I hardly give the Jefferson Memorial a second glance. I see it, like a glowing turtle that has crawled onto the bank, on the far side of the basin. Beneath the memorial’s domed ceiling—modeled after the ceiling of Jefferson’s home, Monticello—Jefferson calls, “What about me?”

It reminds me of that great little scene from “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” from season three of The Simpsons. After seeking advice and inspiration from Abraham Lincoln, who’s inundated with advice-seekers, Lisa seeks out Jefferson for advice instead. The place is deserted. “No one ever comes to see me,” a bitter Jefferson laments. “I don’t blame them. I never did anything important. Just the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the dumbwaiter….”

Lisa, her patience already frayed, leaves him. “Wait!” Jefferson calls. “Please don’t go. I get so lonely….”

The scene always delights me—in part because of what may be an irrational grudge I hold toward Jefferson. The guy has been dead since 1826, passing away within hours of fellow Founder John Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration. (It’s one of the best true stories of American history.)

So why should I hold a grudge against a guy long-dead?

I’m a John Adams man, through and through. History has proven Adams right about so many things—the need for a strong executive, the supremacy of federal over state government, the dangers of a passionate but uneducated electorate—but Adams knew at the time that history would forget him because he wasn’t flashy and because he had the unfortunate habit of calling things as he saw them.

He and Jefferson had been great friends in their early careers, although they made an unlikely pair: Adams was short and rotund and balding, Jefferson tall and thin and red-haired; Adams was a farmer-turned-lawyer, Jefferson a lawyer-turned-farmer; Adams was a self-made man from Massachusetts, Jefferson a member of the Virginia aristocracy.

Yet they saw themselves as comrades in a great struggle. Adams was the voice of the Revolution while Jefferson served as its pen. In fact, Adams was the one who suggested that Jefferson draft the Declaration. After the Revolution, serving together as ministers in Europe, Jefferson was close with the Adams family—so much so that the eldest Adams son, John Quincy, spent countless hours with the Virginia. “He seemed as much your son as mine,” the elder Adams told Jefferson.

But back in America, Adams and Jefferson found themselves on opposite sides of the political battles then waging in the early Republic. For Adams, historian Joseph Ellis has said, friendship trumped politics; for Jefferson, the opposite held true. Jefferson ultimately betrayed Adams, and the wound cut Adams deeply.

Adams eventually forgave his old friend. After twelve icy years of silence between them, and they had both retired to their homesteads, the two former presidents struck up a correspondence that has become one of the most remarkable exchanges in American history. Adams went so far to claim, somewhat disingenuously, that “there has never been the smallest interruption of the personal friendship between Mr. Jefferson that I know of.”

So if Adams could forgive Jefferson, why can’t I?

After all, despite my grudge, I do admire Jefferson, albeit grudgingly. I’ve gotta love a guy who once said, “I have sworn on the altar of god eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” He wrote that in a letter to a friend, and it’s not inscribed along the interior of the memorial’s dome.

A perfect child of the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a deep and profound thinker. Historian David McCullough likened him to “a university unto himself.” Jefferson had so many books that, after the British burned the Library of Congress in the War of 1812, the government reestablished the library by buying Jefferson’s. “I cannot live without books,” Jefferson wrote to Adams. I feel like Jefferson and I are kindred spirits in that regard; I could have his quote tattooed on my forehead.

But I’m also deeply bothered by Jefferson’s inability to face the many, many contradictions in his public and personal lives. He was always in debt, yet he spent extravagantly. He pretended to be above the political fray, yet his maneuverings would’ve taken Machiavelli to school. He opposed a strong executive, yet he unilaterally agreed to the Louisiana Purchase.

“The Jefferson style was to evade, maintain pretenses, then convince himself all was well,” Ellis has said.

And, of course, I am bothered by the fact that Jefferson, the slaveholder, had the audacity to write “All men are created equal.” Jefferson even admitted slavery was wrong, but he thought it would be up to the next generation, not his, to do something about it.

Well, it took a couple generations—four score and five years after Jefferson penned his words—but finally a whole bunch of someones did do something about it, and it cost more than 600,000 American lives.

So maybe, in some sad, terrible way, I have myself convinced that Jefferson’s words and Jefferson’s lack of moral courage led to America’s greatest tragedy.

Maybe not directly, and certainly not intentionally. But as the old saying goes, all it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing. Jefferson ultimately chose to sit on his mountaintop perch and occupy himself with anything and everything except the one great question of his day.

