission when you consider that along with Cheney and Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Zalmay Khalilzad, Scooter Libby, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage and many other PNACers also held key positions on the Bush administration’s Iraq policy team. Eliot Cohen is a featured player in The Gamble, a key figure in the selling of the surge and, according to Ricks, the man who told Bush he should make Petraeus the top commander in Iraq. Not once does Ricks note that Cohen is a luminary in the neoconservative constellation and that, like Cheney and Rumsfeld, he was a founding member of the PNAC.

Also noteworthy is Ricks’s glaring omission of any reference to Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the September 2000 PNAC manifesto that delineated the foreign policy the Bush administration would adopt in whole. Unfinished issues from Desert Storm, it said, provided the “immediate justification” for an invasion of Iraq, but the need to establish a large, permanent military footprint in the geostrategic heart of the oil rich Gulf region transcended “the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” 9/11 gave the neocons the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed to launch their scheme, and the rest is history—as rewritten by the likes of Tom Ricks, who is now abetting them in pursuit of their original purpose.

As is the case with all revisionists, you’ll find grains of truth along the path of Ricks’s narrative, just as you’ll find grain in every pile of horse manure. The only honest thing you’ll find picking through Ricks’s prose, though, is the insanity behind the argument for staying in Iraq.

The real secret of Petraeus’s “success” at counterinsurgency is payola. As commander of the 101^st Airborne in Mosul, “he bought everybody off.” The enemy “was just biding its time and building capacity, waiting him out.” When Petraeus left Mosul, it went up for grabs. As top commander in Iraq, Petraeus bought everybody off again, making “a lot of deals with shady guys” who are “just laying low,” so we can never leave, or the whole country will go up for grabs like Mosul did.

Odds are things will be worse if we leave than they were under Hussein, Ricks told NBC’s Chris Matthews. Hussein was a toothless tyrant, but now that Petraeus has “armed everybody to the teeth” it’s too dangerous to get out. We’ve made the Iraqi security forces strong enough that they might attempt a coup if we’re not there to stop them. The surge may have averted a civil war, but one colonel tells Ricks he doesn’t think “the Iraqi civil war has been fought yet,” so we have to stick around so we don’t miss all the fun. As Iraq becomes more secure, it moves backwards. There’s a “long-term trend toward increasing authoritarianism,” so we have to stay in Iraq so things don’t go back to the way they were under Hussein even though, as Ricks just told us, things were better under Hussein than they are now.

Ricks says the surge is a strategic failure because it didn’t bring about the unification government it was supposed to produce. But that’s okay, because an analyst Ricks knows says “power sharing is always a prelude to violence,” so we have to stay in Iraq to make sure we don’t achieve our strategic objective, which will be easy because “the whole notion of democracy and representative government in Iraq” was “absolutely ludicrous” from the get go.

If you’re thinking Petraeus was plotting all along to create a situation we couldn’t extract ourselves from, you’re right. As Ricks notes, Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.”

Even Ricks seems uncertain that we’ve seen genuine progress; maybe we’ve actually just “poured more gas on the fire,” he says, and even though the surge is a failure, its “attitude is right” so it was “the right step to take,” and we should continue to support U.S. presence in Iraq because we’ll be there a long time whether we support it or not.

As Ricks explained to David Gregory on Meet the Press, Petraeus and his henchmen have Obama over a barrel. If Obama continues to stand up to them, they’ll accuse him of betraying the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace poofter vote. If things go the way Ricks predicts, the president will fold, the military oligarchy will consolidate its hold on American political power, and the neocons will live to make other people’s sons fight another day because they conned Tom Ricks into covering for them.

How sad it is to see that Thomas E. Ricks, dean of the Pentagon beat, has been pants down, bent-over-the-table seduced by the neoconservative cabal. He is as mad as they are, and as madly in love with their eternal crusade in the Middle East as he is with David Petraeus.

UPDATE: Ward Carroll of Military.com, where I have contributed a weekly column for nearly three years, refused to run this essay.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

FROST: So what in a sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston Plan or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.

NIXON: Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.

FROST: By definition.

NIXON: Exactly. Exactly. If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law. Otherwise they’re in an impossible position.

Now, notice how Tricky Dick frames this. It’s legal for the prez to do whatthefuckever if:

• national security is threatened, or
• there’s “a threat to internal peace” of “significant magnitude.”

Well, that certainly sounds reasonable.

A couple quick questions, though. First, how do we determine if there’s a threat, and second, what are the criteria for defining “significant magnitude”? Best I can tell, those calls rest with … the president?

Fast forward 31 years (that’d be to now for you non-math majors), where we find another prominent political Dick – Cheney, in this case -  arguing that the Trickster was right, pretty much.

On Fox News Sunday today, host Chris Wallace asked Vice President Cheney, “if the President, during war, decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?” “I think as a general proposition, I’d say yes,” replied Cheney.

Cheney went on to defend the administration’s actions over the past eight years:

CHENEY: There are bound to be debates and arguments from time to time and wrestling back and forth about what kinds of authority is appropriate in any specific circumstances, but I think that what we’ve done has been totally consistent with what the Constitution provides for.

Okay, let’s be sure I understand the argument, which seems to go something like this:

1. If the country is at war…
2. …anything the president does to protect the country is legal.
3. (And war isn’t even required in Nixon’s formulation – if you’ll recall, the threat to internal peace that got him into hot water was the Democratic National Committee.)
4. We seem to have agreed, in the run-up to our little Mesopotamian misadventure, that the president decides when we should go to war.
5. Once we’re at war, it’s obviously the exclusive providence of the president to decide when to end it (see #2 above).
6. Apparently the chief executive decides what constitutes as “protecting the country” (as contextualized by both Dicks, and also we have to keep in mind that the executive and vice presidential branches of government are the ones with access to all the information and who are charged with “interpreting” it).

If I’m tracking properly – and I can’t see that I’m taking any liberties at all with what the Dicks are saying – this means that:

• the president can do anything that is needed to protect the country in time of war or domestic unrest;
• his judgment alone decides what constitutes a threat to the country and what actions are “necessary”; that is, he controls absolutely the circumstances that afford him this power;
• only he dictates when the emergency circumstances have ended.

Which means that any president has, within the bounds of the Constitution as interpreted by Dick Cheney, the authority to establish himself as Dictator-for-Life. Is this about right?

Hail, Caesar. Let the Calvinball begin.

…in 2004 Warren declared that marriage, reproductive choice, and stem cell research were “non-negotiable” issues for Christian voters and has admitted that the main difference between himself and James Dobson is a matter of tone.  He criticized Obama’s answers at the Faith Forum he hosted before the election and vowed to continue to pressure him to change his views on the issue of reproductive choice.  He came out strongly in support of Prop 8, saying “there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.” He’s declared that those who do not believe in God should not be allowed to hold public office.

“Tone,” my well-toned ass. At the risk of reopening some delicate old rhetorical wounds, the difference between Warren and James Dobson/Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson is lipstick.

Oh, and he also believes that God wants us to whack Ahmadinejad. Good thing for him that Warren is a moderate, huh? Just imagine what a real conservative Christian would want to do to him.

So, what is Obama thinking here? Possibilities include:

1: The Uber-Unity Angle: I know Obama is hell-bent on being a man for ALL the people, ALL the time, regardless of whatever sorts of barking loonery they profess great faith in, and I’m sure this is part-and-parcel of his realpolitik theory about getting us past our partisan divisions. I’ve written before about the ways in which our power-elites have played us against each other, and I’m not a fan of artificial divisions. But at the same time, I don’t think we want everybody on the team – not unless they join on the right terms. There are people in America who don’t need to be courted or united, they need to be changed, and until this happens you’re inviting disaster.

2: The Strictly Personal Angle: Maybe Pastor Dan is right – maybe Barack just likes the guy. I don’t know that this makes me feel a whole lot better, but by the same token, no politician ever got elected by pandering to the likes of me.

3: The Use ‘Em and Lose ‘Em Angle: Perhaps Obama is just about tossing the fundagelicals a bone to make them feel like he’s representing them, too. If so, Warren doing an invocation is something I can live with as long as that’s all he’s doing. I won’t like it (listen, I’ve read the Constitution and Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, so to my understanding the word “God” should never occur in any remotely official legal context) but if this is the extent of Warren’s involvement in the next four to eight years of my life I suppose I’ll hold my nose and deal with it. But if this well-heeled neo-Puritan becomes an intimate consultant and policy driver I might not be quite as forgiving. Nor should you.

Whether it’s 1, 2, 3, all of the above or none, this is a bad move by Obama. You don’t effectively promote unity and progress by handing the show over to a guy who has offended every American with a working brain. So – off to a bad start. Maybe the change we can believe in comes later on the card.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an inauguration to plan for and I can’t find my Ouija board or my official Increase Mather prayer book anywhere….

This time, though, Crane (who’s battling through the early stages of Alzheimer’s) breaks through to a moment of pristine, Emmy-worthy clarity. In a brilliantly crafted scene, he explains to Shore that

You pro-choice people, you need Roe vs. Wade. You’re desperate for it. Not because you’re sure of your opinion, but because you’re not. You need to cling to that ruling as moral validation for a position you’re not entirely comfortable with, deep down.

Denny Crane, indeed.

There’s more than a grain of truth in Crane’s accusation. Pro-lifers have the luxury of absolute moral certainty, you see. Life begins at conception, they insist, and therefore abortion is murder. Period. And life is the most sacred thing on Earth. Is this formulation without its problems? Of course not – it’s about as inane as are all incredibly simple answers to incredibly complex questions. But it is simple, and if you’ve ever been to a pro-life rally you understand that this crowd is not inherently drawn to complexities.

Pro-choicers? Well, the pro-choice side of the argument is a tad more complicated because it’s not really about abortion at all. Let’s be clear on something: pro-choice does not equal pro-abortion. I have never in my life met a single human being who was pro-abortion. Not one. Such a person may exist – we’re a nation of over 300 million people, after all, so somewhere out there a freak-fringe analogue to Fred Phelps may be running loose. But so far I haven’t met this person. (My fellow Scrogue, Dr. Wendy Redal, advises me that Warren Hern of the Boulder Abortion Clinic may come close to fitting that bill, at least in the eyes of some.)

So while the two camps disagree violently on what the law should be, they have one very important thing in common: pro-lifers and all pro-choicers hate abortion. Just about all of them. The problem is that the pro-choice camp is forced to confront complexity. While abortion is bad, how do we legislate against individual freedoms? More to the point, whom do we trust to so legislate?

This is where the rubber hits the road. The truth that we don’t talk about very often is that a number of folks on the pro-choice side of the street are extremely conflicted. Many, I suspect, are uneasy with the proposition that abortion, in all contexts, should be treated as a simple matter of choice. However, they recognize the pro-life movement for what it is – an insidious theocractic wedge into governance – and they believe it to be worse, on the whole, than abortion.

It’s probably safe to say that a healthy majority of pro-choicers think this way about the anti-abortion crowd. Some of us perhaps know a thoughtful, conscientious pro-life advocate who has arrived at the position without the aid of reactionary theology and who craves a solution that doesn’t trash our individual liberties. But if we do, this person is the rarest minority. In point of fact, nearly 100% of the visible opposition to Roe v. Wade in America emanates from socially conservative evangelical Christianity. I’d probably be overreaching were I to suggest that most of these people would gladly subjugate the Constitution to their ministers’ various interpretations of the Bible (however ill-informed they may be), but by the same token you’d be naive to pretend that there isn’t enough of that very dynamic to concern those of us who think Jefferson meant what he damned well said about the wall between church and state.

Bottom line: there are a lot of pro-choicers in America whose positions have very little, if anything at all, to do with abortion per se. Instead, they “cling to that ruling” because they do not, cannot, will not trust those on the other side of the police line with their liberties. Nor should they. Those who would legislate based on facile, tragically misunderstood, millennia-old mythologies must not, under any circumstances, be emboldened in their quest to legally codify America’s status as a Christian nation – not as they define “Christian.”

What I believe. Sort of.

To this point I have been speaking, perhaps too generally, on behalf of others. So let me talk more directly about what and how I think.

