The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.”

Such is the reality for millions and millions and millions of people living here in the Land of the Free^®, the Home of the Brave^® and the Birthplace of the Religious Freedom^®.

As badly as it griped me to see such a fine, artistic photo hidden behind a cut like some tawdry porno you’d pay a Times Square carney a dollar to see (price adjusted for inflation), I also had no interest in seeing any of our intelligent, hard-working readers escorted out of their places of employment at gunpoint.

However, my colleague Dr. Slammy suggested that the all-too-standard NSFW tag – the Modern American Internet’s version of the Scarlet Letter – was a lingering stain on the credibility of the artist, and in due course I (apparently being ill of will and sharp of tongue) was enlisted to pen what you may take as an official Scholars & Rogues policy position.

Briefly stated, when you put an artist behind the Scarlet NSFW, you convey a general social verdict that shame should be attached to the work. It is not fit for general viewing; it is likely to be deemed offensive to some people; and those who choose to click the link, well, that’s between them and Jesus.

It does not matter whether such a judgment is reasonable. For instance, in the case of “Hello Nurse,” what really is there to be scadalized by? Let’s take a close look:

What is the supposed objection? The subject is of consenting age. No aberrant sexual acts are depicted. Hell, she’s not even partially naked. No vajayjay showing. No boobies. She’s not fondling herself (at the moment, anyway). There is an aspect of the erotic in her pose, of course, but let’s be clear here: whatever obscenity might arise from the communication of this image lies entirely within the mind of the viewer.

Goddammit, people, you can see more NSFWing imagery any goddamned night of the week on any goddamned channel on television during goddamned prime time. If this is NSFW, then the publishers of every fashion magazine available in America need to be hung in the public square right fucking now!!!

Oh, I’m sorry – is my invective NSFW?

It is true, as another of my unnamed colleagues pointed out, that good art seeks to provoke. MentalSwitch isn’t an especially in-your-face artist, but it is also true that his work routinely challenges convention in ways that are guaranteed to provoke, and it’s not hard to conclude who the targets of his critiques are. As he explains in the notes accompanying a portrait of “Lizzy”:

If all Christians were like this guy then the world would be a better place. On the other hand, if all Christians were like this guy we wouldn’t even recognize Christianity anymore….

Well played, that.

Welcome to 17th Century Salem, folks. Welcome to neo-Puritan America, a land where dismemberments and flying body parts and mushroom clouds and elected officials intentionally and strategically lying to their constituents are cool but a woman wearing four times more clothing than every teenaged girl around every swimming pool in the United States is NSFW. Because she looks suspiciously like she might enjoy sex in a non-missionary position. And sex is not to be imagined. Pictures that might make us think of sex are not to be condoned.

In neo-Puritan America, millions of people wake up every morning praying that the Lord will afford them an opportunity during the day to be offended. Hypocritical offense is next to godliness and the Constitution apparently has a clause about the right not to be exposed to anything you don’t like. Lawyers will be summoned. Human Resources policies will be invoked. Sinners will be terminated. And Hester Prynne will have a red NSFW branded on her twitchy, hellbound little ass, BY GOD!

In case the theme of my rant hasn’t yet made itself apparent, the Scarlet NSFW brands the wrong person. Those whose visions challenge are to be positioned behind the screen of shame, while those who are afraid of ideas have their narrow prejudices reinforced by official policies and unspoken self-righteous bullying.

We will know America has finally attained a measure of enlightenment when the reverse of those statements is true.

In the meantime, I mentioned something about a policy, so here it is. Since, as I noted above, we have no interest in damaging the careers of our readers, and since we’re smart enough to know the reality of many workplaces, we’ll be placing things that we believe might offend the average granny-panty neo-Puritan behind a cut. But when we do, understand that it is not the artist whom we are indicting. It’s the Scarlet Letter crowd.

In addition, don’t be surprised to see NSFW replaced by NSFP – Not Safe For Puritans. (My original idea, Not Safe For Repressive Puritan Asshat Jesus Nazis, was deemed a bit unwieldy.)

At Scholars & Rogues, we don’t shrink from challenges. We’re not kept up at night by the unconventional. And we are absolutely, positively not afraid of ideas.

And we will not quietly pander to those who are.

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.

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

His adventures through idiocy take him, for instance, to a Creationism museum where dinosaurs have saddles. He visits a talk radio convention to listen to right-wing hosts pat each other on the back in the name of freedom. He looks at legal battles over textbook adoptions. He delves into conspiracy theories, Masons, and Templars. In an especially excellent chapter, Pierce explores behind the scenes of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case from 2005, where emotional sensationalism and political grandstanding obscured the medical facts of Schiavo’s case.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” Pierce says, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway.”

The problem with trusting the Gut is that the Gut can’t always be trusted. “Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense,” Pierce says.

Pierce readily acknowledges the proud tradition America has for crack-pot ideas and cranks. In fact, such eccentricies are vital to the proper functioning of the Marketplace of Ideas. “Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece” Pierce says. “This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”

As one of the organizing conceits of his book, Pierce traces the career of great American crank Ignatius Donnelly—land settler, sometimes-politician, and believer of Atlantis and Ragnorak. Contrasted against that is the career of Founding Father James Madison, a disciple of the enlightenment who believed passionately in the protection of free speech. Both men thrived in America at opposite ends of the American spectrum; America had room for both.

But in Idiot America, Pierce says, the idiots have no patience for—and want to leave no room for—anyone with enlightened, educated minds. Nonsense rules, and Pierce says that’s a serious problem because it comes with “a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing nonsense.”

Whereas cranks like Donnelly peddled their ideas because they believed in those ideas, modern American Idiots peddle their ideas because those ideas move units or forward a political agenda. The ideas themselves don’t mean much so long as someone can make a buck or gain political leverage.

Pierce places the blame squarely on American conservatives. “If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right,” he says, “that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and it succeeded very well.” Pierce does little to hide his left-leaning biases, which sometimes get to be a little much and too holier-than-thou. Perhaps it’s understandable, though, considering how palpable his frustration and anger are.

“It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot with modern politics and all forms of public discourse,” Pierce says, although he points a damning finger at talk radio as “the driving force in changing American debate into American argument.”

Pierce lambasts Idiot America for making a devil’s bargain, “exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself.”

Pierce doesn’t seem too hopeful that the problem will go away any time soon, but despite his obvious cynicism, the text carries an undercurrent of faith in the American system to eventually right itself. The alternative, he implies, would be an intellectual Armageddon that would cripple democracy itself.

Idiot America provides sympathetic audiences with the chance to vent alongside Pierce. Other readers will find well-researched investigation laced with snarkiness.

As for the idiots who won the culture wars—they will probably pick up Pierce’s book, look at the cover and get a Gut feeling that they wouldn’t like it. The people most in need of Pierce’s wake-up call will be the ones least likely to get it.

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.

“Tiananmen” means “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Ironic, then, that most Americans know it, if at all, as a scene of violence and bloodshed.

photo by Jeff Widener, A.P.

June 4 marks the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors who’d gathered in Tiananmen Square. The incident made headlines across the world, and the image of a lone protestor blocking a line of tanks proved especially powerful.

The protesters had camped out in the square since the April death of a pro-reform Communist Party official, Hu Yaobang. By June 4, after a great deal of international attention that embarrassed the Chinese government, tanks and troops rolled in and started cracking skulls.

Western news outlets reported yesterday and today (June 3 and 4) that no media would be allowed near Tiananmen Square on June 4th. Soldiers and uniformed and plainclothes police stood at attention everywhere in the square this morning, and visitors were being searched.

But visitors to Tiananmen Square are always searched. I was searched when my group first visited the square on Tuesday, May 26. I was searched again when I went there on my own last Sunday. The searches were similar to the same thing I went through at the airport: carry-on bags and metal items got sent through an X-ray machine, and I had to pass through a metal detector. We were allowed to keep our cameras with us.

Standing in Tiananmen Square for the first time really drove home how significant the crackdown was which the Chinese government refers to as “The June Fourth Incident”).

First of all, it’s impossible to appreciate how wide and vast Tiananmen Square is. It’s the largest public square in the world, even beating out the public courtyard at the Vatican. It can hold a million people—just as it was doing by June 3, 1989.

China’s Great Hall of the People, opposite Tiananmen Square

The square sits opposite the Great Hall of the People, roughly China’s equivalent of our Capitol Building. In essence, that made the protests a direct slap in the face of the Communist Party and central Chinese government even though the demonstrations were peaceful.

In the resulting military action, thousands were injured. The number of killed various from 241 (the Chinese government’s official number) and 2,600 (an unofficial number once given by the Red Cross).