For that reason, I suspect it would be virtually impossible to construct a Jefferson Memorial today. FDR proposed the memorial in 1934 at a time when America didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it checkered history of race relations. The memorial opened nine years later, on April 13th, 1943, the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s birthday.

It’s a beautiful location, and lit up as it is on the edge of the tidal basin, the memorial stands as one of Washington’s most distinctive pieces of architecture—which is saying something considering the fact that the capital city is full of distinctive architecture.

But it’s lonely over there, too. Jefferson is in a kind of exile, and the pillars that hold up the dome could also be great marble prison bars that hold Jefferson in place.

I’ll visit him at some point. I always do. But tonight, I’m feeling the Adams grudge. After all, my man calls out, too, from across the years: “What about me?”

It’s 7:00 p.m. The last trickle of the evening commute has drained from the capital, and the busloads of school groups haven’t yet arrived from dinner. It’s the perfect time to visit. It’s me and the insects and perhaps ten other visitors. Three Muslim women walk past me, their heads covered with scarves so brightly colored I can see them in the dark.

And there’s the president—a bronze, life-sized statue of FDR in a wheelchair that sits near the entrance to the memorial. Writer Christopher Buckley once said the statue looked “exactly like James Joyce on the toilet,” an image I can now never shake from my mind. What a way to dethrone one of the Twentieth Century’s towering figures.

I walk the granite grounds of the memorial, laid out like sprawling, open-air rooms—four areas to represent each of FDR’s terms in office. Bronze sculptures and bas-relief panels depict scenes from the Great Depression, Fireside Chats, the CCC and the TVA, and even FDR’s funeral procession.

Everywhere there’s water rushing, gurgling, pooling, spouting, splashing, roaring, whispering, frothing, splattering, and spraying. Fountains abound throughout the memorial, and even the jets overhead in their landing patterns can’t drown their sound.

The third room, the room that represents Roosevelt’s war years, is mostly dark except for the muffled glow of a floodlight in the nearby bushes. The fountain is off. And empty. The massive statue of FDR, flanked by his Scottish terrier, Fala, sits in shadow.

However, the words on a wall nearby still illuminate even if they’re unilluminated: “There came a time when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.”

Sure, it’s a reference to World War Two. But the journalism professor in me can’t help but think the quote could serve as a mission statement for newspapers and other media outlets—at least those that still take their public service missions seriously and haven’t fallen slave to corporate beancounters.

That’s a new reflection for me. My visits to the memorials always give me new and sometimes surprising things to think about. I’ll be able to chew on that particular tidbit for a while.

I’ve been visiting the memorials in D.C. ever since I was a kid. Now, as an adult, I still find great enjoyment when I visit these great American shrines. When I have my choice, I come at night because the crowds are smaller and it’s easier to reflect on my experience. I also like to visit at night because the subdued lighting brings out the memorials’ sublime beauty.

I still have the place mostly to myself. I come around a corner to find park ranger shining his flashlight against a granite wall, twisting the lens to adjust the width of the beam. Satisfied, he turns it off and resumes his rounds. Another jet roars overhead; they come every minute and a half or so.

I make it a point to walk to far end of the FDR Memorial. There, on the wall past the small amphitheater, are inscribed Roosevelt’s famous Four Freedoms: Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.

Years ago, when my son was five, my wife and I brought him to the FDR Memorial one afternoon. The fountains fascinated him, and he spent a lot of time looking at the sculptures. When we got to the end, we showed him the wall with the Four Freedoms, which he read to himself.

“Yes!” he yelled. “Yes! I have my Four Freedoms! Yes!”

He started to jump around, throwing his hands into the air, whirling almost dervishlike. He was absolutely serious about it, too. He was thrilled to have his Four Freedoms.

“I have my Four Freedoms! Yes!”

Now, as I stand there in the cool October evening, I read those same words and relive my son’s excitement.

I know some cynics who scoff at the idea of building great memorials to great men, but that’s hardly the point for me. Certainly FDR, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Teddy Roosevelt all deserve their memorials in D.C., but I try to think about what those men represent. To me, those great men embody great ideas, which their memorials enshrine.

The Four Freedoms, for instance, represent everything America is supposed to be. We often fail to live up to the responsibilities those Four Freedoms require of us, but likewise, those Four Freedoms help us aspire to achieve wonderful, beautiful things. Those Four Freedoms mean that my son can stand there once upon a time and read those words for himself and express his unbridled joy at what they meant to him.