First, do I believe that abortion is wrong? Maybe, but “wrong” is a loaded term. Wrong by whose standards? I believe abortion is usually a very bad thing, because at the bare minimum it exacts a lasting toll on the woman having it. There aren’t any occasions I can think of where an abortion is a cause for celebration. The only times I’d count abortion as “not so bad, on the whole,” are in cases of rape or incest, or where the woman’s life is threatened or where the fetus proves to have some form of birth defect.

Yes, I’m generally okay with abortion in the case of certain kinds of physical and mental defects. Each day children are born under circumstances guaranteeing that their lives will be miserable. I find that abhorrent. Life is a remarkable thing, but a life of torture is worse than death. Mercy, and an enlightened sense of responsibility toward those doomed to suffering, this is a higher value, I believe.

I certainly do not believe that abortion is a sin, though, primarily because I reject the foundations from which the current use of the word “sin” arises. By now I hope I’m clear on this subject: your religion and your conscience are yours, but you have no right whatsoever to export your religious beliefs onto others. If you have reasoned yourself to a pro-life moral position, I respect that and we can talk about it in good faith. If you believe it because somebody told you that’s what Jesus thinks, we have nothing to talk about, and you absolutely should not be allowed anywhere near a policy-making apparatus.

Do I believe that life begins at conception? No. At least, not in any way that’s relevant or actionable from a policy perspective. Depending on how you define things, life may begin before conception – I mean, eggs and sperm are alive, right? Is this really a road we want our various legislatures wandering down?

What I’m a lot more concerned about is viability – at what point is the fetus capable of living outside the womb? Do I have a problem forbidding the aborting of a viable fetus? Well, unless we’re talking about one of the instances I note above, maybe not. But these kinds of procedures are far more rare than most pro-lifers would have you believe.

In any case, I’m not a scientist, nor am I a physician. I’m willing to take guidance on this question from those who are experts in the study of physiology and medicine. And yes, I do think it’s possible to have this conversation productively and in good faith.

So, I do believe we should get rid of abortion, then? Well, I think we’d all be better off if there were so few abortions that the subject pretty much never came up, and that when there was an abortion the circumstances surrounding it were wholly uncontroversial. But overturning Roe v. Wade would no more accomplish this than the volumes of statutes currently on the books are preventing murders, robberies, rapes, child abuse and jaywalking.

So How Do We Get Rid of Abortions, Then?

We Americans have a bad habit of addressing the symptoms instead of curing the disease. Unfortunately, you’re never going to treat a sucking chest wound with a band-aid.

The first steps to eliminating abortion in America – assuming that’s really what you’re after – require us to address the actual causes: poverty and sub-standard education. Levitt and Dubner do a nice job of examining the socio-economic conditions surrounding abortion in Freakonomics, and let’s simply note here that if abortion is a scourge in the United States, it’s not the educated and well-off neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt of the damage. To be sure, privileged girls from the best schools in the lily-whitest gated communities in America’s most respected and white-flightest suburban enclaves do get themselves into the family way on occasion, but there are few more effective prophylactics, if you will, against unwanted pregnancy than the family and communal stability engendered by top-notch education and a clear sense of opportunity in life.

Unfortunately, we’re coming off what may prove to be the eight dumbest years of governance in our history. The decade of the 2000s will not be remembered for advancing learning in our society, and it’s hard to find a better example of educational malfeasance than “abstinence-only” sex ed. Bush and his social conservative henchmen have pushed the hell out of this particular anti-educational affront to coherent policy-making, and at this stage the only controversy remaining is whether abstinence-only makes no difference or whether it makes things worse.

I expect that, upon his inauguration, we’ll see Barack Obama confronting these issues in his social and economic agendas, although whether his administration will genuinely work toward a level playing field and universal opportunity or if it will simply settle for a few cosmetic nips and tucks around the fugly spots remains to be seen. However, if we get serious about making the most of every mind and turning some of our rhetoric about how all children can grow up to do whatever they set those minds to into actual reality, then we will see dramatic drops in the abortion rate (along with corresponding decreases in all kinds of anti-social and criminal behavior).

And for our pro-life readers: that’s what you really want, right? Right?

The Real Argument

This whole thesis is one I’ve been carrying around for quite some time. It has long been obvious that our nation’s most violently divisive argument wasn’t really about abortion at all, and the basic dishonesty of this, of our collective willing suspension of disbelief, has griped me to no end. To be clear: there is no disagreement in America today, nor has there ever been, about abortion. There is almost nothing that we agree on more unanimously, in fact.

Instead, abortion is the field on which a battle is being waged. It’s as though we’ve confused the turf at the Meadowlands with the game of football. Put another way, the abortion “debate” is about abortion in roughly the same way that the Civil War was about real estate in Manassas, Gettysburg and Chattanooga.

What we call the abortion debate is better understood as a conflict over human rights. More deeply, it is about Modernity vs. Fundamentalism. Are we a nation governed by reason and law, or are we a nation governed by the priesthood? Do we believe that individuals are endowed with certain inalienable rights, or do we trust TV preachers to tell us what rights God wants us to have? Will we insist on a system that adapts and evolves as our society grows and learns, or will we cling desperately to a system that refuses to acknowledge that change even exists?

Put bluntly, will we live in the 21st Century or the 16th?

I’m willing to have debates, so long as they’re conducted intelligently and in good faith. But for too long we’ve been conflating things, tangling ourselves up in rhetorical sucker plays and refusing to acknowledge what’s really on the agenda. That has to change if we’re ever to make any progress toward resolving our fundamental differences in a way that allows us to move forward together.

I’m game, but I wonder how many are with me.

Change We Can Live With

Obama will take office on the promise of “change we can believe in.” He promises that things will be different, that we’ll step past the partisan divisions that have set us at each other’s throats for so long.

So maybe this is the moment. Maybe this is our opportunity to find a way of addressing abortion in a way that is legitimately about abortion – that is, to discuss it in terms of science and the deeper social conditions that underlie it instead of in terms of reactionary, fear-driven theology.

Before this can happen, though, President Obama will need to restore government’s respect for the Constitution, a document that has suffered tremendous abuse in recent years. Governmental research functions will need to be returned to the control of actual researchers and we’ll have to stop pretending that anti-science is actually science. No more fundamentalist litmus tests, no more faux “debates” about facts that are settled, no more obeisance to those who think that Leviticus is a peer-reviewed journal.

Maybe now is the time for this. Or … maybe not – I mean, how hopeful should I be as long as Obama is still taking Rick Warren seriously? (For a wonderfully detailed look at the … ummm, quagmire … facing Obama, see Sarah Posner’s new American Prospect analysis on “The Truth About Abortion Reduction.”)

I believe that when these things are accomplished, we’ll all be surprised at how many people are willing to sit down at the table and honestly discuss their opinions about issues that have heretofore not been open to discussion.

Denny Crane was right: many of us are uneasy about being forced into an absolutist position over something we know to be nuanced and complex. I, for one, hope the time is approaching when intelligent people can begin untangling those complexities in an environment that’s free of suspicion and fear.

Let me return to a period which is widely regarded within the advanced industrial societies as a high water mark of public service broadcasting, the BBC in the early 1960s. A key figure from those years was Sir Arthur fforde (that is the correct, if old-fashioned spelling of his name), in my view quite possibly the greatest of the chairmen of the BBC. In 1963 he published a little booklet called What is Broadcasting About, which was printed privately in an edition of 400. In this at first curious piece he tries to lay out a theological context for what was happening within the BBC, which was then at the height of its creative and social impact on British society, and causing all kinds of heartburn among what used to be called the Establishment.

The Sheer Banality of Contemporary Culture

The book is, on first reading, impenetrably obscure. On second reading what becomes clear is that it is fforde’s attempt to harmonize the BBC’s emergent agnostic and humanistic ethos with a more ancient view of the nature of religious experience. Even as I write that it does feel almost quaint, but there lies within the pages of fforde’s book arguments that are, or should be, central to any contemporary discussion of the role and purpose of broadcasting in an allegedly mature, cultured democracy. He writes:

“By its nature broadcasting must be in a constant and sensitive relationship with the moral condition of society.”

He felt that the moral establishment had failed modern society and that broadcasting was a way in which that failure could be rectified. He added that it

“is of cardinal importance that everyone in a position of responsibility should be ready to set himself or herself the duty of assuring, to those creative members of staff, who must take the daily, hourly, and even instantaneous decisions . . . that measure of freedom, independence and elan without which the arts do not flourish.”

fforde understood that then, just as now, the moral condition of society was undergoing an important change as standards which had for so long, for so many people, been successful route maps, were being redrafted. What concerned him, was not the change per se, but whether the standards which would replace them were worthy, even if they were secular rather than religious? It is a good, always necessary, question.

It goes without saying that it is my firm conviction that it is precisely the absence of such protective layers and imaginative commitments that have nurtured, brought to the surface, the boorishness, sheer banality of contemporary culture, here and elsewhere. That idea of providing a protective layer within which the imaginative spirit might create, lay at the heart of the BBC version of public service broadcasting which increasingly flourished in the post-war years.

Ian Jacob, Director-General of the BBC from 1952 to 1959, refined the notion. In 1958, in an internal document called Basic Propositions, he described public service broadcasting as:

. . . a compound of a system of control, an attitude of mind, and an aim, which if successfully achieved results in a service which cannot be given by any other means. The system of control is full independence, or the maximum degree of independence that Parliament will accord. The attitude of mind is an intelligent one capable of attracting to the service the highest quality of character and intellect. The aim is to give the best and the most comprehensive service of broadcasting to the public that is possible. The motive that underlies the whole operation is a vital factor; it must not be vitiated by political or commercial consideration.

This is one of the best attempts to capture in words a concept and view of broadcasting which remains central to the world of cultural politics. Yet even here the vision, the articulation, is limited. Jacob’s words imply that we understand the nature of public service broadcasting not by defining it, but by recognizing its results, rather as one plots the presence of a hidden planet or a subatomic particle not by “seeing” it, but by measuring the effects of its presence.

The Pilkington Committee, a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Harry Pilkington set up by the British government in 1960 to undertake an inquiry into the future of British broadcasting, said as much when it reported in 1962: “though its standards exist and are recognizable, broadcasting is more nearly an art than an exact science. It deals in tastes and values and is not precisely definable.” The committee added:

“The duty of providing a service of broadcasting, and the responsibility for what is broadcast, are vested in public corporations since the purposes and effects of broadcasting are such that the duty and responsibility should not be left to the ordinary processes of commercial enterprise, and because there are compelling objections to their being undertaken by the State…”

It suggested that the products of these bodies should be a service which fully realizes the purpose of broadcasting, which it later defined as:

“…one which will use the medium with an acute awareness of its power to influence values and moral standards; will respect the public right to choose from amongst the widest possible range of subject matter, purposefully treated; will at the same time be aware of and care about public tastes and attitudes in all their variety; and will constantly be on the watch for and ready to try the new and unusual.”

The Dream of the Mob

The beast that lurks in the shrubbery of these kinds of discussions is that whatever the definitional uncertainties, that great broadcasting can be experienced and recognized but never properly captured by language, means that someone has to decide on what is “good” and “bad,” that there should be a guiding hand, by what has been referred to as “custodians” or the “caretakers” of culture. For much of the history of public broadcasting this idea – so anathema today – was simply taken for granted. Hierarchies of social status and cultural judgment were simply assumed.

A key justification for the custodial role in most societies where public service broadcasting was established was that since the radio frequency used for transmissions was a limited natural resource, someone had to ensure that its use served the public good, and the whole community. The cultural geology of this decision had, however, a deeper level to it, based on 19th Century assumptions about the ways in which the arts and humanities could elevate the human condition.

In fact, one way of looking at the creation of public service broadcasting in the early years of the 20th Century is that it was the relocation of a 19th Century humanistic dream that through culture the fragile structure of civilization could be nurtured and protected. The fear that drove that dream was of “the mob,” the pervasive belief among cultural, religious and political elites that there was indeed a dark side to the human soul that was, when let loose, dangerous and devastating to the flesh as well as the spirit.