While I certainly don’t condone the government’s decision to clear the square, I can understand it a little better than I once did. China is not, nor has it ever really been, ruled on principles anywhere close to ours. Authoritarian rule has always been the way there—for five thousand years. We forget how old and ingrained that is.

On Sunday, as I strolled the square, I saw a few extra plainclothes police near Mao’s Tomb. Nearby and just out of direct sight, soldiers were drilling in a closed-off portion of the square. I have no idea if that’s normal or not; it’s just what I saw and heard on Sunday.

I’ve also heard that the government was blocking internet access and it was blacking out CNN. It was trying very hard to be sure that no one remembered the events of June 4, 1989.

I didn’t register as a journalist before I went to China, so my dispatches have been under the radar screen I suppose. But from my own perspective, I’ve not had any trouble blogging since I got to Beijing (although I think some of my e-mail was reviewed or filtered or something). I couldn’t access YouTube, which I only tried to access because I’d heard from my students that it was off-limits. They were right. On Tuesday, students suddenly couldn’t access hotmail, either.

I actually had more trouble in Shanghai than in Beijing. In Shanghai, I couldn’t log on to LiveJournal, although I never had a problem logging into or posting at Scholars & Rogues (I suppose we at S&R need to start being even more subversive!).

In Tiananmen Square, looking south toward Mao’s Tomb

But I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel comfortable talking about Tiananmen Square in my dispatches other than to provide a description. In my post about Mao’s Tomb, I didn’t feel I could talk about just how oppressive Mao’s regime was. Maybe it was just my good manners because I didn’t want to run the risk of causing headaches for my host from the Beijing Institute of Technology—which is, of course, a government-run school.

Tiananmen is one of the “Three T’s and an F”: Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Falon Gong (a cult-like religious group that stirs up a great deal of political controversy). Those are the taboo subjects. The government actively discourages and represses coverage of those topics, although I was able to discuss the “Three T’s and the F” openly with tour guides and people I met.

The same day we visited Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall, for instance, the president of Taiwan was in town for talks on more open relations. The few Chinese citizens I spoke to about Taiwan expressed delight that relations between the mainland and the island had thawed considerably over the past year or so.

My students, colleagues, and I had a chance
encounter with a Tibetan monk (pictured center).

That same day, our group also had a chance encounter with a Tibetan monk near the gates of the Forbidden City, just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen. The students thought he looked cool and all wanted their photo taken with him, but I’m not sure if they realized what a rare encounter or a big deal it was. “Imagine what he must feel like,” one colleague said. “People around here must be looking at him like he’s some kind of trouble-maker.”

It’s too bad the government frowns on discussion of those controversial topics because the rest of the world doesn’t get the full story. Any P.R. person knows it to be true: Tell as much of the truth as you can because otherwise people will think you have something to hide, and their assumptions will usually be far worse than the actual situation.

I’m no expert on Tibet, for instance, but talking to ordinary Chinese folks—who are, far and away, an apolitical bunch—they see the Tibet issue much differently than Westerners do. A Chinese princess married the Tibetan emperor in 640 A.D. to unite the kingdoms, and in Chinese minds, they’ve been one kingdom since and that’s that. Their sense of history comes not from the Communist Party but from a long oral tradition, so they aren’t just spouting party propaganda.

The Chinese people aren’t exposed to the Dali Lama’s P.R. efforts—and we are. I emphasize that because we forget, in the end, that the Dali Lama is conducting a P.R. campaign. (I don’t mean to oversimplify, although I am, because I know there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than I’ve even broached here—but that’s part of my point: there’s a lot more to the Tibet situation than we even realize.)

The silver lining is that the Chinese people find ways to talk about these things anyway. As CNN correspondent Jaime FlorCruz told us, technology provides ways around the government controls. As restrictive as the Chinese government can be with its censorship, it can only just keep up with the internet—it can’t control it. FlorCruz’s kids, for instance, can bring up YouTube on a whim by easily circumventing government blocks.

That trend will only continue as the number of online users grows (the online population in China already exceeds the entire population of the U.S.). The Chinese themselves call for more information.

“The internet is one of the most revolutionizing phenomena in China,” FlorCruz said. “The Chinese government can join it, ride it, sort of control it, but they cannot stop it or shut it down.”

These are skilled people with diverse interests and even more diverse points of view. Three are college professors. Also writing for S&R have been or are an Hispanic activist from Texas; a foreign affairs writer who specializes in nuclear deproliferation issues and civilian casualties resulting from armed conflict; a gay staff cartoonist; a management consultant specializing in organizational behavior whose clients include 20 percent of the Fortune 500; an ex-pat South African economist; three experts in popular culture; a former director of the Berkeley Stage Company and statistical demographer for the U.S. Census Bureau; a professional stage actor; two stay-at-moms; a photographer; and occasional guest columnists.

However, we all share one trait: We are volunteers. We don’t get paid. We have other lives, other responsibilities, other people dependent on us to make a living. As business models go, ours sucks. Modest ad income and passing the hat means S&R remains a labor of love. But can love be a sustaining force for the online medium in the absence of profit?

In the Beginning of Blogging, it was all so exciting. Thrilling, even. Putting up a post, watching the stats, seeing who read your work, where they were — and how many read your stuff. Generate those hits. Yeah. That was heady stuff.

Is it still?

Most individual and group blogs are dependent on volunteers. It’s rare that a Huffington Post can raise $37 million to sustain the enterprise. (Of course, HuffPo has “volunteers” too, doesn’t it?)

The print newspaper industry continues to collapse in terms of revenue, profitability, and numbers of paid, professional journalists. So the dominant use of volunteers to inaugurate and maintain sites featuring commentary and/or advocacy journalism becomes an increasingly important public-interest issue.

Most S&R writers are ideologically progressive but rarely hew to party lines. As the S&R mission statement says:

Scholars & Rogues is a diverse band of thinkers, social analysts, activists, grousers, jesters, and troublemakers. We’re different in many ways, but we share a general belief in progress, a conviction that smarter is better, and a passionate distaste for convention.

That statement mirrors the intent of many capable bloggers. Many (but perhaps not most) bloggers seek to simply make things better. We have particular issues or problems that occupy our blogging attention. We are exceedingly dependent, though, on the research of others (those paid professional journalists whose stories we link to) to support points made in our posts.

But those posts, which leaven “objective” journalism with (usually lucid) commentary, add substance to debates of public interest. Yet the majority of bloggers are not paid for their work. What will become of community blogs such as S&R as the corps of volunteers 1) lose interest, 2) lose access to reliable, verifiable information produced by journalists, 3) lose equal access to the Web as politicians favor corporate control of the Internet or 4) just need to spend more time at the day job in a bad economy to make ends meet?

Note that newspapers, in the early days of online news Web sites, had links where volunteers could post community news. Now, that didn’t work out so well, did it? Let’s hope community blogs fare better.

Volunteerism is the principle means of support for community blogs such as S&R. Many such blogs, blogs populated by smart, capable people (see our blogroll), no doubt face the same pressure the volunteers at S&R do: Keep pumpin’ out the posts. Keep the conversation going. Keep the debate fresh and focused. But it’s difficult, as a volunteer, to pump out as many posts as I’d like. (I do like to get eight hours’ sleep each night.)

At some point, as B.B. King would sing, “The thrill is gone.” I hope most of us aren’t there yet, but it’s increasingly a problem faced by those bloggers who believe in candid, civil, and common-sense conversations in the public sphere — yet have family and job responsibilities elsewhere.

But readers in those cities still have print options for newspapers providing some local news.

Not so in the mountain town of Carbondale, Colo., whose population about equals its elevation. The Valley Journal, founded in 1975, had its plug pulled in March, reports DeeDee Correll of the Center for Rural Affairs. The 6,000 residents had no other sources of local news.

Their solution: Publish a newspaper themselves.

A core of volunteers started the Sopris Sun, running it as non-profit free weekly with a press run of 3,000 copies. Why’d they do it? Says the Journal’s original founder, Rebecca Young: “It just beat the dickens out of sitting around whining that our paper was dead.”

Carbondale’s solution was civic-minded. It taps every possible source of revenue, including grants. Says Carbondale Mayor Michael Hassig:

I don’t know if they have a business model that will work. It wouldn’t surprise me if [the newspaper] was sustainable because there are an awful lot of people who do labors of love here. There was a void. Every town should have a park, a library and a newspaper.” [emphasis added]

The Sun, of course, has days of reckoning ahead. Commitment and pride may drive volunteerism, but is free labor a sustainable business model? Will printing 3,000 copies a week be a cost that eventually cannot be borne? Will volunteers shy away from penetrating coverage of their neighbors and friends who may be public officials or business owners? Will the Sun succumb to soft-feature-itis by being unable or unwilling to produce eat-your-veggies journalism?