And who is to say that they were wrong, nestling as they did between the first great war and a looming second. And let us not forget that John Adams in his dialogue with Jefferson about the nature of democracy made the comment that a “mob is no less a mob because they are with you.” There remained, however, well into the 20th Century, a residual faith, tied to the whole condition of Enlightenment humanism and belief in progress, that popular culture need not be debauched but could in fact transcend itself. Consider these key passages from the Pilkington Report:

“Television does not, and cannot, merely reflect the moral standards of society. It must affect them, either by changing or by reinforcing them…..

Because the range of experience is not finite but constantly growing, and because the growing points are usually most significant, it is on these that challenges to existing assumptions and beliefs are made, where the claims to new knowledge and new awareness are stated. If our society is to respond to the challenges and judge the claims, they must be put before it. All broadcasting, and television especially, must be ready and anxious to experiment, to show the new and unusual, to give a hearing to dissent. Here, broadcasting must be most willing to make mistakes; for if it does not, it will make no discoveries.”

The suggestion here isn’t that public broadcasters are all hoping and dreaming that their programs will transform people from cultural and intellectual slobs into something of which one can more readily approve. But rather that objectively some such argument must be the last line of defense. The language is of standards, quality, excellence, range. The logic is of social enrichment, that in however indefinable a manner this society is “better” for having programs produced from within the framework of those social arguments that pursue a public interest, compared to those programs produced within an environment in which commerce or politics prevail.

The Consequences of Public Taste

It is interesting and extremely useful, to counterpose these principles, values and ambitions documented over the past several pages with the evolving realities of cultural production as a market, since they entail very different world views. I have long suspected that the potency of the market is its simplicity, in that it doesn’t ask very much of anyone – there is no required effort to engage at some deeper level what it is that is being broadcast. The more purposeful, social and cultural agenda of the European model does demand – as it should – some effort on the part of the audience-qua-citizen. The audience-qua-consumer is easier to feed.

There is, however, another ironic potency in the market model, one that speaks to an inherent tension in the deep commitment to the idea of the collective, “the public,” “the public sphere,” the “cultural sphere.” This inevitably rests uneasily with what is an even more basic principle on which our cultures were, and are, established, the foundational sovereignty of the individual. The fact of this latent tension could be avoided for much of the history of broadcasting, for example, by touting the argument that because the natural resource of the radio spectrum was scarce it had to be carefully controlled so that everyone could benefit. This was a useful fiction. The agenda of the founding figures of public broadcasting was always about nurturing social and cultural good, and maintaining standards that would not be populist. In other words there was always a residual fear of the consequences of untrammeled public taste.

The beauty of the idea of the market, for those who wish to make the case rhetorically, is that it represents the triumph of populism – some of which is intelligent, much of which is corrupted, but it is populism nevertheless. Its potency lies in the fact that it embodies a kind of faux democracy, the individual making his or her own choices from the range of cultural goods made available by the market. It is a difficult argument to oppose since the essential premise of western governance and culture in modernity is that society is constituted of individuals who are rational, informed and sovereign, an admittedly nonsensical but nonetheless potent conceptualization. There is obvious utility in this for proponents of the market, because if one cannot interfere with the right of Everyman as citizen to act as Everyman as consumer then one cannot, by definition, interfere with the market because one would thereby not be interfering with this or that company that markets its wares, but with the very stuff of democratic civilization.

Another charge against the kind of values I have been discussing here rests on a rejection of the very idea of making a judgment about what is good or bad, since this implies a hierarchy of values. In the argot of pseudo-postmodernism this is anathema. In his latest book, Richard Hoggart writes well about the problems of this relativistic perspective:

“It is a growing characteristic of mass communications today – in the press, magazines and much broadcasting – that they show no respect at all for the ‘life of the mind’ (a good and essential phrase), but dismiss such things as elitist and not for people ‘such as us’; not that ‘we’ now think ourselves inferior, but quite the opposite; we are members of the overwhelming majority who are going the way the world is going. This is the dead center of popular and unassailable taste. Chat-show hosts and hostesses display it daily, television ‘personalities’ are pleased to indicate that they have no tastes which in anyway differ from those of their mass audiences, and certainly none which might seem ‘better’ than those of the audiences. The broadsheet newspapers often fall backwards into those postures. Such words, words of evaluation, have fallen out of the populist lexicon. Broadcasting interviewers see themselves as ‘the voice of the common man,’ which is a reductive myth; their common man is all too often an invented vulgarian.”

He points out that the Booker Prize for 2001 was not awarded to a writer that public opinion seemed too favor. When asked why, one of the judges said, “This prize is not meant to be a reflection of public taste. It is a prize for literary quality.” Hoggart concludes:

“At the bottom of the acceptance of relativism as the only belief is, paradoxically, a belief that there is no such thing as belief or conviction. That can do much to remove guilt or even the feeling of being somehow lost, since relativism provides a Dead Sea of common feelings in which we float, all warm and supported. The motto used to promote the soap-opera East Enders, repeatedly shown on television, hammers away with: ‘Everyone’s talking about it.’ ‘So what?’ – is the only self-respecting response.”

It is terribly easy to turn this around and to make the accusation of elitism, made all the more weighty in an age where the very idea of a hierarchy of values is called into question, indeed seen as out of date – useless, of course, we are dealing with the majestic superior ability of a Michael Jordan or a Roger Clemens or a Peyton Manning.

Those who would argue for the market, for giving people only what they want, for abandoning other, larger more principled judgments that see human beings, citizens, as something other than statistics in skins, principles that celebrate excellence as much they reject tat, must persuade us that all is well and cheery, must hope that we never do come to understand the comment made by Hector, in Alan Bennett’s History Boys. He suggests that in the presence of great literature (and I would expand this to all great culture, whether in print, or on the screen at home and in the movie theater) it is as if a hand has reached out and taken our own.

The Foundational Principle of the Republic

There is, however, another important lesson from the events of the past ten years, for me most profoundly reflected in the hate mail (e- and snail-) that I received, particularly after Karr was released. This is far from the first time this has happened and it was probably on no greater scale than the attacks that took place after David Mills and I made the first of our documentaries. The reactions then were incredible, with phone-in campaigns to the Dean’s office, letters to the President of CU, to the then-Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Phil DiStefano, to the Regents, almost all calling for me to be fired. The university was nothing but supportive, for which I was and am grateful. There was even a bizarre attempt by some to get Congress to revoke my green card. It was all very strange and intense, so when Karr happened the flood of attacks was neither unusual nor unexpected. I simply became a useful whipping boy for, well, for what?

I think the answer here is again quite complex. Obviously there were those who hated the position I had taken on the Ramsey case, and the fact that I had been very vocal and public in my belief that John and Patsy were innocent. (That was actually not my position in 1997 and 1998. I didn’t know, because I couldn’t know, what the evidence was so that when we made the first documentary the question of their guilt or innocence was conceptually irrelevant.) To then, in 2002, make a documentary, working with Lou Smit, that laid out the case that an intruder killed JonBenet would inevitably incur further wrath. Clearly, however, what was thrown at those who came out in support of the Ramseys and argued their innocence (one of the lead detectives on the investigation described Lou Smit as a “delusional old man,” a comment that would be offensive if it weren’t so silly), was nothing compared to the intense and unrelenting abuse that the Ramseys and their family had to endure.

However, what perplexed then, as it does now, was, why? Why the fury, the anger, the inability to disagree without hating, a condition which defines not just the narrative around JonBenet, but a vast acreage of public discourse.

Honest disagreement, the ability to engage in rational discourse is the foundational principle of the Republic. On April 13, 1943, the bicentennial of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and declared:

“Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in Man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves.” FDR concluded his address by proclaiming Jefferson’s own words that are etched into the memorial, words that are wonderfully and determinedly paradoxical, the very essence of the Enlightenment: “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” In his 1988 biography of Jefferson, The Pursuit of Reason, Noble Cunningham notes that despite Jefferson’s numerous interests and accomplishments, “…certain basic tenets motivated his life and shaped his actions in whatever challenge he faced. Of these, none was stronger than his belief in ‘the sufficiency of reason for the care of human affairs.’ As a man of the Enlightenment who believed in the application of reason to society as well as to nature, Jefferson throughout his life pursued the use of reason as the means by which mankind could obtain a more perfect society… (He believed) that ‘knowledge is power, that knowledge is safety, that knowledge is happiness’…” His faith in the power of reason “nourished his belief in progress, under-girded his political principles, explained his devotion to learning and to educational opportunity for every person, and produced the optimistic outlook that failed him only as he approached the end of a very long life.”

In 1927, in the case Whitney v. California, Justice Louis Brandeis, in what is widely regarded as the most profound articulation of the meaning and importance of the First Amendment, wrote:

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the state was to make men free to develop their faculties; and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to speak as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones…. “

Brandeis’ vision rests on a basic premise: that there is both a human capacity and an urge to use language to pursue truth. The assumption about the power of language and evolved thought has guided the whole history of our culture, or, perhaps more accurately, it has guided the idea of what our culture should look like: informed citizens, engaged in mature reasoning, arriving at decent and proper ends.

The question now in play is this: in a society whose forms of popular, mediated, mass culture are all but bereft of evolved language, whose education system leaves much to be desired in its failure to nurture the critical thinking capabilities of its students, to what extent can it still claim to continue Jefferson’s “pursuit of reason,” and Brandeis’ “secret of liberty”?In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that we live in a place in time in which there is a great demand, from different corners, for a studied silence. It was clear to me, still is, that there was, to many people’s way of thinking, something unseemly about even suggesting a counter-narrative about the Ramsey case.

There is, unfortunately, nothing remarkable about this. Witness the rigidities of great swaths of people, here and elsewhere, with fundamentalist religious beliefs. Consider what happens when the likes of Daniel Moynihan in the 1960s and Bill Cosby more recently tried to engage a debate about the social ills of the African-American family. And, of course, think through the extraordinary difficulty that was faced by anyone who, in the years after 9/11, wished to challenge the brutish and stupid foreign policy of the Bush administration, underpinned as it was by a public hysteria that sought some kind of psychological relief by clinging desperately to the symbol of the flag and the mother’s milk succour of patriotism.

Passion and Reason

There is another, related way of thinking about this that also comes out of 18th Century thought. In that time physicians believed that the mind was divided into three main faculties – reason, feeling and will and that, as Norman Dain wrote in his 1964 book, Concepts of Insanity, “sanity prevailed when reason remained master over feelings and will. Violent emotions would overthrow the power of reason.” The essential premise then, as now, is that we are rational. That is why we expect the juror and the citizen to arrive a conclusion in the wake of a clear and rational engagement with the available information and evidence, even though in neither case are they required to explain how they arrive at any given conclusion. However, as Arthur O. Lovejoy notes in Reflections on Human Nature, while “…the philosophers of the Age of Reason believed that although reason should control the other mental faculties, in fact the passions, or emotions, always ruled supreme: reason served primarily to accomplish the aims of the passions.”

This description fits perfectly to what happened in the Ramsey narrative, where many people were driven by intense, even primal passions, all the while using their capacity to reason to cobble together “information” to demonstrate the legitimacy of the visceral hatred of the Ramseys and of anyone who argued the case that an intruder killed JonBenet. On a larger scale, as I write, fully one-third of the public believes that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11, and almost half of the public continues to hold to the idea that humans were created in their current form at one moment in time in the past 10,000 years, offering a mountain of “evidence” to support what the scientific community would deem to be an absurd belief. They hold fast to such beliefs, even in the face of their obvious falsity, because not to do so would shatter whatever semblance of emotional calm they still cling to, and still desperately need.

Another issue that perplexed me was that there was something about Patsy that seemed to make a lot of people not just uneasy, but ready and willing to believe that she was capable of killing her child, possibly with the assistance of John, and then making it like someone else was responsible. The obvious question is: why? Yet again, I think the answer taps into a complex of emotional and psychological conditions of how, in this instance, we come to think about crime, and in particular, how we “see” guilt.