American has thousands of small daily and weekly newspapers. The mean circulation of the American daily newspaper is about 38,000 — but I’ll bet the median circulation is a third of that.

Small papers’ chances of economic survival are much higher than the metro newspapers of large cities. Small papers offer unique goods – local news and a local audience for local advertisers. Big newspapers are targets of aggregators galore. Their goods are not always unique.

Carbondale could react quickly to fulfill the communal void left by the demise of its newspaper. Could Cleveland? Portland (either one)? Tampa Bay? Dallas? Boise? Toledo? Burlington? San Diego? St. Louis? Spokane? Buffalo?

America’s cities are largely served by only one daily newspaper of substance. (Yes, that substance has been diluted by foolish cost-saving measures such as firing or buying out the professionals who report and write the product the papers are trying to sell.) We’ve seen the first metro dailies fail. What happens when the lone metro of a large city ceases print publication?

Perhaps opportunity happens. Dan Conover, says his bio, edited a big metro-daily and took a buyout in 2008 after 18 years in the news business. He makes this observation:

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won’t come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That’s because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he’s looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants. [emphasis added]

That’s an interesting perspective. So pundits like me will be watching what’s lining up to contest for that “market space” about to be relinquished, developments in Seattle, Denver, and Tucson suggest, by large metro dailies.

[Thx to my colleague Carole McNall.]

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.

Our ears may hear bleep, but our eyes see lips moving that say shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker. Sometimes our ears will gather additional evidence. They will hear mother followed by bleep instead of fucker. Sometimes the ears will detect ass followed by bleep or bleep followed by hole but never the compete asshole. But the ears never hear cock followed by bleep or bleep followed by sucker because, it seems, Almighty Television Execs think cocksucker is so reviled a concept as to ever be partially bleeped.

I rarely view pricey premium channels such as HBO or Showtime. But my friends who can afford such luxuries assure me that there’s rarely if ever a bleep to be heard. It’s shit and fuck and motherfucker and cocksucker, etc., as far as the eye can see (or, rather, the ear can hear).

The broadcast networks, of course, don’t even offer any profanity to bleep. (Well, maybe the occasional nipple, but that’s not the issue here.) Apparently, the Federal Communications Commission fines them (in the public interest, of course) for transgressing against something called “public decency.” (We all know, of course, that offending the public with profanity isn’t the real reason — the networks just don’t want to piss off the advertisers.)

Basic cable is my only hope for a little guilty pleasure. Wouldn’t comedian and social critic Lewis Black’s unbleeped HBO “Red, White & Screwed” special be much more delicious if Comedy Central’s reprises of it didn’t bleep every instance of Mr. Black’s fuck and shit and the occasional dickhead? Comedy Central doesn’t demand that Jon Stewart clean up his language during live taping of The Daily Show — yet bleeps his utterances of asshole and fuck when the show airs.

And then there’s the lovely, demure Kathy Griffin on Bravo (winner of two Emmys, as she likes to point out). She’s a true potty mouth. We all know what she’s saying. She drops the offending profanities with aplomb. She’ll even use hand motions to emphasize the language. Yet Bravo bleeps them all.

That’s hardly brave of Bravo, the basic cable channel that says it “delivers the best in food, fashion, beauty, design and pop culture to the most engaged, upscale and educated audience in cable.” Surely such an audience can deal with the occasional shit, fuck, motherfucker, and cocksucker uttered by some of its performers. Surely such an audience does not need the “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” that bleeping represents.

Hell, even basic cable channel AMC bleeps the use of shit in “Blazing Saddles.” Why is AMC so wimpy about such a low-level profanity in that Mel Brooks classic movie ?

I like the occasional, well-timed profanity. I’ve even used it in my classroom. (Committing such rhetorical sins, however, as a professor at a Catholic university probably means I’ll be plenty warm during my afterlife.)

I should confess, though, that I prefer limits to my liking or use of profanity. Like any rhetorical device, if overused, profanity loses its capacity to convey shock, emphasis, and powerful emotion. We all know, of course, people who drop fuck, shit, asshole, and motherfucker into every possible utterance. From the lips of those people, profanity is merely noise shrouding a lack of signal. Lewis Black, Jon Stewart, Kathy Griffin, Mel Brooks and other comedic social commentators are not such people: They are desperately needed signal trying to break through overwhelming noise.

I wish basic cable would just let me hear what my eyes can see. It’s particularly egregious when Comedy Central, of all basic cable channels, bleeps profanity. After all, this is the network that put a counter on screen to record the 162 utterances of shit in a South Park episode. Comedy Central broke linguistic ground with that show — then promptly threw the dirt back into the hole it dug in social norms.

To those TV chieftains who serve as basic cable’s Highest Authorities on What May Be Heard, who deny my ears the profane audio of these social critics to accompany the video my eyes can see, I say fuck ‘em. If viewers of these comedians object to not bleeping shit, asshole, fuck, cocksucker, and motherfucker, I ask: Why the fuck are you watching those shows in the first place?

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.

But if you’re all pissed off about that, how about Olympic athletes wrapping themselves in the flag? Or flag napkins? Or a car painted as a flag? Flying a flag in the rain or leaving it up overnight unlit? Flag beach towels? Flags on campaign buttons? In every case, that’s mistreatment of the U.S. flag, according to the Flag Code.

According to the US Code, Title 4, Chapter 1, Section 8, “Respect for the flag”:

(b) The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise.

So much for those beach towels.

(d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery
(j) No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.

And so much for flag clothing.

(h) The flag should never be used as a receptacle for receiving, holding, carrying, or delivering anything.
(i) It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard.

And there goes those campaign buttons, napkins, cups, and plates.

(e) The flag should never be fastened, displayed, used, or stored in such a manner as to permit it to be easily torn, soiled, or damaged in any way.

And given how dirty cars get (pigeons, insects, road grime, slush), you’d think that a flag paint job on a car would qualify as “easily soiled.”

As for displaying the flag, let’s not forget that all-weather flags are OK in bad weather, but no flag should be displayed unlit overnight – it’s disrespectful, and against US Code Title 4 Chapter 1 Section 6.

Tell you what – you don’t question the patriotism of Obama’s supporters and I won’t question the patriotism of all the Olympic athletes who have soiled a flag with their sweat, of all the swimmers who have lain on a flag beach towel, of all the patriots who throw millions of flags away on the Fourth of July every year. Deal?

Image credit: Baltimore Sun

It’s been going on for so long now that we can’t even assign blame anymore. I got pull-off-the-road-and-calm-down furious on Monday when, in an interview on NPR’s All Things Considered Monday afternoon, a Gaza politician claimed that either a) Israeli collaborators had launched the rockets into Israel as a pretext or b) there had been no launches at all and Israel was faking the whole thing. And I got just as furious this morning when I the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. refused to admit that Israeli commandos had been assassinating Hamas leaders during the cease fire in yet another NPR interview.

Hammurabi came up with the first written code of laws – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And the result of following that law is that Israelis and Palestinians have each become toothless, blind, deaf, mute, and stupid.

I’ve lost the hope for a negotiated peace I had when I was young and naive – there have just been too many cycles of violence and so-called ceasefires for me to believe that diplomacy is viable at this point. All that’s left is a final solution to the conflict – annihilation. Either the state of Israel will cease to exist or the Palestinians will.

Let’s be frank here: if the international community wanted the conflict to end, it would. Neither Israel nor its neighbors could resist the combined military and economic might of the rest of the world. So if Europe, the U.S., Russia, and the rest of the Middle East was willing to say “enough is enough,” then the conflict would be over within a year, two at the outside (the first year for both parties to realize we’re serious, and a year to negotiate the actual agreement). This means that the rest of the world wants the conflict to continue; other nations find it valuable or useful.

The autocratic governments around the Middle East are the ones whose motivations are easiest to divine. What they get out of the ongoing conflict is a convenient distraction for their own restless population, and especially for their angry youths. Young people who would otherwise be focused on their own government’s failings on human rights, their country’s lack of jobs and services, and so on spew their bile on, and occasionally detonate their bodies in, the state of Israel instead. And in the process the autocrats maintain their own power. So the governments of the Middle East have every reason to keep the conflict going forever – they need to keep Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah powerful enough to harass Israel, but weak enough that they can’t actually destroy Israel. And Egypt, Iran, Iraq under Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Syria, et al have become masters at it.

I’m hardly an expert, so I have to make an educated guess about what Europe in general gets out of this, but I think it’s very similar to what the Middle East nations get – a distraction. Europe has massive Arab and Muslim minority communities that are pretty much shat upon by their host nations – just look at the riots by Muslim immigrant youths in France in 2005, or how the Turkish minority claims to be treated in Germany, or the lack of integration of Muslims in Great Britain. All of these communities would be more likely to demand rights and services and integration from their host nations if the conflict didn’t exist. In other words, second-class citizens would start demanding the same rights that all other citizens get automatically, and that not only be economically expensive but would also create unrest throughout the rest of society. And as the gay marriage debate in the U.S. shows, large numbers of people irrationally believe that granting rights and privileges to others somehow denigrates their own rights and privileges.

I’m also not entirely sure what the United States gets out of the conflict, but I know what the U.S. gets out of the existence of Israel, and it’s entirely possible that U.S. politicians have historically viewed the conflict as an unfortunate but tolerable side effect. By supporting Israel, the U.S. gets a ally in a mostly friendly and democratic nation smack in the middle of a region that is vital to our national interest. We need the Middle East’s oil, and it’s possible that prior administrations have considered the oil supply so vital that no disruptions could be permitted. And I can understand the logic of how the devil you know (the al-Saud royal family, for example) may well be better than the devil you don’t (any government that rises up following a hypothetical overthrow of said royal family). So anything that keeps the Saudis stable and in power keeps the oil flowing to American automobiles and trucks, and if that means the deaths of Israelis and Palestinians, then at least it doesn’t mean the deaths of Americans. Or something along those lines, anyway.

So the world has an interest in keeping the conflict going. And that’s why diplomacy won’t work. Stopping the conflict is as simple as the U.S. stopping aid to Israel and the various Middle East governments stopping aid to the Palestinians until a final treaty was negotiated and signed. The economic and social disruption that would result would be so devastating that the two sides would have no choice but come to the table in good faith and with a willingness to compromise. But instead we’ll continue to have European governments bemoaning the carnage in Gaza while the U.S. defends Israel’s right to defend the citizens of Sederot from Katyusha, but since everyone has a vested interest in keeping the carnage going, it’ll never stop via diplomatic means. At least, not until the U.S.’ vested interest in keeping Israel going fades with our dependence on Middle Eastern oil….

Which brings us to the latest cycle of violence in the conflict, the bombing of Gaza and the launching of Katyusha rockets in to southern Israel.

Officially, Israel is seeking a military solution to the problem of the Katyusha rockets. No military solution exists. In the sphere of military conflict, when one side loses the ability to continue fighting, the other wins. The problem in Gaza is that the conflict is military vs. insurgent/terrorist, and the only way to destroy Hamas’ and the Palestinians’ ability to fight is to convince the people to turn against the insurgents and terrorists hiding among them and to stop producing more insurgents/terrorists. You can do that a number of ways – economic reconstruction, improved human rights and greater freedoms, bribry – but you can’t do it by bombing neighborhoods or destroying government buildings. Bombing neighborhoods injures so many innocent people (who’s only crime is to be Palestinian) that it creates more new Hamas members than it destroys and thus increases Hamas’ ability to fight. And destroying government buildings hurts Hamas’ command, control, or communications infrastructure not at bit.

Actually, I was wrong – there is a military solution to the conflict, but just one – ethnic cleansing via the forced relocation or mass murder of all 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and probably the million or so Israeli Arabs too. Israel almost certainly has the military might to do this, especially if the U.S. didn’t cut off military assistance in the process – the Gaza Strip, home to about 1.5 million Palestinians, is only 139 square miles, or about 1/11th the size of the state of Rhode Island. The other 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, in an area about 20% larger than Rhode Island. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) normally has only a couple hundred thousand active soldiers, and 200,000 soldiers against four million Palestinians means the Palestinians win. But the IDF is composed of conscripts – nearly every physically able man and woman enters the IDF at the age of 18, resulting in upwards of three million available soldiers. So when you’re putting three million Israeli soldiers against four million Palestinian civilians, the Israelis win. And with the overwhelming technological superiority of the IDF, the IDF wins against a guaranteed Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, etc. assault to protect their fellow Arabs too.

But let us assume that the state of Israel is unwilling to become like the very monster that nearly destroyed them during World War II. It’s a pretty good assumption, after all. Israel won’t be committing genocide against the Palestinians any time soon. As harsh as the Israeli governments tactics are, they’re not as bad as gas chambers. But Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and, to a lesser extent, Hezbollah have no such historical moral restrictions. In fact, they’ve called for the destruction of Israel and actively work toward it. And with Israel’s counterproductive military tactics of punishing families and entire communities backfiring and creating more terrorists, Hamas et al will ultimately gather enough force to existentially threaten Israel. Not this year or next, but given the demographic advantages the Palestinians have over Israelis, it’s only a matter of time. And if Israel thinks that they’re facing an existential threat today, imagine how bad it’ll be when they’re facing not 10,000 Palestinian terrorists hiding among four million civilians, but rather a million Palestinian terrorists hiding among 10 million civilians.

Three million IDF soldiers against 10 million Palestinian civilians and one million Palestinian terrorists isn’t a guaranteed win for Israel by any stretch.

Of course, the state of Israel could be destroyed by peaceful means instead of by Palestinian pogrom. It was created by international fiat, it could be dissolved and the citizens spread throughout the world in another diaspora by another international fiat backed by international military might. Not that this is likely, of course – it’s more likely that the international community would force a negotiated settlement, and you know how likely I think that is.

So what will be the final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? More conflict. More rockets and suicide bombings. More airstrikes and assassinations. And the conflict will last until the developed world no longer relies on dictators and monarchs who rely on oil wealth to fuel their economies instead of freedom and education.

When the world doesn’t need or can’t afford Middle Eastern oil any more, it won’t need or enable the Israeli-Palestinian conflict either.

All images from AFP

George Denis Patrick Carlin was a goddamned hypocrite, and I loved him for it.

In the latter part of his long and storied life and career, the late standup comedy legend came off as a crusty, irate, disappointed, extremely cynical bastard who freely admitted he’d given up on the hopeless human race and reveled in its plentiful fuckups and contradictions.

“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. This country is finished.” – GC

Offstage though, Carlin was a kind-hearted, selfless, encouraging friend to myriad pluggers on the comedy circuit. His daughter and colleagues say he was nothing like the persona he developed in the face of advancing age and frustration with the agonizing lack of progress in the nation he loved as much as he lampooned.

“Some people see a glass that’s half full. Some see a glass that’s half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” – GC

Though he insisted that he didn’t give a shit about America anymore, he sure kept up with it. In his last HBO show, It’s Bad for Ya, he opened with an astounding rapid-fire monologue loaded with all the latest buzzwords to show how tuned in and mentally shipshape he still was, despite having endured heart surgery and hitting the big 7-0.

Plus, he read more blogs than you do.

“The day after tomorrow is the third day of the rest of your life.” – GC

I saw Carlin perform three times, the last here in Denver a few years ago in which he scoffed at the obsessively precautionary society America had become. He bragged about having swum in New York City’s filthy rivers as a kid.

“I was tempered in shit!” – GC

But he could never shake that bad ticker…

“As it stands right now, I lead Richard Pryor in heart attacks, two to one. However, Richard still leads me, one to nothing, in burning yourself up.” – GC, 1982

George was honored in November with the Mark Twain Prize, apparently the only award he saw as “legitimate.” I wish he’d a made it to the ceremony, but he was undoubtedly there in spirit. Ah, who’m I kidding…

“What’s this favoritism toward the dead? FUCK the dead!” – GC

But I’d like to offer this wish of seasonal cheer, no strings attached. No agenda, no proselytizing, no offense. Just the outpouring of a full and warm heart on the 25th of December.

It is Christmas Day, and my heart’s naïve hope is that it could stand for what it is ought to be in the broadest cultural sense – an occasion to wish peace on earth and good will to all. Whether or not one believes in the incarnation of Jesus Christ as God come into human history, the nativity myth is filled with simple beauty, and the ancient yuletide traditions it has become associated with have for centuries celebrated the triumph of light over darkness in a bleak world. To say “Merry Christmas” is, for me, to affirm that light and share its spirit with others, whether or not we embrace the same religious practices or none at all.

I explained this to my 10-year-old daughter earlier this week, when I wished a Merry Christmas to the stylist who trimmed her hair before her picture with Santa.

“Mom!” responded my socially sensitive, Boulder-raised daughter, as we walked out to the parking lot, “What if she doesn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“Well, I suspect she will recognize that I was sharing a warm wish with her, and will take it as just that,” I replied. I was willing to chance it.