What was important here in understanding the narrative that surrounded Patsy was that it was not the presence of any meaningful evidence that suggested her involvement, and indeed what evidence did exist, such as the DNA, pointed away. Rather, there was a loose and vague perception, held by many, as to who she was. There were many facets to the case, the forensics, the theories, the flawed investigation, the small town Gothic atmospherics, but I had long understood that much of the essential energy within that narrative had literally been looking us in the face, Patsy’s face, and the fact that she entered JonBenet in the pageants reflected, for many people, a moral laxity the depth of which was such that she was indeed capable of brutalizing her daughter in a moment of anger and then pretending that it was someone else. It is not an argument that I can even begin to understand, but it is one which was simply assumed by many people. It was almost as if, in pointing the finger at her, there was some kind of emotional relief.

In her 1990 book, The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm takes a fascinating look at the case of Jeffrey MacDonald and the writer Joe McGinnis. MacDonald was serving three life sentences for murdering his wife and two children. McGinnis had come to prominence in the 1960s for his book The Selling of the President, which told in savage detail the way in which advertising had been used by the Nixon campaign. He had subsequently developed a successful writing career, including a book about the MacDonald case, Fatal Vision.

McGinnis had written the book at the suggestion of MacDonald, whose intent was to have McGinnis vindicate him in his claim that he was innocent. Malcolm’s account points to the way in which McGinnis ingratiated himself with MacDonald, leading him to believe that he was a friend who did indeed believe in MacDonald’s innocence. When the book finally appeared it was a portrait of a psychopathic killer, not the ode to a wrongfully convicted friend which MacDonald had been expecting. MacDonald sued and almost won (one juror refused to support MacDonald) prompting Malcolm’s wry comment: “…five of the six jurors were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving of more sympathy than the writer who had deceived him.”

There is one passage in Malcolm’s book in which she describes a dinner conversation she had with MacDonald’s attorney, Gary Bostwick, and his wife, Janette, a psychotherapist. At one point Janette interjects:

“In my work, a patient will come in and say, ‘This is the truth about me.’ Then, later in the therapy, a significant and entirely opposite truth may emerge – but they’re both true.” In Malcolm’s account, Bostwick responds: “It’s the same with the judicial process…People feel that it’s a search for the truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.”

There is much to agree with in what Bostwick was saying and in explaining what happened to Patsy. It also perhaps helps explain why the media pay an almost obsessive attention to certain cases, not just to formal legal proceedings, but also to the pseudo-trials that take place on television, talk radio and in print media. They do so in part because they are part of that process of societal catharsis, given energy by rumor, gossip and almost obsessive voyeurism and the cruel brew of “certainty,” as to what “happened.” In the end “truth” is not what judgment of guilt and innocence is about, it is all about mood.

The Unreal Made Real

The problem is compounded by the fact that the media, who should properly have been a countervailing force to these tendencies, were themselves complicit in fueling the firestorm in which the Ramseys found themselves engulfed. It has been pointed out by such people as Tom Patterson, the Benjamin C. Bradlee Professor at the Kennedy School of Government, that at some point in the 1970s, the tradition and character of investigative journalism in the American media began to change. At its best that tradition had journalists going to considerable lengths to unearth facts, to dig beneath the surface of a story to reveal hidden truths or, as with the Pentagon Papers, to offer enriched interpretation of information which already exists. As Patterson told the Committee of Concerned Journalists,

“by the late 1970s we find a substitute for careful, deep, investigative reporting – allegations that surface in the news based on claims by sources that are not combined with factual digging on the reporter’s part. The tendency increased in the 1980s, increased again in the 1990s… The use of unnamed and anonymous sources becomes a larger proportion of the total…”

It certainly characterized the coverage of the Ramsey case.

One particular consequence of this is to allow rumor and gossip to flourish and to establish potent, feverish irrationalities and “understandings” of an event in which the unreal is made real, the stupid profound, ignorance knowledge and the bigoted insightful. There is no question that rumor and gossip are part of who we are, and serve as social and emotional utilities in “explaining” the world around us. In the context of crime rumor, gossip and innuendo can become a potent means of establishing a paradigm from within which one sees something “this” way rather than “that.” The only way to step outside of this is to engage the evidence, think through the narrative of the crime, question commonsensical ways of thinking, use critical faculty, in other words to do what most people, most of the time have neither the patience, the resources nor desire to do. What is clear, though, is that in the vortex of rumor and gossip minor personality traits, small eccentric quirks of character can be quickly transformed into hints of some dark underlying condition.

A particularly odious aspect to rumour, gossip and innuendo is that they are rarely if ever presented as such. They can masquerade as “concern” for the victim, a pretentious proffering of “…it pains me to say this but…” The gossip or rumour-monger is not especially concerned with solving a problem, rather drawing a kind of narcissistic sustenance from them, from “knowing” something that others don’t. I was, for example, told by three different people, who were in no way connected, that they knew someone who had been on the chair lift at the Eldora ski area near Boulder with a cop who told them that the Ramseys were about to be arrested, and I was told this in each case with a kind of knowing glee. And gossips thrive on the negative, the controversial and the sensational – qualities which were present in abundance in the Ramsey case, as neither the media nor their public heeded the admonition of Psalm 34: 13-15: “Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech.”

So at one level the lesson was, yet again, that the idea of reasoned discourse is, in this culture as in much of the rest of the world, on life support. What still plagues me, though, is why, how did this come about? Perhaps it was always there, this corrosive hostility to an idea not liked, a person who is different, “the other,” the “alien,” a fear of narratives that are complex, a demand for that which is simple and readily understood. I’m reminded of William James’ comment that “…a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” Perhaps there is a deep human instinct to manage neurotic anxiety by projecting outward irrational loathing. One way of thinking about how the culture dealt with the case (and one could put many others cases and situations in here) is to see it all as what one might call a “persecution text,” an acting out of something that, however troubling, seems to be deeply human.

There is in fact an extensive literature on this, such as R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Laurie Carlson’s A Fever in Salem, Richard Sugarman’s Rancour Against Time, Rene Girard’s The Scapegoat, Max Scheler’s Ressentiment, Robert Wuthnow’s Meaning and Moral Order, Hugh Trevor Roper’s work on historical patterns in lynchings and a veritable library of works dealing with Salem, perhaps most notably Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans.

This is a rich and fascinating literature, but at its core is a relatively simple argument: that anxiety at the individual and collective level, caused by external circumstance, creates a powerful urge to punish – someone, something, somewhere. The emotional physics are: punish – feel better. It doesn’t, of course, except in a momentary sense, work. This would be troubling in and of itself, but it becomes especially so when the mood is used as fodder for entertainment, and therefore boosts in ratings and circulation.

I have long thought that John and Patsy Ramsey were “guilty” well before JonBenet died, that they would both be, but Patsy in particular, the ready object of resentment, a kind of class loathing, but that in this presumption of guilty evil lay emotional utility and significant profit. It has certainly been my experience that much of the public mind in the Ramsey case was defined by unreason and that its suggestible irrationalities reflected a larger condition, and a fearsome thought, that the Age of Reason never really happened except in the fevered, if would-be noble, utopian imaginings of the Founding Fathers.

Remember those comments I used at the beginning, where people expressed their profound, if unfounded belief in Ramsey guilt. In them I had the first whiff of what I’ve been trying to engage here, a sense of a canker in the social and moral order within which we just happen to dwell. It troubled me partly because of that feeling I expressed earlier of the desire for life to be fair and decent and just, a good and caring place of fine principle with a moral culture (of whatever theological or a-theological stripe) that was not of the Fallen. It also troubled me because within the stench of spite and hate lay a very serious question as to who we really are, of who we should properly see in the morning’s mirror.

Next: An Awful, Dark Year

INDEX

West:  “You may recognize this famous quote:  ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  That’s from Karl Marx.  How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around.”

Biden:  “Are you joking?  Is … is this a joke?”

West:  “No.”

Biden:  “Is that a real question?”

West:  “That’s a real question.”

Biden, of course, being caught by surprise, could say little that would be of much use on a television screen.  He could have made the point that all taxation does, in some manner, spread wealth.  Even soldiers are paid from tax dollars and, while they earn their pay, there’s no question that they are being paid from taxpayer’s wealth.  Anyone being paid to serve taxpayers, from dog catchers to police, are part of a wealth spreading scheme of some sort.

What Biden should have done, had he not been blind-sided, was to make the point that all Obama is doing is adjusting the progressive income tax structure that was supported by none other than Adam Smith, the patron saint of free markets, and introduced to the US, originally, by Republican Abraham Lincoln.  Later, the progressive income tax was supported so heavily by Republican Teddy Roosevelt that the Constitution was amended to accommodate the income tax, and Roosevelt made it clear, in a speech delivered in 1910, why he thought a progressive tax was the right way to go.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

When it comes to redistributing wealth, good ol’ Republican Teddy was pretty clear, wasn’t he?  Maybe Teddy Roosevelt was a Marxist.

What about Republican Ronald Reagan, the modern patron saint of conservatism?  Reagan was a big supporter of the earned income credit (EIC), a distribution from wealthy taxpayers to less wealthy ones, saying it is, “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”   Both Reagan and George Bush the First increased funding for the EIC.  Are they both Marxists?

But perhaps the most effective response might have gone like something like this:

Barbara, I’m glad you asked that question, because words like “socialist” and “Marxist” are getting tossed around by people who are afraid of losing an election, hoping that these words will sway enough votes to get them into the White House, riding on a lie.

The fact is, Barbara, that if there is a socialist or Marxist in this race — and I don’t really believe there is — then it has to be Sarah Palin.

In Sarah Palin’s state of Alaska, every citizen gets a check from the government every year for doing absolutely nothing.  Not for work.  Not for anything they’ve earned.  They get that check just for breathing and living in Alaska.  Last year, that check amounted to $3,269 per taxpayer.  And all for nothing.

Do you know where Alaska gets that money?  They get it mostly from the oil companies that pump oil from the state.  More than half of Alaska’s total tax revenues come from separation taxes, which are basically taxes on oil and minerals taken from the ground.  Another 25% or so comes from corporate taxes.  Because companies are paying so much, Alaska citizens pay no income or state sales taxes.

But they do get a check generated from the wealth those big companies generate.  And there is no other state in the Union that doesn’t require either a sales or income tax from its citizens, yet gives them a check every year from money those citizens didn’t earn.

I don’t really think Sarah Palin is a Marxist, Barbara.  I think that’s a word made up by desperate people who will do anything to win – even tear our country apart by demonizing their opponents.  But if there is a Marxist in this race, Sarah Palin would have to be the one.

Maybe we could get Michele Bachmann to investigate Sarah for being un-American.

by Michael Tracey

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

So on to the really interesting part: what has it all meant, what do I take away from this curious episode in my life, and from a decade-long involvement not just in the narrative around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the cultural ecology out of which that narrative climbed?

Henry James once wrote that to be an American is a complex fate, a sentiment I’d like to amend by suggesting that to be alive is a complex fate, pulled asunder as we are by the competing forces of deep, unspoken Neolithic urges, the demands of the caring heart and struggles in usingdavid the Rational mind, all elements present in the World of JonBenet.

Three general issues suggest themselves: the first is what was revealed about the condition and nature of contemporary American culture; the second involves what might be called the mood of the public mind; and the third is the personal experience.

The Media vs. Justice

Perhaps the most serious issue which emerged, or was revealed, yet again was the relationship that now exists between two core institutions, the media and the judicial system. In fact, increasingly, and wrongly, these two elemental parts of this society as a democracy seem to be engaged in a danse macabre, where the law has become part of the entertainment industry, and where that industry is consistently fed and led by leaks from law enforcement. As I suggested in the opening sections of this essay, and in the email to David Mills, small but influential sections of law enforcement in Boulder willingly provided “information” from the investigation which had one clear purpose, to persuade the American people of that which the police department was utterly convinced, that John and Patsy Ramsey killed their daughter. That “information” was presented uncritically to a public only too willing to believe what they were being told. In effect, it seemed that what was illustrated here was that the very integrity of the rule of law is increasingly compromised by the role of ratings and circulation driven media.