When I was in Nepal during Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, I was caught up in the revelry of the holiday, recognizing in the proclamation of light in darkness, knowledge over ignorance, and love over hatred, ideals for all humanity. I did not have to be Hindu to find an empathetic appreciation for this celebration — and far from being offended, I found it an occasion to find joy across cultural divides. Ditto for the invitation my daughter received to a classmate’s Hanukkah party. She’s begged me to try my hand at making the tasty latkes she was introduced to, and I’m going to try my progressive Protestant best to emulate them.

But as the holiday season comes round again each year in the U.S., I feel a heavier emotional burden in negotiating the unfortunate minefield that our well-wishing has become. No matter what one says, our greetings are too often seen as political statements, rather than sincerely intended.

“Merry Christmas,” in some minds, has become a militant rhetorical weapon wielded by Christian conservatives. See, for instance, Pamela White’s column in the Boulder Weekly, which condemns Focus on the Family for instigating a boycott of businesses that opt to wish “Happy Holidays” to their customers, rather than a Merry Christmas.

“Happy holidays,” likewise, which was once an alliterative phrase with an encompassing festive appeal – like “Season’s Greetings” – has now become a hallmark of political correctness and hostility to Christianity, for many. The similarly all-purpose “Have a good holiday” that the grocery checker sends me on my way with has ironically become as uncomfortable as “Merry Christmas,” (including perhaps for the atheist who rejects all “holy days”).

No matter what we choose to say – or not say — we have attached so much tense political baggage to our expressions that the season can feel harsh and scary, rather than standing as a moment in our annual calendar when we can come together in all our diversity, respect our various traditions, and celebrate peace and love amidst the ongoing horror of global wars, fears over collapsing economies, and the tedium of quotidian demands.

Even our musical heritage is reflecting this anxiety. I’ve noticed we no longer hear traditional Christmas carols on retail music systems in December – no Joy to the World or Hark the Herald Angels Sing, no Silent Night. Just an insipid barrage of Jingle Bell Rock and cheesy pop versions of Sleigh Ride. Are these old pieces of sacred music so potentially incendiary that we must remove them from our shared cultural lexicon, insisting that they stay exclusively in the private sphere so that in a generation or so, few may still be familiar with them outside a church? If we follow that logic, we may as well shun Handel’s Messiah or Bach’s Christmas Oratorio from our classical radio stations (the handful that remain). I’m sorry, but I find this overly zealous self-censorship foolish.

Europeans, who are not remotely as religious as Americans but becoming just as socially diverse, aren’t nearly as hung up as we are about seasonal salutations and religious references. To my eye, they have a sense of perspective and reasonableness that we tend to lack.

Americans, we need to lighten up. Rather than impoverish our collective spirits and cultural heritage by eliminating specific expressions of the holiday season from our shared spaces, including the dominant realm of commerce – or saying nothing if we are afraid we won’t “get it right” — can’t we just enjoy our cultural collage, including our religious traditions, with a little more mercy and lightheartedness?

Delight in the glow of the Menorah, enjoy the fresh scent of a twinkling fir, burn a yule log and revel in the return of Ol’ Sol, rejoice that a humble babe born in a cattle stall was sent into the world to challenge might and materialism…

In this spirit, I wish you a very Merry Christmas indeed, and I welcome your reciprocal overtures to me, whichever kind-spirited tradition they are grounded within.

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

There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

- Pop Will Eat Itself, “Ich Bin Ein Auslander”

When all is said and done, nothing communicates the racism and knee-buckling stupidity of all-too-wide swaths of our nation quite like video. So if you don’t trust me to tell the truth about these folks, maybe you’ll trust their own words.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here, for your copying-and-pasting convenience, is a transcription of some of what you just heard:

“I’m afraid if he wins, the blacks will take over. He’s not a Christian! This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

“When you got a Nigger running for president, you need a first stringer. He’s definitely a second stringer.”

“He seems like a sheep – or a wolf in sheep’s clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin – she’s filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she’s gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

“He’s related to a known terrorist, for one.”

“He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

“He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

“Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody’s still kinda – a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but… I dunno, it’s just kinda… a little unnerving.”

“Obama and his wife, I’m concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

“I don’t like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash… because we’re not!”

As I always told my writing students: show, don’t tell.

Clearing a Low Bar

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate
Shout loud in the crowd “Watch
them beat us all down.”

At this point, I’m trying to imagine what I can add that isn’t superfluous. That racism still exists, in tragic amounts, isn’t a revelation to anyone with more than six or seven functioning brain cells, although being confronted anew with this kind of evidence is still jarring.

What’s different, though, is what I said back in June.

Make no mistake, in the coming months you’re going to see the ugliest artillery that our nation’s drooling, inbred hatemongers have at their disposal. The looming prospect of a nigra in the White House is going to bring the vermin out of the woodwork, out from under their rocks and out into the light. It’s going to incite the well-heeled country club elite to crank up the meme machine with every sort of subtle, codemongering dogwhistle it can manufacture. The truly ignorant and hateful are going to be liquored up on rhetorical bile of the lowest sort and those who live further up the social ladder are going to be provided with a variety of messages that let them vote white without having to admit to themselves that they’re fundamentally just like the snuff-suckers in the trailer park across the tracks.

This is a good thing. Let me say that again: this is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because we’ll never defeat an enemy that can safely hide from scrutiny. This is a disease that’s only going to be cured with copious amounts of very bright light.

We will not fear your mask. Because what we believe in doesn’t need to hide.

In this election campaign, let’s invite the Klan and its fellow hate groups out into the light. Let’s get their hoods off of them. Let’s show all their videos. Let’s make sure that everybody gets to read their brochures and visit their Web sites. Let’s hand the microphone to their most eloquent speakers and stand aside. Let’s get them front and center and make sure America sees, in all its slack-jawed, toothless glory, precisely what racism looks like.
…
And above all, when we hear racist code masquerading as legitimate, issues-based messaging, let’s not be afraid to say “excuse me, but will you take off your hood?”

It’s decision time, and I’m ready for a referendum on hate. How about you?

Regardless of what happens on Election Day, we won’t have triumphed finally and completely over ignorance. Our culture is, at its very core, anti-intellectual and frighteningly tolerant of the willfully stupid. We fetishize shallowness and vote on whether or not we’d like to have a beer with the candidate. We mock “elites,” sort of. We’re too thick to recognize real elitism when we see it, but we can be relentless in our abuse of those born to meager means who, through little but their own intelligence and hard work, rise up to make something of themselves. Our ability for self-deception is unmatched in the entire civilized world.

But an Obama victory (which looks more likely by the day) would nonetheless mark a milestone: we would have arrived at a point where a man of non-white (or half non-white, as the case may be) heritage can be elected to our highest office. As my colleague Whythawk has observed, that actually says something pretty good about America, given how few of our fellow industrialized nations can say the same.

“We suck less,” though, isn’t the sort of shining-city-on-the-hill standard America has traditionally prided itself on setting (even if only rhetorically), and while being the first to clear a very low bar is something to note, it’s not something to get too puffed up over. This is especially true when we have millions of citizens howling for the corpse of Barack Obama. It’s especially true when our media institutions ignore the filthiness happening right before their eyes. It’s especially true when these disgusting public spectacles are funded by a hyper-rich power elite that’s willing to spend whatever it takes to keep us ignorant and at each other’s throats.

As for the premise that McCain is no racist, well … racist is as racist does, don’t you think? He got his back up at the suggestion that he was somehow like George Wallace, but in what conceivable way is that charge less fair and valid than the slanders his campaign has slung in Obama’s direction?

And why should we taken seriously McCain’s late-to-the-dance attempts to rein in the hate that’s been committed in his name? His actions in recent years have made clear that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win the White House, Bob Dolizing himself to a degree that Dole himself could hardly have imagined. Tack this way on the advice of advisers, pander to the Right to shore up the base, let Karl Rove bully you out of your VP preference, let slip the dogs of Race War… Why would I or you or any other thinking American regard this as anything besides a tactical maneuver driven by research showing that undecided voters are turned off by it?

None of Us Are Free

In “None of Us Are Free” (written by Barry Mann, Brenda Russell and Cynthia Weil), Solomon Burke sings

None of us are free.
None of us are free.
None of us are free, one of us is chained.
None of us are free.

Clearly, large portions of America remain chained. Our Cracker Problem persists, and what ought to be most disconcerting is that it not only exists in the heart of Georgia, in Outback Ohio, in pro-America Virginia or in a Republican Women’s club in California. It not only thrives in the minds of elderly whites who preferred Jim Crow to Martin Luther King. It’s not only alive and well in organizations like Stormfront and the League of the South.

No, the problem is that racism, racemongering and race-baiting are alive and well at the very highest, most public levels of our democracy: our presidential election process. And it was put there, on full display, and sanctioned by one of the only two parties that ever really stands a chance in any national election.

On November 4th, let’s hope for an epic thrashing of those who seek to profit by trading in hate and ignorance. Let’s further hope that those who can’t and won’t evolve get the message loud and clear: crawl back underneath your rocks and remain quiet until it’s finally your time to die.

But whatever we do, let’s not confuse winning a battle with winning the war. Our Cracker Problem will be with us for awhile longer, and November 5th will be the beginning, not the end.

And when they come to ethnically cleanse me
Will you speak out? Will you defend me?
Or laugh through a glass
eye as they rape our lives
Trampled underfoot by the Right on the rise…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previously: Ich Bin Ein Auslander

Listen to the victim, abused by the system
The basis is racist, you know that we must face this

In 1991 Pop Will Eat Itself produced one of the most damning comments on racism in society in the history of popular music. “Ich Bin Ein Auslander” was specifically aimed at anti-immigrant racism in Europe, but over the past 17 years it’s been impossible for me to hear the song without mapping its penetrating, undeniable truth onto our American context. Our black auslanders aren’t recent arrivals (although many of our brown ones are), but they nonetheless remain social, political, economic and cultural outsiders, and whatever progress they may have made in the several hundred years since they first arrived in shackles, only a fool can believe that the basis is no longer racist.

I said some time back, as the presidential election lurched into overdrive, that the heavy racist stuff was coming. Not that it necessarily took Nostradamus to predict that, of course – as staggering prognostications go this one ranked right up there with “the sun will rise in the East.” Still, the predictability and magnitude of racism in America, the absolute certainty of it, matters.

Welcome to a state where the politics of hate Shout loud in the crowd
“Watch them beat us all down.”
There’s a rising tide on the rivers of blood
But if the answer isn’t violence, neither is your silence

So I collected the bits and pieces of evidence as they began flying across the transom. As Obama’s lead solidified. As McCain became more desperate. As the ignorant and hateful on the Right were whipped into a lynch-ready lather by Rush, Hannity, O’Reilly, by the Coulters and Savages and their legions of local market disciples. As they were egged on by the silence of a gutless old man who’d sold what little soul he had to start with; and by the photogenic perkiness of the former beauty queen he chose as his running mate: finally realized, Dan Quayle and Marilyn all rolled into one, witch doctor-approved, and so far to the right politically and theologically that even Pat Robertson has to be thinking “that bitch is crazy.” And of course, by their cynical proxies, who have read enough history to know a thing or two about the value of a good “other” when the scapegoating hour arrives.

Slowly, but all too surely, Cracker America began to realize that its most horrific of spectres is taking corporeal form: the White House is about to become the Black House. One of the greatest truisms of human nature is this: crisis reveals character. Or, in this case, lack of character. If you want to know what people are all about, at their core, back them into a corner. The truth will soon reveal itself, for good or ill.

The Code of Real America

“Take a look around at the cities and the towns.”
See them hunting, creeping, sneaking
Breeding fear and loathing with the lies they’re speaking

I said I had been collecting evidence. Let’s have a look, shall we?

• A Virginia county GOP chair wasn’t content to play the race card – he played the whole race deck:
  

  You need to read this column to believe it. In “humor” he accuses Obama of wanting to paint the White House black, supporting reparations, changing the national anthem to the “black national anthem”, teaching “black liberation theology in all churches”, and replacing the flag with a “star and crescent logo”.

  That he resigned is good, but it hardly excuses anything.

• While we’re talking about Virginia, what do you think Virgil Goode means by “politically correct loans”? Hmmm. Far be it from me to accuse someone of Mr. Goode’s stature of employing code, but as someone on one of my political lists points out, it’s worth noting that if you Google the term, the top result is … illuminating.
• When it comes to deciding whether a particular person is a racist, it’s hard (despite Mr. Bush’s claims of omniscience regarding Harriet Miers) to know his or her heart. Still, we might infer something useful from looking at the company the person in question keeps. With this in mind, Sarah Palin’s political associations should certainly raise a couple questions, don’t you think?
• In our current climate – which I guess we’ll call semi-actualized – it’s no longer acceptable or prudent for a candidate to stand up and shout something as inflammatory as “lynch the nigger!” So when you want people who are open to that message to hear it without you actually saying it, some sleight of tongue is required. At the moment, when we hear the word “terrorist” we tend to think of people who are … how to put this? … not white. We don’t think of Timothy McVeigh or Eric Rudolph, for some odd reason, nor do we think of the Irish Republican Army or the fine folks who advocate bombing Planned Parenthood clinics and murdering doctors who perform abortions (although we do get exercised about Bill Ayers, a man nobody cared about until he became a vague acquaintance of Obama’s; dare I suggest that he wasn’t a real terrorist until he was found in the company of negroes?) So when we hear Palin linking “Obama” and “terrorist” the way she’s fond of doing, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear people in the crowd stepping up for their portion of the call-and-response with “terrorist!” and “kill him!” You may argue that there’s nothing racist about this at all, and if it existed in a vacuum, if it were isolated from any larger context, I might have to cede the point that this was simply about a general ignorance of the facts. But there’s a lot of if in that equation, and those showing up to see Palin certainly seem capable of connecting the dots.
  

  At a McCain rally on Monday, television stations caught audio of a crowd member calling Obama a “terrorist,” while Dana Milbank reported that “[o]ne Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, ‘Sit down, boy.’” Also on Monday, at a Palin rally, one member of the audience yelled, “Kill him!”

  So I don’t see any of us benefiting from playing stupid.

  

• But, you say, it’s not the fault of McCain and Palin that there are a few yahoos in the crowd. True. I’m not responsible for your stupidity. However, I am responsible for my reactions to that stupidity. If you yell “nigger” in a crowded Republican rally and I, the candidate, say nothing, how can I be seen as doing anything but endorsing it? As Solomon Burke sings in “None of Us Are Free,” “if you don’t say it’s wrong, then that says it’s right.”
• By the way, I’m having a hard time understanding why the Secret Service isn’t hauling people out of these rallies and charging them with whatever the charge is when you incite/advocate murdering a Senator. Just saying….
• The above assumes, for the sake of argument, that the campaign’s racist tone and tactics aren’t by design. As last week’s Frank Rich column illustrates, though, we can’t possibly assume anything of the sort.
  

  From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

  McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

  No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

  This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

• McCain’s campaign co-chair employed a pretty nifty code-swarm when he worked “guy of the street,” “cocaine” and “Jeremiah Wright” into a conversation with Dennis Miller. “Guy of the street.” Hmmm. Granted, this steps away from all that “elitist” bullshit, which is nice. But if you’re black, your choices are now “uppity” or “street thug”? Lordy, how far our darkies have come from the days of “field negro” vs. “house negro”…
• We haven’t talked about Virginia in a few bullet points, so how about this: Obama = Osama. And again, let’s remember – we’re all smart enough to see the big picture and understand the larger context, especially in light of the fact that we now know this wasn’t a one-off – it’s part of the sewage that campaign workers are being trained to spew.
• By Virginia, of course, we’re referring to real Virginia. You know, Macaca Virginia, which we assume to be part of pro-America America. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
• There’s not only a “real Virginia,” there’s a real America. This FiveThirtyEight analysis takes a good, hard look at Palin’s ideal America (based on her rhetoric and the places she’s chosen to appear lately) and guess what? Real America is significantly whiter than … unreal? … America.
• In Fairfield, Ohio, Halloween is evidently being celebrated by hanging Obama in effigy. If you’re a little confused by the Star of David on his head, join the club. I imagine black and Jew are all pretty much the same thing in some people’s minds.
• By the way, you know that whole “Obama is a Muslim” thing? Read up on the piece of work who fabricated it here. Turns out he don’t like them dirty Jews, neither. And that’s not the half of it.
• You may be thinking – how have I gotten this far without once mentioning FOX “News”? I think this item will reward your patience. Up until now Colin Powell’s negrocity has been tolerated, but yesterday he forgot his place and endorsed Obama. Which means he’s fair game for stuff like this: “Colin Powell has his dancing shoes on, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up to do the Obama Two-Step.” I guess we should be grateful that they stopped at “two-step” (I was expecting “shuffle”) and that they didn’t deliver the story in blackface.
• Lest you think that racism is confined to the South and Midwest, this entry hails from the Great State of California. Where, apparently, them jigaboos loves them some fried chicken and watermelon. Of course, the perpetrator apologized because, you know, she didn’t mean to offend nobody.
• Want more? We got more. Check out the gallery of stupid over at Pam’s House Blend, where you’ll find:
  * More fun in post-racial America
  * John McCain forced to denounce racist, homophobic member of Virginia leadership team
  * Kentucky, I know you can do better than this
  * FL: middle school teacher uses ‘nigger’ to describe Barack Obama
  * Palin praised racist writer who called for RFK’s assassination
  * Values at the Values Voter Summit – Obama as a Muslim Aunt Jemima
  * Westmoreland stands by ‘uppity’ remark about Obama
  * White supremacists: Obama’s boosting our movement
  * John McLaughlin: Obama fits the ‘Oreo’ stereotype
  * Georgia: publication features Obama in crosshairs on cover for article on white supremacist threat
  * Bigot eruption: GOP House member refers to Obama as ‘boy’
  * South Carolina: black reporter attacked by white family (on camera!)