The role of publicly constructed rumor and suggestion, publicly made falsehoods, through the mass media, the Internet and everyday chatter in people’s lives, raises a profound issue of law. The public verdict was of the Ramsey’s guilt. If one thinks of this in terms of the proper demands of the law, any case of guilt has to be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. Any conviction on less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt is constitutionally infirm under state statutes and the Constitution. At the heart of this lies the notion that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be premised on pure conjecture. The jury has to consider, as does any appellate court, whether the evidence, considered most favourably to the State, was such as to permit a rational conclusion by the jury that the accused was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Can the jury rationally choose the hypothesis that supports guilt rather than the hypothesis which is consistent with innocence?

The question which needs to be considered in this context is whether the media coverage of this or any other case is prejudicial and therefore harmful to the basic rights of the accused because of the precise way in which it nurtures, even advocates, pure conjecture that inhibits the ability to look at the evidence rationally. What was certainly being undermined was an ancient tenet of Anglo-Saxon law, one which is embedded in the Constitution’s 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments, the presumption of innocence or, as the Supreme Court has asserted, the assumption of innocence.

The burden of proof is on the prosecution to convince the court that the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This right to be presumed innocent is so important to democratic culture that many societies, not just the United States, have included it in legal codes and constitutional documents. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 11, recognizes the presumption of innocence, as does the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In many countries journalistic codes of ethics clearly state that journalists should clearly refrain from referring to suspects as if their guilt was clear and certain.

A very basic question then, one to which we will never know the answer, is whether or not the Ramseys, one or both, could have gotten a fair trial, given the clear and overwhelming evidence that the whole narrative around them was one of their being guilty. For the record, Bryan Morgan, John’s attorney, thinks that given the makeup of the population in Boulder (which has been declared by Forbes Magazine to be the smartest city in America because it has, per capita, more people above age 25 or over with at least a Bachelor’s degree – 52.9% – and this resting on the highly questionable premise that possessing a degree is a simile for being smart) and given voir dire, where potential jurors are questioned, they could have gotten a fair trial. I have to say, Bryan has more sunshine in his soul than I have.

In this context, also, there was an intriguing presentation in the winter of 1999 by the pollster Dave Sackett in a speech on “Key Trends in National and Colorado Public Opinion.” He suggested that: 1. truth is what people believe; 2. villains must be identified; 3. rhetoric is more important than fact; 4. the intensity of the focus is on detailing the problem, not the solution.

One of the arguments used by media lawyers to demand that information be released from the investigation, such as the ransom note and the autopsy report, was that there was a public “right to know.” It was, lawyers such as Denver based Tom Kelley who would claim, in the public interest.

The obvious question that emerges from that is, why? And what if one could reasonably argue that maintaining the integrity of the investigation served another equally compelling public interest, apprehending a vicious killer and therefore protecting public safety?

What seems perfectly clear is that the issue isn’t one of the public’s right to know but, all too often, the public’s right to ogle, at the expense of those who may or may not have been charged with a crime, or who simply may have a desire for their privacy to be protected. The premise seems to be that if the public’s interest in a story is understandable then it is by definition legitimate and therefore a valid media story. This begs, again, the question of: why? Obviously there are some stories that are both of interest to the public and which speak to obvious issues of the public good and interest. Corrupt politicians on the take would be such an example. Corrupt cops would be another. What public interest or good is served, however, when every detail of a serious issue such as child murder is made available in the public square in a manner almost guaranteed, and in the Ramsey case intended, to harm other rights that the individual properly has in a society in which the rule of law is deemed to prevail? In such moments, what drives the story and its consumption by a slack-jawed public is not their need for the knowledge to sustain democratic culture, but the desire for tittle~tattle and to sate a ravenous prurience.

Perhaps my own sense of the problems they would have had in obtaining a fair trial is based in considerable part on the feeling I increasingly had that this society was extremely concerned in establishing guilt, in punishing, in condemning, but yet it was not necessarily concerned with the possibility that the innocent could get caught up in the rush to justice. Indeed there is a not inconsiderable section of the population which is willing to accept that the death penalty should be maintained, even if the innocent are occasionally wrongfully executed – though one suspects that their views might be a tad different if they were the innocent being strapped to the gurney.

I also came to see that there was a small but influential group of what one might call professional accusers – I have in mind people such as Dominick Dunne, Mark Klass and John Walsh – three men made bitter and angry by the terrible experience of having a child murdered – and such programs as Cops, 911, True Stories of the Highway Patrol, Forensic Files, as well as the numerous other people and programs that give visible force and meaning to the society’s desire, need, to put bad people away. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this even if, as I will suggest in a moment, it reflects impulses fed by deeper social and cultural pathologies.

Accusing, Damning, Condemning

As I first began to make some notes about what might become a book, in the summer of 2003, I noticed a new member of this band of those who would seek and render justice to those they deem – no, know – to be guilty and all beneath the glare of klieg lights. She was called Nancy Grace, and became a frequent pontificator on the Larry King Show. Eventually she would have her own shows on CNN and Court TV. She is, inevitably, a former prosecutor.

At that time she was particularly eager to tell us that a California woman, Lacy Peterson, was killed by her husband, Scott. There had been no trial, the evidence had not been laid out , but that didn’t matter one jot. The bastard’s guilty because Nancy says so.

A few months before, in 2002 she was equally sure that Richard Ricci, a handyman who had done work for a family in Utah, the Smarts, had kidnapped and probably murdered young Elizabeth Smart. The poor wretch, whose wife was adamant that he was asleep in her bed on the night of the disappearance, turned out to have an arrest warrant for him on an unrelated matter. He was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison he had a brain aneurysm and passed away. On March 12, 2003, Elizabeth Smart was found walking down a street in a Salt Lake City suburb in the company of a psychopathic drifter and self-proclaimed prophet, Brian David Mitchell, and his wife Brenda Barzee, with whom the whole while Elizabeth had been camping out in the hills near her home.

Nancy never said sorry, because she clearly had no more capacity to admit error than she has to offer forgiveness or the benefit of the doubt. Given these serious character flaws it should come as no surprise that she is in great demand for talk shows, has her own show on CNN and has a following of viewers, overwhelmingly women, who call in and before offering their question and comment say “I think you’re great Nancy,” at which point a faux smile crosses her face like a sunbeam on a granite cliff.

Honesty makes me confess to the fact that when I first saw her I had an immediate and visceral dislike. Her face is flinty, hard, drained of warmth. Her eyes are dead and cruel. She drips anger at God knows what, like a divorced soccer mom who lost custody, no kid or ball, but all of the attitude. She is the very embodiment, the Goddess Athene, of the resentment that seems to afflict so many lives, a disposition that demands: punish them and make ME feel safe; punish them and make ME feel better. I nevertheless had a sense that somehow she was a victim of something, that she was in pain, that some dynamite trail led to what Mailer once called a “stricken place.”

And there was. Her fiancé was murdered.

Dunne in particular interests me. He has never seen an accused who wasn’t guilty. There is the dandy dress, the ostentatious spectacles, the name dropping, the apparently perpetual lunch at the perpetually fancy hotel, the obsession with celebrity crime, about which he writes for Vanity Fair. In his 2001 book, Justice – Crimes, Trials and Punishments, he writes about the various celebrity trials he has covered, such as Claus von Bulow, OJ, the Menendez brothers and Michael Skakel. In a moment of either candor or idiocy, during his account of the Menendez trial, he writes: “In cases of high crime, I’ve never made any attempt to present a balanced picture. This was no exception.”

I had an interesting, and to me revealing, experience with Dunne on the Larry King Show. I can’t recall what it was that happened in the Ramsey case that led to the call to see if I could go on that night. Dunne had been booked for the whole hour, but was now to share the first couple of segments in a discussion about the murder. Early in the first segment King asked Dunne what he thought about the case. In that rather faltering style of his he said, “well you know Larry, I think that the brother might have done it.” Since there are two brothers, Burke, who was nine at the time of the killing, and John Andrew who was in his early twenties and was JonBenet’s half-brother from John Ramsey’s first marriage, King asked Dunne “which one?” “Burke,” Dunne replied, and then proceeded to ramble on about how this small boy had strangled and bludgeoned his sister, concocted a long and literate ransom note, got rid of much of the objects and materials used in the crime (including a stun gun), gone back to bed and fallen asleep.

If there was any truth to this then Burke would surely count as one of the more interesting psychopathic nine year-olds in history. The fact of the matter was that Dunne seemed to be the only person on the planet who did not know that the one person who had been cleared by the Boulder police as a suspect was Burke, on the not unreasonable grounds that given the nature of the crime no small boy could have done it.

As I listened to Dunne I became furious and let him know my contempt for this extraordinary combination of arrogance and ignorance. King, I think, was slightly embarrassed and did his best to defend Dunne. What stayed with me most, however, was the unspoken assumption that one had a perfect right to make such an accusation and the fact that he knew nothing of any value about the case was irrelevant. What was important was being in the spotlight of the Larry King show, and the adrenaline rush of accusing, damning, condemning whoever happened to have wandered into the cross-hairs, and if only he could do this enough then maybe some of the anger and anguish over his own life’s loss would be diminished. That innocence and the innocent would be trampled in the process was, well, just too damn bad.

Post-OJ America

In another sense when one looks at how the media dealt with the case over the years, from that Christmas of her death to the August of Karr’s arrest, one is reminded, not for the first time, that so much of what represents itself as “journalism” is actually a broth of fantasy, the trivial, the sleazy, the sexual. It isn’t that this is so new. Since the beginning of modern media, including the early newspapers that spoke to this new Republic, crime, scandal and sex have been staples. Today, however, there is so much, at the expense of much else, and it thrives not at the margins but in the heartland of the culture. It is this that is so troubling, and of which the Ramsey case has been so potent a symbol.

Lewis Carrol might have recognized the world in which the Ramseys found themselves: “I’ll be Judge, I’ll be Jury, said cunning old fury, I’ll try the whole case and I’ll condemn you to death.” In other words, the story constructed a surreal view of reality, but one that many people were only too willing to accept as if it were real. The Ramseys and those trying to defend them had to deal with a kind of “consensual hallucination,” to use Gibson’s phrase, constituted by what the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus that “not only guides experience (but) often as well expropriates the very chance to have experience that can rightly be called ‘our own’…” galvanizing the extraordinary force of the irrational.

The context within which the case would be reported would be the America of post~O.J Simpson. It was a new media world in which the void left by his acquittal would be quickly filled by the Ramsey case. The Clinton sex scandal had further fueled a 24/7 voracious media monster. JonBenet’s murder happened just as this new media environment was being birthed. Adding to this was the deepening legitimization of the tabloid press in American journalism as they had shifted their attention away from the bizarre ~ Elvis seen paddling down the Colorado river ~ to real-life scandal, sleaze and human frailty, in which it seemed the nation was now drowning and for which the public had an impossible to slake thirst.

The Internet had also happened, with God knows how many Web sites dealing with the case and a culture of obsessive online interest in her death sprouting up with extraordinary speed. And driving it all was the fact that the images of JonBenet in the pageant videos, the sense of “that’s awful,” “tacky,” “exploitative,” the beauty, the youth, the violence, the sex, the wealth, the lifestyle and the fact that it happened on Christmas night made many giddy. One book editor, pointing out these characteristics of the case, told Sherry Keene Osborne, “I can’t tell you how excited we are.”

There was also a surfacing of a moral mood in the country that fed off a public hardened to cries of innocence, especially from parents. They felt duped by Susan Smith, who had for a time convinced everyone that her two sons had been abducted by a black man, only to eventually confess that she had taken them to a lake, fastened them in their seat belts in the back seat of her car, pushed it into the dark, cold waters and watched them slowly drown and all because she wanted to keep a boyfriend who didn’t want kids.

Millions of Americans also believed that Simpson had bought his “innocence” with his wealth and that in fact he was a killer. And the mood seemed also to feed off a delight in seeing the “better off’ brought down, as class resentment reared its head, as anger, fear and loathing became the defining emotional motifs of countless lives. It was a set of circumstances, a perfect storm, that would lead people to look at John and Patsy Ramsey and “see” killers.