As the song says:

Freedom of expression doesn’t make it alright
Trampled underfoot by the rise of the right.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next: None of Us Are Free

AN ESSAY ON MURDER, MEDIA MAYHEM AND
THE CONDITION OF THE CULTURE

by
Michael Tracey

FOR PATSY RAMSEY, SHERRY KEENE-OSBORNE, and BARB SMITH
Courageous and Good Ladies All

* * *

This long essay was originally intended to be a short memoir. It did not work out that way. It has evolved, for good or ill, into a work of parts, and can be read as such.

* * *

In late 2006 Professor Michael Murray, of the University of Illinois, asked me to contribute a chapter for a book he is editing on crime and the media. It would be an account of a curious, singular event I happened to get caught up in, an event that in a sense began in 1997, but took an unfortunate turn in 2006. Writing it, he suggested, might even be therapeutic. He was correct. But as I started to write it almost inevitably grew, moving in various directions, as the narrative which I initially wrote raised questions that begged explanation.

The account of the “event” is told in narrative form. The essay then shifts direction, to engage what is to this mind’s eye, more substantive issues that not only do I want to raise but which I take be of considerably greater importance than the dark dance that occupied my life for a miserable, harmful year, indeed ten years. Inevitably, then, the style changes, or evolves, from a narrative of unfolding events to an examination of larger social and cultural issues, reflecting my long held belief that the only reason to examine, pick apart, the particular is better to understand the general. Blake put it best in his admonition : “..to see the world in a grain of sand, to hold infinity in the palm of your hand.” In this case the particular was the murder, on Christmas night 1996, of JonBenet Ramsey and the August 2006 arrest of a person claiming to have killed her “accidentally.” The general is the meaning of the national, indeed global, reaction to these two events.

This was not, however, an act of scholarly whimsy, of knowingly using an account of dreadful tragedy as a tool to go where I “really” wanted to go. It was, in truth, a deeply personal experience out of which, by happenstance, I was able to think through other questions which I have long pondered and never quite resolved, issues of the nature of our culture, a condition defined not just by the stuff of its content, or of how it comes to be what it is, but also by what one might call its mood, its psychology and morality, its texture if you will. Perhaps, within all of this, what I really wanted to get to grips with was something I have long detected, and been massively disappointed by, the sense that there is within the public mind and heart, within the societal corpus, an anger that seeks the balm of calm through occasional explosive, emotional fury, a fury which is, by the way, ever so open to manipulation – as we have seen of late.

The need to engage with these questions of the condition of American culture and the role of the media in defining that condition comes naturally. I am at one level simply intellectually curious about the world around me, always have been, and for that I make no apology. There was, however, I understand and will admit, another purpose , another need to know the forces forming and, to my way of thinking, distorting, this society, drawn from the well of my childhood.

295 Shaw Road

A few miles from where I was born, in the English working class community of Oldham, an old cotton spinning town that went into steep decline in the early 1950s and which has been trying to climb out of the pit of industrial failure ever since, is Moston Cemetery. My father is buried there. I was 4 years old, he was thirty one when he died. He was in the Royal Air Force and burnt to death when his plane smashed into the side of a Welsh mountain. I have a feeling that he didn’t want to be in the RAF but it was 1952, he was working class, the prospects outside weren’t great. He chose to stay in the service, he died and I never knew him. I have no memory, no picture gallery of the mind to occasionally roam through. He was too young to die and I was too young to have been deprived of his presence. Never a day has passed, nary a moment when I don’ t think of him. I miss him desperately, and I’m old enough now to understand and, more importantly, to acknowledge that his loss impacted, scarred, my whole life. It was unfair, just as the loss of the young always seems so unfair, like acid poured into an open, never to be closed, festering wound. Such loss is unfair, and we lash out against it because it offends against a core thesis of our world, that death is not for the young.

After his death my mother and I moved in with my grandparents. They were kind and I loved them very much. The physical circumstances were, however, to say the least meager. 295 Shaw Road was a 19th century terraced house, what would be called a row house here, built by cotton factory owners to house the workforce. It had been condemned many years before I was born but still stood there, a defiant reminder of an age long gone except in the hearts and minds and moods of those who lived within its cramped, damp space. It was what we called “2 up, 2 down,’ that is, 2 bedrooms upstairs, a downstairs living room and a kitchen. There was only running cold water, a coal fire and an outside toilet. I lived there, sharing a room with my mother until I was 14 when the local authority re-housed us in a council “flat,” what here would be called public housing. At least this had an inside toilet and, oh wonder of wonders, central heating – we had of course been moved because my mother had convinced the powers that be that it wasn’t quite seemly for a teenage boy to be sharing a room with his mother ( thank God for puberty.)

One thing I came to understand at an early age is that the English working class don’t handle death well, and in some senses they are not all that great at handling life. I’ve been away a long time now and maybe today it is different, maybe. What I recall, however, is a world, a culture that was in considerable part, traumatized by its circumstance. It was also a world, one that could never go inside and engage the pain. The idea of therapy, of talking about feelings and hurts was unthinkable except when fueled by alcohol at which moments the emotional engagement either translated itself into a certain maudlin, self-pity or violence in a curious ritual in which one way to deal with pain was to inflict it. To my young eye none of this was necessarily apparent since life seemed fine ( black dog, who would later emerge snarling, was still a puppy.) On the surface life was lived with a kind of jolly chirpiness, a mood that spoke that all was well, life is basically OK, when in fact it wasn’t. I remember whenever I walked with my mother to the local store, or around the town centre’s outdoor market, and we passed someone with whom she was familiar, they would say to each other, with a quick smile, “hiya,” the local version of hello and then very quickly move on, no conversation other than perhaps a piece of gossip or “how’s yer mum?” For a long time I assumed that the greeting and the smile were real. They weren’t, more often than not they were milquetoast artifice behind which lurked something far less cheery, a dark misery. There was humour, buckets of it, but it was I think similar to what someone once said of Graham Greene’s novel, Travels With My Aunt, “laughter in the shadow of the gallows.” The fact is that the English working class, no less than the English middle class, if for different reasons, knew when they listened to their inner voice, that they were sad, disappointed, incomplete, frustrated.

And then there was death. They bury it in the darker recesses of the mind where demons lurk, they don’t talk about it, pretend that there is no need to grieve, that somehow grief is actually a sign of weakness, unless it is the orchestrated, sad, even bizarre spectacle of public grief, as happened with Diana in 1997. It is a sad, but perhaps necessary consequence of the felt need to just “get by,” to survive in a hostile world that is designed for and by their “betters.”

There were no photos of my father in the house, not one. I once found some letters of his but they quickly and inevitably disappeared. No one ever spoke of him, mentioned his name, reminisced about him, told the stories that I was so desperate to hear, as is any child who has lost the other most important person in their life. There was one exception, when a family friend said “you have his eyes,” at which point I blushed and changed the subject. It was as if he never existed, except of course in my heart. The silence was so intense that it was impossible for me to even ask those simple, but vital questions: what was he like; was he funny; did he like soccer or cricket; did he love me?

I remember my first day at Cardinal Langley Grammar School, an all boys school run by a religious teaching order. In one class, taught by Brother Leonard, he asked us what our fathers did – not, note, our mothers (mine was a shop assistant.) I heard the boys say “he’s a teacher,” “a solicitor (lawyer),” “he owns a shop,” “he works in a factory.” The brutal question slowly snaked towards me, from the front of the class to the back where I was sitting. I was terrified, what would I say, what could I say – I knew what I couldn’t say, the truth. I lied. I said he was a “dustman,” a trash collector. Looking back it was an interesting choice in that if I was going to give him a job it wasn’t going to be glamorous. I simply didn’t have the emotional strength to say that he was dead, that he had died serving his country, that I was proud of him, loved him very much and missed him dreadfully, even if I hadn’t a clue as to who he was. What a wretched moment, one that I’ve regretted ever since. Of course the silence about him could not last, and one day my mother asked me what I wanted to know? I was 50 years old. I think she sensed my rage at what they had done, but I simply replied, “It’s OK, it’s too late.” I did ask her one question that had plagued me, “did I go to his funeral…?” Of course, I knew the answer to that one.

It was during these years on Shaw Road that two things happened that, along with his death and the screaming silence, came to define my whole life, and laid the ground work for the events of 2006, indeed the past ten years. My grandfather was a leading local politician and every Friday night his political pals would come to the house and talk politics. I would sit on the floor and simply listen. I was entranced, and there was born my love of language and my fascination for all things political. Then when I was about 13 I was browsing in a book store and picked up a copy of Theodore White’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Making of the President 1960. Each week my mother would give me my “odd money,” what here would be called an allowance. It was tiny, but each week I would go to this small bookstore and spend two or three hours deciding which book to buy. I stood there in the bookstore ( I have always loved the smell of books), opened White’s book and read its famous first words, “It was invisible, as always…”

The “it” was the unfolding majesty of the electoral process, as the first votes are counted in the far eastern corner of America and then slowly, surely moves like the sun from east to west as the leader of the free world is chosen by the ordinary, but decent, folks of this most free of lands. If I might engage in a cliché, I couldn’t put it down. Here was the proffering of a dream to a young boy so desperately in need of a dream. I fell in love with the idea of America, with its politics, its institutions, its peoples and most of all its glorious possibility. I drank in White’s wonderfully mad, idealized narrative of the process, and in particular I fell in love with the iconic figure of JFK – the first of many iconic father figures I would come to adore and respect and learn from.

I started to read everything that I could get my hands on, books, newspapers, magazines. I subscribed to the London Times and would clip every article about the United States, a land that I “knew” in my youthful heart was truly blessed, that shining city on the hill. I became a huge fan of the Times’ then Washington correspondent, Louis Harris. I would do crazy things like writing to the Port Authority of New York and the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce for anything they could send me. The packages would duly arrive, and I couldn’t wait to open them and devour the latest information on a new industrial plant in Schenectady or Buffalo or…name a place, or the tonnage of shipping passing through the waters off New York City.

Ah, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive and to be young, even in Oldham. I could recite JFK’s inaugural, detail the stories in his Profiles in Courage, tell you about the Constitution, explain the reason for being in Vietnam even before Vietnam was a major blip on the global radar. I “knew” that JFK was a good and great martyr, that LBJ while gruff was designing the Great Society of which, by the time I was 15, I definitely wanted a piece. In the eyes of a sad child “America” was quite simply heaven on earth. And then I came to live here and that’s where it started to go wrong.

A Troubled Place

I have no regrets about my childhood naivete, which has never quite left me, because if a child can’t dream, who can? It was not, however, as I would have wished it to be. It disappointed as I realized that like few societies on earth America promises people Heaven, and gives them Hell, and then for good measure gives other parts of the planet a good kicking. In his 2005 Nobel lecture, the English playwright, Harold Pinter, savaged what America had become and done, particularly in its foreign policy and its almost fetish-like desire to cuddle up to this and that authoritarian regime that had perfected the fine art of ripping peoples’ fingernails out – if they were lucky.

He noted, however, that the United States was particularly adept at masking all of this – just as it had with the boy from Oldham. Standing in the Stockholm Konserthus he observed that whatever the miseries inflicted, in the public eye,

“…It never happened. Nothing ever happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite classical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put it to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most salable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words ‘the American people’…It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable.”

What Pinter said resonated. His critique was twofold: of the dreadful actions of the political class in foreign affairs and of the witless compliance of “ordinary” Americans. It was this latter that particularly concerned me because while I was troubled by what the United States was doing to the rest of the world I was equally troubled by what it was doing to itself. I wanted, somehow, on however small a scale, to do something, to say something about what I saw as a miserable, wretched but fundamentally unnecessary condition. The Fell upon which I had long walked was that of culture, particularly as expressed through, and by, the media.

For many years as I observed I became ever more troubled, arriving at a conclusion that I wished would go away, but which lurked with an ever greater and chilling presence. I had come to see the dragging down of the idea that cultural expression could serve larger purposes, could be imbued with the spell of wisdom and profundity, could work from the premise that there was something ultimately good, indeed great, about who we are, who we can be, who we should be. I had come to feel a growing belief that there was no longer any meaning to the old aphorism that, for example, broadcasting at its best made the good popular and the popular good. I come to agree with Newt Minnow who, forty years on, revisited his famous claim from the early 1960s that television was a vast wasteland, declared that it was a vaster wasteland still. OJ was happening, along with a growing trend of reality television, that bitter broth of voyeurism and public humiliation – Cowper’s “Detested sport/That owes its pleasures to another’s pain.” I had this unshakable sense, a long time in the making, that mass culture was evolving in ways that shoved aside things of worth and merit in favor of too much vacuous, juvenile, even primitive “pleasures,” egged on all the while by ever larger corporations.

The larger body politic also seemed driven more by the will to power than the will to serve, a metastasizing lack of grace. When he was dying of a brain tumor, Lee Atwater, who had been the wunderkind who had masterminded the election of the first President Bush and who all but single handedly invented modern-day, dirty politics, had a profound epiphany. He wrote:

“What was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood…I don’t know who will lead us through the 90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, the tumor of the soul…”

It was as if the culture and its institutions, its governance as much as its education system, had failed and left vast numbers of people ill-equipped for the hard work of citizenship, a population that was bored, too readily drawn to simple pleasures, ignorant of the world around, drawn ever more to absurd beliefs and world views. In other words, I had arrived at a place I didn’t want to be, a troubled place. Perhaps it was all inevitable.

On such a broad landscape it may seem curious to admit, but when JonBenet died and the media frenzy began, and the public clamoured for ever more information, and sought retribution against her “ghastly parents,” here, for me, was an opportunity to say something about what was a deeply troubled land, to say that this is not how it is supposed to be, this is not how the media should function in a democracy, this democracy, this is not how justice should be pursued, it’s wrong. I wanted to do this because I could not, do not want to, shake that feeling of calm and warmth and, finally, finding a future, a place to love not just live in, a place in which to belong, not just be in that I felt as I stood there in that bookstore, opened the pages of the book and read those words, “It was invisible, as always…”

NEXT: JonBenet

INDEX

The second company, Philip Morris, is suing using a totally different legal logic. They say it’s an unconstitutional abridgment of their First Amendment right to free speech.

In 2003, the Supreme Court dismissed Nike, Inc., et al, Petitioners v. Marc Kasky (with dissents on the dismissal by Justice Breyer and Justice Kennedy). According to the dismissal concurrence (linked above), the case essentially involved a private California citizen (Marc Kasky) suing Nike for unfair and deceptive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law, specifically that “Nike made a number of ‘false statements and/or material omissions of fact’ concerning the working conditions under which Nike products are manufactured.” Nike’s response was that Kasky’s suit was unconstitutional since Nike had a First Amendment right (ostensibly guaranteed by its status as a juristic person) to say anything it wanted in its “commercial speech” (ie advertising). The Supreme Court initially granted, and then subsequently dismissed without deciding the constitutional questions, a hearing on this issue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle article, Philip Morris is claiming that “‘…the purpose and effect of the ordinance is to suppress communications directed to adult smokers, in violation of our constitutional rights’, said Joe Murillo, a lawyer representing Philip Morris USA.” Understandably, the director of the city’s Department of Public Health, Mitch Katz, is not impressed:

“Do you remember any part of the Bill of Rights being about pharmacies selling tobacco?” he asked. “Philip Morris has fought every attempt by public health officials to save lives by curbing smoking … It’s a badge of honor for anyone in public health to be sued by Philip Morris”

It’s probably not a coincidence that Philip Morris is suing in California, the same state that brought the question of corporate personhood and First Amendment protections for commercial speech before the Supreme Court previously. California was one of the first states to adopt false advertising legislation (Sections 17500-17509 of California State Law), and California’s restrictions on both advertising and unfair competition are quite strict. In addition, California is the nation’s largest single market and as such it drives much of the nation’s regulations(which is why energy and automobile companies fight tooth and claw against California’s strict carbon emissions law, among others). A win in California would have a great deal of influence on regulations throughout the rest of the country, including at the federal level with the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection – Advertising Practices Division.

For more on corporate personhood, please visit Reclaim Democracy.

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Money, speech, and corporate personhood
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