The story that would be told over the coming months began, however, almost as a whisper. But even within that there was beginning to lurk the essential suggestion: here lie dark secrets, perversity of an almost unimaginable kind. Major stories work by taking on a life of their own, but, as with any life form, the essential elements are there from the moment of conception. What is remarkable is just how much and how quickly “information,” was being leaked from “sources close to the investigation.” It was, to be blunt, from the standpoint of contemporary media values, a great story.

After all, it’s just comedy…

In thinking about the nature of the media coverage I am reminded of the prescient comments of the English writer Richard Hoggart (who was also my boss for eight years) in his famously brilliant book, The Uses of Literacy, published in 1959, that moment when television had all but finished its conquest of public culture. He wrote of this

“newer mass art…This regular, increasing, and almost entirely unvaried diet of sensation without commitments is surely likely to help render its consumers less capable of responding openly and responsibly to life, is likely to induce an underlying sense of purposelessness in existence outside the limited range of a few immediate appetites. Souls which have had little opportunity to open will be kept hard-gripped, turned in upon themselves, looking out ‘with odd dark eyes like windows’ upon a world which is largely a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations.”

Later in the book he writes:

“Most mass entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life.’ They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral leveling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure. These productions belong to a vicarious spectators’ world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much .They have intolerable pretensions; and pander to the wish to have things both ways, to do as we want and accept no consequences.”

The experience also yelled, once more, that the case, and the public’s sense of it was much ado about sex, and particularly sex with children. This often invokes a dark brew of condemnation and fascination. Andrew O’Hagan has written:

“We could go a stage further, and suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite.” [He quotes Margo Jefferson, who wrote an essay about Michael Jackson:] “‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes underreported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerized by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’”

O’Hagan is correct that conclusions about guilt made ahead of the available evidence are now a commonplace in popular culture and in fact have become the stuff of comedy. In the Los Angeles Times, Jay Leno’s former scriptwriter, Brad Dickson, points to the comedian’s habit of accusing people of being guilty. He writes, “…my job consisted largely of waiting for public figures to be accused of something vile, preferably illegal. Murder was No. 1 on our hit parade. Once a public figure was accused, we writers pounced like mountain lions on a lame goat. The jokes did not necessarily have to be good…but almost always assumed guilt… Much like a hangman, a ‘Tonight Show’ writer must recognize that as a well paid jury-pool-tainter, your charge is to not question guilt.”

He writes of how uncomfortable he was, for example, with the accusations Leno consistently made against Richard Jewell, who was for a while a suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing – Leno called him ‘Doofus Dick’ Jewell. Jewell was later exonerated by the FBI and indeed declared a hero for his actions that night. Dickson also writes: “The most potentially injurious jokes I wrote were about the parents of murdered JonBenet Ramsey. If not guilty they still had to endure a national late-night drubbing insinuating that they killed their own child. Although Leno has a reputation for presuming guilt the fastest and being the most relentless with mean jokes, almost all late-night hosts assume the accused are guilty. But does it matter? After all, it’s just comedy.”

Clearly it does matter, since it is now clear that more and more people, particularly the young, look to such shows for “information.” Why else would would be governors or presidential candidates declare their intention to run on the “Tonight Show.”

The Joy of Killing

One other possible, even likely, explanation for the popularity of the story of her death and others like it, the energy which feeds the news value, is that they ‘speak’ to a vital aspect of the human condition, an innate, morbid curiosity in death and mayhem, a compulsion of sorts that incites excitement and fear in exploring macabre topics such as death and horrible violence.

Mark Twain wrote in “Following the Equator,’ which was published in 1897: “The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done – these are the traits of the human race at large.” It is a disposition that has been described as “necrophiliac voyeurism.” There is nothing new here. In a review of Perry Curtis’ Jack the Ripper and the London Press, published in 2002, Richard Davenport-Hines writes: “When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in their interest, and journalists were seldom squeamish in their reporting… executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch William Palmer hang outside Stafford Gaol. Coventry Patmore’s rousing poem ‘A London Fête,’ describing ‘the wicked treat’ of a public hanging at Newgate, conveys the public’s ‘horrid thirst’ for gore.” One of the conclusions drawn by Curtis is that “Jack the Ripper” (whose name was almost certainly made up by a journalist at the Central News Agency) may not have been very good for the health of prostitutes but he was massively good for the health of newspaper circulation.

The obvious question I’m trying to engage is why do stories such as the death of JonBenet take hold of the collective imagination, and why stories that what one might properly define as more substantive, are so often marginalized? The answer is both simple and complex. Simple because there is an obvious public appetite, complex because of the mystery of why there are such appetites in the first place, ones that originate on the dark side of the human condition. In The Empire Strikes Back, young Luke Skywalker asks his Jedi master, Yoda, whether the dark side of the force is stronger than the good. Yoda replies with his Jedi wisdom and irony, “no, easier, quicker, more seductive.” Indeed.

Next: A Crisis of Prevailing Values

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

There had earlier been another development that caught the attention of the local US intelligence services based in the embassy. In July Daxis had told me that he had got a job teaching in an international school and that while there for the interview he had “made some lovely new friends ~ little girls age five…” In a mail on July 13 he mentioned one in particular, adding “I lust for a little five year old at school…” He wrote to me of how he had massaged her bare foot and how she said to him, laughing, “…you’re a monster” except that because of her accent it came out as “monsta.”

DNA

The only rational conclusion was to assume the worst and that he had his next target. Some of the people in the US embassy had young daughters in international schools. Daxis now had their very serious attention since they, like everyone else, were working with the possibility that they were dealing with the person who had tortured to death a six year old girl on the other side of the world.

The new school term would begin on August 15th, and assuming that Daxis was telling the truth about the school, Mark Spray, who had flown to Bangkok as soon as news came of the pick-up, and other American and Malaysian officials put Daxis under 24-hour surveillance. They knew where he lived, having followed him from the drop to his apartment, but they still didn’t know who he was. Mark had managed to get an apartment on the same corridor as Daxis, and to find out who this person was he arranged with the Thai authorities to send two Thai police officers to do a passport check on the complex’s inhabitants, something which is not uncommon. They know which room he’s in, ask to see his passport. Daxis is John Mark Karr.

Then there were two outstanding questions: could they get his DNA and which school was he being employed at? The question of the DNA was crucial because of the “foreign” DNA in the drops of blood in JonBenet’s panties. The question of the school was important in case, in the brief period he had been there in July, a child had been harmed.

Mary Lacy would later be much criticized for not having DNA tests done in Bangkok. There would be much ballyhoo and squealing about this, usually from people who were actually massively relieved that Karr’s DNA did not match since they could then get back to their decade-long accusations against the Ramseys. The fact of the matter was that DNA was gathered in Bangkok, it was just never tested.

The DNA was gathered in two ways. Mark cleaned the door handle to Karr’s apartment so that when he returned and opened the door, with presumably sweaty hands, he would inevitably leave trace samples of DNA. Wearing latex gloves, Mark held the handle tight and, pulling his hand away, inverted the gloves to preserve whatever sweat and skin cells had attached to the door knob. Agents did the same to the handle bars of the mountain bike. There was, in short, a massive amount of DNA that could be tested. The question was, what to do with it, test it there or send it back to Boulder?

The decision on this was made not by Lacy but by the Denver Police Lab’s Greg LeBerge. He insisted that the DNA gathered in Bangkok should not be tested, but that Karr should be brought back so that the sample could be taken under proper, controlled circumstances and so that there could be no question as to how it was gathered or, crucially, about the chain of evidence. I have no way of proving it, but I suspect this was what might be called the “OJ effect.” You will recall that in the Simpson trial Barry Scheck, for the defense, demolished the prosecution’s case by raising all kinds of questions as to how DNA had been gathered, how it had been processed and raising serious doubts about the chain of evidence – that is, who had handled it and when. LeBerge did not want to be Schecked if this was going to trial.

Arrested

The other question had been, which school? From the moment he was identified the decision was made to keep Karr under surveillance until the start of the new term, which would be on August 15th, following a national holiday in the 14th. Karr rose early on the morning of the 15th. Mark, pretending to be a bum, was hanging around in the corridor outside Karr’s door. He could hear the shower. It would stop, and then start again, and again, as Karr was blow drying his hair, rewetting it and blow drying again. In fact, Mark became so frustrated that he started looking for the valve which would cut off the water supply to Karr’s apartment. Finally Karr leaves, mounts his bike and starts to wend his way through the heavy Bangkok traffic, followed by two surveillance cars, in one of which was Mark Spray and other agents and in the other an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, Gary Phillips. There came a point when it seemed they would lose Karr because of the traffic and so Spray and Phillips leapt from the cars and started to run after him. They did so for four miles, but remarkably they kept up and saw him, finally, enter the New Sathorn International School.

It was real, as I knew it would be since, to reiterate, everything about Karr that could be checked out, checked out. It was therefore reasonable to assume that the children that he had mentioned in the emails were real as well.

Karr’s classroom was exactly as he had described it, including a large window overlooking a road. The surveillance team had a clear view of him as he taught his eight students, four of whom were girls. On the evening of his first day he wrote me a long email describing how things had gone, and mentioning that “I have an unusually young girl in my class. She is six but will be seven in September. She’s very affectionate with me. She likes me. I’m not really that attracted to her but I need her badly. I showed her a photo of JonBenet today…” The following day, the 16th in Bangkok, the surveillance team could see him in his classroom with a young girl sitting on his lap. They saw another teacher enter the room and he quickly pushed the girl away.

Spray had seen enough and that night he accompanied Thai police to arrest Karr. They had the manager of the complex knock on his door on the pretext that there was a water leak. As John Mark opened the door, the police entered; one turned and put his hand on Spray’s chest, telling him to wait. When Mark did enter the room he noticed a suitcase by the door, one that turned out to be full of clothes. He asked Karr about this. Karr replied: “I always have a case packed so I can flee at a moment’s notice. That’s how I live.”

The Canker Afflicting Contemporary Journalism

August 16, Boulder. It didn’t take long for news of the arrest to break. The calls began. Not just from US television and radio but from all over the planet. My office phone’s voice mail became full in what seemed like an instant. The CU switchboard, the SJMC’s phone lines, all were under siege. Then my cell, all of this within a matter of hours.

It occurred to me later that I can’t recall giving out my cell phone number but an awful lot of people seemed to have it in an awfully short time. But then, in the bizarre intensity of today’s media, these people can find out the colour of your jockey shorts and how long you’ve been wearing them without breaking a sweat.

There were so many calls in the days following the arrest that my partner, Jen, became an unpaid, but rather good, press secretary, fielding calls on her cell as well as mine. The fact that there were so many requests for interviews came as no great surprise: JonBenet does that. One did surprise me however. It was a request from the BBC’s august ~ at least it used to be ~ Radio Four. Here, if ever, was evidence of the extent of the canker afflicting contemporary journalism.

Journalists and camera crews wandered up and down the corridors of the School. One of the film crews from Japan ( there were several) asked Dona Olivier, who has a desk outside my office, if they could film my door. Understand, it’s not even a special door – no ornamental flourishes, no unique wood, just an ordinary, utilitarian office door which they had come 12,000 miles to film.

Geraldo Rivera’s people sent a crew to film what I refer to as my down town office, The Hungry Toad. The New York Times turned up, as did the Los Angeles Times. Actually, the reporter from the LA Times, who had flown up from Texas and clearly didn’t want to be there, turned out to be someone with whom one could have an interesting conversation, in this case about the condition of newspapers ~ not good, we agreed.

Every local paper, TV channel and radio station called repeatedly. Calls came in from Australia, Canada, the UK, Germany… In fact, we lost track. For all I know Iceland could have called. I received a call from the local newspaper in the town I grew up in, the Oldham Chronicle. It is difficult to think of a major network show that didn’t request an interview. The London Times, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, various British tabloids.

One of the things we discovered was that when they really want to put the pressure on for an interview they get “the star” to call. I remember one moment in the scrum that followed Lacy’s press conference (of which more in a moment) when a young field producer slid over to Jen and handed her a cell and said, “Matt Lauer wants to talk to you…” To which Jen replied that she had zero interest in talking to Mr. Lauer.

My own personal favorite was receiving a call from Larry King, who was, as he called, picking his boys up at school. He really wanted me to go on his show; he was the only major interview show that I agreed to ~ unless you include Wolf Blitzer, who interrupted his war coverage and interviewed me from a sand dune in Iraq.

The truly fascinating figures were the field producers sent out by all the major networks and the cable news stations. Invariably young, they weren’t just hungry, they were ravenous, ruthless and determined. They would call, cajole, beg, offer money (“…we’d like to offer you a network consultancy…” She was from Fox, and so I thought, maybe not.) The CNN field producer, a nice, affable but determined man, was particularly intense in trying to persuade me to be interviewed. He had one curious habit that perplexed me for a while. We would be talking, I’d make a point, and he would say “Roger.” It happened several times and I began to think to myself, “who the hell is Roger?” It turned out he was ex-military so what he was saying in fact was “roger that.”

“You’ve been accused of writing a book…”

Mary Lacy held a press conference on August 17, outside the Justice Center. She didn’t say very much but there was a great throng of reporters, producers, camera crews. It was the kind of sight that we’ve become used to whenever OJ or Michael Jackson are put on trial (for the record, I wrote this before OJ’s arrest on armed robbery charges), or the “runaway bride” explains herself or Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan gets arrested again, or Madonna turns up with another baby, or Angelina and Brad buy Zimbabwe or the latest Christian evangelical leader turns out to be a part time drag queen.

For my sins I chose to go and watch, which on reflection was probably a mistake, since after Mary had departed, surrounded by Nagel, McGuire and Bennett, I suddenly found myself in the middle of that scrum. It is a curiously interesting experience, having questions being barked from all around you, not wanting to answer them, knowing, and regretting, that I’d become part of the spectacle.

One comment that was thrown at me was by a local attorney, former prosecutor, radio talk show host and long time Ramsey accuser. He said, “…you’ve been accused of writing a book…” It was a quite remarkably stupid comment, and in a way slightly fascist in its hint that books that would arouse hostility should not be written. I suggested that, as a professor with tenure in a research university, who has written a number of books over the years, it is not only what I do but what I’m expected to do. The subtext, the one that so many people loathed, was that they knew that the book I had been working on, essentially based on the documentaries that David Mills and I had made, would be arguing that the media got the story wrong, overdid it and that the evidence was overwhelming that an intruder killed JonBenet. Oh, how they did not want to hear this, how they wanted to continue their corrosive loathing of John and Patsy. I admit to a certain pleasure, immature perhaps, in goading them.

There was, however, a real issue of how to respond to the questions; what, if anything, to say? I’d discussed this with John Ramsey some time before, and we’d agreed on what I suppose might be described as a strategy. John, as much as anyone on the planet, understands what it is like to be accused by the media, willy-nilly, absent any meaningful evidence, year in, year out, of the most odious act, being complicit in killing your own child. He, like few others, also knows what it is like to have trashed that most precious right, allegedly guaranteed under the Constitution, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, trashed because it is less important than the entertainment, and therefore ratings and circulation, value of the accusation.

It was quite clear that there was brewing that sense in the public mind that since he had been arrested, Karr must therefore be guilty and a deeply dangerous psychopath. When the Thai Airways flight landed in Los Angeles reporters were asking passengers whether they had felt in any danger with Karr on their flight. What exactly did they think was going to happen, did they imagine that this slight male would overcome both Mark Spray and Gary Phillips, who were returning Karr to the U.S., take it over and fly it to Cuba? The most appalling illustration, however, of how his rights were being trampled would be the New York Post’s front page photo of Karr on the flight back, with the large print caption, “snake on a plane,” taking its cue from a recent, bad movie.

I decided that the moment was perfect to make a point by not. This may sound a tad Zen, but what I mean is that the one question that I was being repeatedly asked was whether I thought Karr was guilty of the things he had claimed, specifically sexual relations with many young girls and, the most horrendous claim, that he had killed JonBenet. To each and every question I had a simple reply, that I had no comment, that he had a right to be presumed innocent, a right that had never been extended to the Ramseys. John Ramsey would say the same thing.

It was, to those asking, an infuriating response. Why can’t you just say what you think? Come on, he’s guilty, isn’t he? I was quite clear, and determined, that I would use the platform of interviews to make this simple point. I told King’s producers, Wolf Blitzer’s people, in fact anyone who wanted a interview that this was all I would say. It didn’t matter: one, because they thought that I would be pressured into saying more, and two, they just wanted to be seen doing the interview. Substance was less important.

One final thought on this. It is difficult not to like King; he is very much a gentleman, not shrill like so many other interviewers, shrewd but not full of rancor even when he didn’t get what he wanted.

The press coverage was huge and global. Some of it was shrill, some of it balanced. Karr’s every move was followed. Business class on the flight back from Bangkok was packed with journalists. Helicopters hovered over LAX as he was being transferred to the plane used by the Governor of Colorado. News copters were also over the Boulder County jail. It was an amazing, but deeply troubling spectacle.

Released

Later, after Karr had been released, on August 28th, because his DNA didn’t match that found on JonBenet, there would be the inevitable attacks on me and Lacy, particularly in two ridiculously long pieces: one in Westword, a local free paper that seems to make much of its revenue from small ads for prostitutes and gay male escort services, and the other in a Denver glossy magazine, 5280.

This latter was written by a recent graduate of the School, Cheryl Myers, and when she asked to talk to me she referenced the fact that she was an alumna. Who was I to say no, and in the end I gave her a lot of time. The piece that emerged, and that I admit I did not see coming, was an extremely aggressive attack on me, which to this day I don’t fully understand.

A colleague, who didn’t read it until August 2007 while sitting in his dentist’s waiting room, described it as reading like a piece written by a 13 year old girl who hates her father. It was in the category of what one might call uber~bitch journalism. Indeed, if one could tap in to the bile that flows through that young lady’s veins you could open a bottling plant the size of Coors brewery in Golden, Colorado.

The chair of her masters committee and a faculty member who felt that she had been a mentor to Myers let it be known to her that they were ashamed that she was one of our graduates. I have no doubt she will do very well.

Next: Meanings

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

In the mid-1980s David Mills had tried to get a budget together to make a documentary based on my work on public broadcasting, making the case that market forces would prove disastrous for broadcasting as a means of serving the public interest. We would also argue that deregulation, along the lines of American television, would be deeply unfortunate, along with the more nuanced argument that there is, anyhow, no such thing as de-regulation – there is only regulation (ie someone making decisions about content) in the public interest or a private interest. Culture is never, finally, neutral.

David’s efforts came to nothing. We did however keep in touch. He was aware, vaguely, of how during 1997 I had been drawn into talking about the case in scores of interviews, across all media. It was, in fact, a good opportunity to make the point about the problems of journalistic practice in a market-driven environment that he and I had discussed many times.

In September 1997, I decided to write an op-ed piece for the Sunday edition of the local paper, the Daily Camera (cf. appendix.) The peg for the piece was the debate about the role of the paparazzi in the death of Princess Diana in Paris on August 31, 1997. I argued that the question of the tabloid and mainstream media obsession with Diana should come as no surprise to anyone, particularly anyone living in Boulder. We had had for nine months a pitch perfect example of exactly the same kind of obsession in the coverage of JonBenet and her parents. At the end of January, a month after her death, there were three hundred reporters in Boulder, covering the case. The rhetorical question that the piece asked was simple: how come we all know the Ramseys are guilty? The answer was obvious, as I have already stated: that was the only story being told.

Shortly after the op-ed appeared I got a phone call from Bryan Morgan. I didn’t know much about Bryan then (we have since become good friends) other than that he represented John Ramsey and that he was founding partner, with Hal Haddon, of one of the most powerful criminal defense law firms in the western states. My immediate reaction was to wonder if there was something in the article I had written that had raised his hackles. I couldn’t imagine what that could be since I think I can reasonably claim that it was one of the first times the possibility had been raised in the media that maybe the case wasn’t so tight and shut as everyone was assuming. He told me that he wanted to come and talk, and so we did, meeting in my small cramped office in the Norlin Library on the CU campus. I explained to him my position, a mini-version of the arguments I expanded upon in the Prologue, and added that I had no view as to the guilt or innocence of his clients, and that my main concern was with the nature of the media coverage, the role of the tabloids and the fact that, guilty or innocent, the Ramseys still had rights that were being trashed. It was an interesting conversation but when he left I assumed that was the end of it.

A couple of days later, however, Bryan called me again with a startling proposal. He told me that Patsy Ramsey wanted to come and talk to one of my classes. I must admit that I burst out laughing. The Ramseys were the most wanted couple in America, the ultimate “get” for all the major media figures like Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, but they had been totally hunkered down, on the advice of their attorneys, for whom defense law 101 is your clients don’t talk, and here she wanted to come and talk to a bunch of college kids. We agreed to meet next day for lunch.

As I put the phone down, I had an idea and called David. I found him in a bookshop in Scotland. I briefly explained the context and then with that temerity again showing its head said that we should make a documentary that would allow us to make the point that we had discussed all those years before by telling the story of how the story of JonBenet had been told. And I added, if I can get the Ramseys will you produce it. Barely thinking (something that there would be many moments he would regret) he said yes.

The First Time I Met John Ramsey

I met Bryan the next day at The James Irish Pub. With him was Pat Burke, Patsy’s attorney. They had come expecting to discuss how we could get Patsy into one of my classrooms, without drawing any media attention. I suggested that I had a better idea. I told them that I wanted to make a documentary about the media story of JonBenet’s death, but that to do that I had to put their clients on camera. In television terms you could no more make such a movie than you could stage Hamlet without the Prince. There was also a practical reason, in that no network was going to put up a budget if they were not interviewed.

As they heard my proposal, Bryan and Pat – both of whom are very high-end criminal defense attorneys whose talents you definitely never want to be in a position to need – looked at me as if I were a lunatic. When your clients are assumed by the whole world to be guilty of killing their daughter, when an indictment is obvious, when the whole of the world’s media would love to talk to them and is anyhow spewing forth extraordinary amounts of so-called “information,” the absolutely last thing you do is let them talk. However, as I was about to learn for the first (but not the last) time, the normal laws of moral physics do not exist in the universe that swirls around her death. They said that they would put my proposal to the Ramseys, clearly assuming that there was no way this was going to happen. They were wrong. Within about 24 hours Bryan called me again and said, much to even my amazement, “they’re interested.”

The first time I met John Ramsey was in the foyer of the Hyatt in Marietta, Georgia, in early December 1997. He had come to take Bryan Morgan and I to his house on Paces Ferry Road. David would be flying in later from filming in Bucharest. As we shook hands on first meeting, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I were shaking hands with a child killer. That whole weekend had a kind of out of body sense to it: trying to negotiate an interview, all the while looking at them, searching for a clue, something that would reveal an inner, ghastly persona capable of killing.

Nothing. Here was a life, it seemed of wealthy ordinariness, caught up in vicious extra-ordinariness. There were other little clues that weekend. We went to dinner at a private, elegant club on Peachtree, in Atlanta, where they were well known. The waiter greeted them warmly, not it seemed to me out of any obsequiousness, rather out of genuine affection. At one point in the evening David, who was sitting next to Patsy, asked how she coped with the pressure of being accused by the whole world of killing her child. She started to cry. Not out loud, rather out of what seemed like a private agony. David and I would both note that John seemed not to react, carrying on his conversation with me. Instead Bryan got up, moved around the table, put his arms around her, and led her from the dining room. From another table, a lady rose, followed them out, and suggested she take Patsy into the ladies powder room so that she could compose herself.

Later David and I discussed this incident and John Ramsey’s apparent aloofness to his wife’s distress. Could it be, as many had suggested, that he did indeed have ice in his veins, that he had the cold stone heart of man who could indeed kill his own child with blithe indifference? Or could it be that in the context of unimaginable pressure and accusation he had to hold his composure, for his sake, for Patsy, for the family? For if not him who could, would, should? I now see John Ramsey as man with almost surreal courage, the likes of which I have never, before or since, seen.

The following morning, Sunday, David and I sat down with the Ramseys at the dining table in their home to discuss the interview. Bryan sat quietly alongside one wall. We had a drawn up a list of conditions that we insisted on. Looking back there was nothing if not British hubris in this: here were two people who were possibly, one or both, facing the death penalty, who were being begged by their attorneys not to talk to us, who were in demand by every major news organization in America for “the interview,” and here we were saying we’ll do this but only if you accept our conditions. These were basically that we could ask any question we wanted, no exceptions; that they would have absolutely no editorial involvement, indeed that they would never see the programme before it was broadcast; and that if we found out anything damaging to their case we would use it. The only clause which Morgan asked to be included was that we would agree not to broadcast the documentary during the time that any grand jury – if it were empanelled – was sitting. ( This clause would cause much confusion and silliness, and in the end was revoked by the attorneys at our bidding.)

That we had put these conditions forward came largely from the fact that we knew that any attempt to get a commission out of the UK would be very much dependent on our convincing the commissioning editor that what we were proposing was a piece of independent investigative journalism and not – as we would inevitably be accused – a softball interview. We laid out these conditions to John and Patsy, and generally discussed our ideas as to what we had in mind: a story had been told about them and this crime, a story which we wanted to interrogate to see if another story could have been told. They listened , agreed, we stood up, facing each other across the table, shook hands and they signed the agreement. Bryan Morgan went to an even whiter shade of pale because of what had just happened.

The inevitable thought that came to mind, however, was why would two people, if they were the killers, allow two Brits to interview them with these terms. If they were guilty, and they were still agreeable to cooperating, in the form of a major interview, then we were clearly involved in something that married the bizarre with the surreal. It could be argued that they, or at least those, like Susan Stine, whose counsel they sought knew something of my own position because of the numerous media interviews I’d given over the previous months. That position, however, was never that that they were innocent or guilty, only that the media coverage was vastly overdone and deeply prejudicial to any legal rights they had under the Constitutional provision to be presumed innocent.

However, they could have no idea about Mills’ position on the case if only because he didn’t really have one. I also explained to them that David came out of a tradition of broadcast journalism, that of British public service broadcasting, that treasured its integrity and independence. His mentor, Ray Fitzwalter of Granada Television, was legendary for both his nurturing of brilliant investigative journalism and for his utter, incorruptible integrity ( pity the producer who put in padded expenses to Ray, or didn’t nail the story factually as well as conceptually.) The Ramseys would have been stupid beyond belief to imagine that Mills would allow himself to become – please forgive the pun – a patsy.

Left Hand, Right Hand

When I returned home after this meeting there were the inevitable questions of: well, what are they like, did they do it? To which my reply, utterly subjective, grounded in nothing more than a feeling, was “no way.” But I was always quick to add: but even if they did, that’s irrelevant to us.

Later, as we filmed, the same experience would confront others. Dan Glick and Sherry Keene-Osborne, who wrote for Newsweek, were working with us as associate producers and had done some wonderful, revisionist journalism about the case. Neither had met the Ramseys until we started to film the interview. Both came away with that same sense of “no-way.” Having said that, it is important to understand that Dan and Sherry were as open to evidence that pointed at the Ramseys as that which pointed away. Dan and I in fact used to keep what we would call our left hand, right hand column moments. In the left column would be evidence that pointed away, the right evidence that pointed at them, and in particular Patsy. There was also one memorable moment at dinner the first night of filming, in March 1998. Bryan Morgan, tears in his eyes, recalled the moment when he realized that John at least was not involved. It was when, at one point in 1997, he was describing how JonBenet had died and it became clear to him that John “hadn’t a clue.”

For me, though, one reaction in particular stood out. We had hired as our cameraman-director Patrick Turley. Patrick is wonderful at his craft. He was by this time semi-retired. He had won numerous awards, and when Stanley Kubrick had wanted someone to shoot the New York scenes of Eyes Wide Shut, he had asked Patrick to do it – Kubrick famously never traveled. Patrick could also be testy, something that reflected both his perfectionism and an edgy psychology. He was also deeply cynical in a manner that Brits have mastered. He had in his career seen and filmed it all, war, mayhem, corruption. That same first night of the interview he said, to no-one in particular, “ I can’t see it.”

Of course, none of this was, or could, be conclusive. To have “seen” in the Ramseys “innocence,” would have been as wrong-headed, as irrational and stupid, as to have “seen” in them “guilt.” Over the next several years and two more documentaries , however, Mills and I became convinced that they were innocent. Following the December Atlanta meeting there were weeks of intense negotiation, a back and forth between me and the attorneys, as David was back in the UK trying to get a budget together.

What became quite clear was that whatever the advice, John Ramsey wanted to talk, indeed needed desperately to talk. I remember one key meeting, on a Saturday in the law offices of Mike Bynum, John’s friend and business partner. Everyone was there, (with one key exception): David, Dan, Sherry, Bryan, Pat Burke, Hal Haddon and Lee Foreman, the other senior partner in the Morgan, Haddon law firm. I made the pitch as to why they should do it, basically arguing that we would be professional, that their clients needed to be heard and definitely wanted to be heard.

There was surprisingly little opposition, because John Ramsey, the one vote that counted, had decided that we should proceed, and had told his attorneys of his decision. The deal was done. David got a budget from the British network, Channel Four, and in March 1998 we arrived in Atlanta. It had started.

There was one strange, vivid moment that, looking back, suggested the real extent to which JonBenet would enter my life. I had set my alarm for 6:00 am on the morning I would fly out to Atlanta. I had a dream about her, and recall vividly her saying, “Time to wake up Professor Tracey.” I awoke, slightly startled because it really did feel real. It was 5:59 am.

In January, 1998 I wrote a longish note to David suggesting what seemed to me to be the essential themes we needed to confront:

“David/ here are a few initial thoughts on the programme. We will obviously need to think long and hard about how to proceed. The trump card which we have is the Ramseys. Their involvement is what will get the attention. The down side to that is that we will be accused of being part of their PR campaign. So we will need to stay focused on the heart of the matter, which in effect is to put the American media on trial, and in so doing put America itself in the dock because without an audience for what Teddy White called “the schlock storm” it wouldn’t exist.Background

On December 26th 1996 the body of JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her home. Her skull had been fractured, she had been strangled and she may or may not have been sexually assaulted. She was six years old, her home was in Boulder, Colorado and her death was to become the latest example of an American pastime, private tragedy as public spectacle.

Almost immediately two things happened:

1. her death became a major news story, with remarkably extensive coverage on tv and radio and in newspapers. At one point in January there were three hundred journalists in Boulder covering the story. It became a fixture on local television news, on cable programmes and primetime network news magazines. Even the London Sunday Times was to carry it as the cover story for its magazine, which featured a photo of JonBenet and the line “The Kiddie-Porn Killing: How the murder of a six year-old beauty queen chilled America’s soul.” That in itself was interesting because what it represented was the way in which an essential interpretation of what had happened, that the case was an example of familial sexual abuse, had become so prevalent that it had crossed the Atlantic.

2. there was an immediate and widespread assumption, fueled by media coverage, which was itself partly fed by the Police Department, that the parents were guilty of killing the child. The flow of “information” went: police dept leaks info to media, including tabloids and local paper, which publishes it as ‘fact,” which reassures the public, which has already been reassured by Durgin’s statement ( this was the mayor’s statement on January 2, that the police were not scouring the streets of Boulder for a child killer, a comment she said, when we interviewed her for the first documentary, she very much regretted) and which is anyhow disposed to believe the spin because of its own sense of how these kinds of crime happen, and which is anyhow fascinated with the case, and which wants more, which leads to further leaks to the increasing numbers of journalists covering the case, and so on as a public “understanding” of what happened and who did it becomes a powerful and unquestioned orthodoxy.

There is an obvious connection between the two, since the overwhelming tone of the coverage has often implied, and sometimes overtly stated, that the parents were guilty. It is clear that this was a conclusion that was arrived at early on by the police. Their problem was that they were then unable to make the case so that an indictment could be brought. This is why they decided to use the media to create a climate of public opinion which would force the DA to bring the Ramsey’s to trial. In my first conversation with Bryan Morgan, John Ramsey’s attorney, he said that when the story of the case was eventually told the real hero who would emerge would be a figure in the DA’s office (I now know that Bryan had Pete Hofstrom in mind, a man who was widely regarded not just an excellent assistant district attorney but someone who was ethically unimpeachable, and who has maintained a studied silence on the case to this day.) He seemed to be suggesting that it was this person in particular who had been primarily responsible for resisting the pressure to go to trial. In the recent Louise Woodward case ( an English nanny working in New England who had been accused of killing a child) it became clear that many Brits were surprised, shocked even, by the role of the media in the case, for example the television appearance of the parents before the jury had arrived at a verdict. The reality is that there was nothing unusual in this in terms of the relationship between the US media and the judicial process. In the context of the Ramseys there is no-one in the whole of the United States who has not been repeatedly told that the parents did it. One real puzzle, however, which may be beyond the scope of a television programme is why there was such a ready and potent willingness among the public to accept such an interpretation given that there is little meaningful evidence to sustain such certainty.”

Looking back there is little that I would change.

Storming the Bastille of Words

The errors in the media story were especially egregious precisely because they were fundamentally unfair and utterly denied the Ramseys the most basic of rights, to be presumed innocent. In the end the system worked and there was no indictment, but it was all perilously close.

The point David and I have been trying to make through the documentaries was that the story of JonBenet’s murder was a perfect avatar for a brute and new reality about American journalism, one which is increasingly boorish, banal, corrupt and debased, and that more importantly its condition was metastasizing into the body politic, and in particular into the judicial process and the rights of the citizen under the Constitution. So the brute premise was that even those – perhaps especially those – who would eventually be found guilty of heinous crime had rights. This was, it seemed to me something which never came close to being granted to the Ramseys.

There is, I believe and hope, a certain reasonable purpose in spending a decade of one’s life focused on one child murder. I am, I recognize, grasping here for a certain justification of purpose. Why her, why this case? I’ve thought about this question many times, but only recently began to fathom what might be an answer, with the help of many hours of conversation with a wise and gentle man whom I’ll refer to here simply as DG. It was, in fact, those conversations that guided me to the thoughts that I expressed in the Prologue.

In the same year that JonBenet died there were 804 children below the age of twelve murdered in the United States. She was one. Yet her death took on iconic status. She became Marilyn, Elvis, the Diana of slaughtered children, as her name entered the inner sanctum of public memory and knowledge. About that six year old child, about her demise, a mountain of lies were told. And if we cannot tell the truth about a child’s death, what else can we, as a culture, lie about?

The right to know the truth about JonBenet’s death is no different than the right to know the truth about, say, war and security. Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth it was time to storm what he called the “Bastille of Words.” David Mills and I set out to storm that Bastille of Words about the Ramsey case using the power of television. One obvious aspect was that as a student of culture who has spent many years writing and talking about the deepening corruption of cultural and, in particular, journalistic values here was a pitch perfect example of the argument, and it was on my own door step. As I suggested in the Prologue, the nature of the coverage suggested that the country I had idealized as a boy was falling well short of those ideals.

I was also motivated by a profound sense that, not only was she an innocent about whose death the truth should out, a child who had not, in all likelihood been killed by her parents, but that the family were being bullied, by the media and a great swathe of the public, and in my world view there is a special place reserved on the inner ring of hell for the bully.

I’ve felt this way since childhood, perhaps because when your father dies when you are only four years old the world becomes a scary place, and you develop a fearful sense that it is peopled by those who will prey on the vulnerable and when you are four, and your dad has gone, who will protect you? Yourself, if you can. And with that comes a belief, at least it did with me, that when you see someone being bullied, you have a moral responsibility to help them.

I guess it was as simple as that: this was not the America of my boyhood dreaming; it didn’t make sense that they would do this; and I felt profoundly sorry for them.

Next: Daxis

INDEX