Another jets rumbles over, breaking my reverie. I realize I’d better get a move on if I want to hit the other memorials. Already, I see a pair of busses have pulled up. One of them disgorges a crowd of people chattering in German. The other disgorges a school group.

From one of the walls, I take a final FDR thought with me: “The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

Yes. Let us move forward. Yes.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences.

The amendment’s final language, on which Colorado will vote in November 2010, is as follows:

SECTION 1. Article II of the constitution of the state of Colorado is amended BY THE ADDITION OF A NEW SECTION to read:
SECTION 2. Person defined. As used in sections 3, 6, and 25 of Article II of the state constitution, the term “person” shall apply to every human being from the beginning of the biological development of that human being.

So what does “biological development” mean? Last year’s amendment defined a person as starting with a fertilized egg (and it lost by a 3:1 margin), and the new amendment could be interpreted to mean the same – a zygote is a person.

But this time, the amendment’s language is even broader. The Independent article makes it clear that this was intentional on the part of the amendment’s authors. The language was written specifically to “to be more comprehensive in our definition of a person,” and the result is that, if passed, the amendment will outlaw abortion, many types of birth control, stem cell research, and could potentially outlaw fertility clinics.

“Beginning of the biological development.” That phrase may be perfectly clear to a conservative Christian abortion activist like Jones, lawyers and judges will have a more difficult time interpreting what it does to Colorado’s laws.

Last year, our own Dr. Slammy and commenters pointed out a number of the absurdities that went along with last year’s failed amendment, such as allowing a pregnant woman to drive in the HOV lane, the legal drinking age becomes 20 years, 3 months, sex with a pregnant woman becomes menage-a-trois, a woman who is not aware that she is pregnant while engaging in a harmful activity of any kind could be charged with neglect, and so on.

The new proposed amendment is even broader in its possible interpretation because a single cell – an egg – would be defined as a “person” this time. And as a result, the possible ramifications are even more farcical.

The problem is that it’s really hard to define when a “person’s” biological development starts. You could say that it starts when an egg is fertilized and be relatively safe (if it passes in 2010 and survives the inevitable legal challenges, that’s probably how this amendment would ultimately be interpreted). But it’s possible that the amendment would be interpreted more broadly. After all, that egg started its development years or decades before it was fertilized. If the egg is damaged, then the “person’s” development will be adversely affected. And damaged eggs happen all the time – they’re one of reasons for miscarriages and failures to conceive. Does that mean that we need to protect a woman’s children when they’re eggs in a girl toddler’s immature ovaries? And how, exactly, are we going to do that?

Are we willing to charge prepubescent girls with child neglect for daring to play soccer and risking ovary damage? What’s next, forcing women to wear petticoats and ride horses sidesaddle? Actually, I suspect that many of Jones’ supporters would find cultural regression to Victorian or Puritan values to be pleasantly refreshing.

And since a human can’t develop without the aid of sperm (cloning aside), does development start when intercourse and ejaculation provide the sperm? Or does it start in the man’s testicles? Or even before then? Damaged sperm are a lot more common than damage eggs – that’s the biological reason that men produce billions of them. Is each damaged sperm an example of child neglect? Should we charge a little league coach with manslaughter if he accidentally throws a baseball into a boy’s crotch with an errant pitch? And should urologists be prosecuted for accessory to murder for performing a vasectomy?

The zygote personhood amendment last year crashed and burned because Coloradans understood that it was a legal minefield of epic scale. This proposed personhood amendment is even worse. Any legislation that makes a minimum of 20,000 separate changes to Colorado law is going to have a huge number of unpredictable unintended consequences.

One of those unintended consequences will be that Colorado will become more of a laughingstock than it was during the Amendment 2 debacle decades ago, or than Kansas was after its school board voted to permit the teaching of “intelligent design.”

It will be in the voters’ hands in 2010. Hopefully they’ll make the right decision next year just as they did last year.

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?

You remember that story, don’t you? Was all over the press in July 2012? Oh, wait, that hasn’t happened yet. Still to come, so to say. Let me get my thoughts arranged.

It was in 2009 that airport security added the new full-body x-ray scanners to their arsenal of devices to humiliate and traumatise travellers. Sarah Barrett, head of customer experience at Manchester airport, says, “This scanner completely takes away the hassle of needing to undress.” Because we’ll do it for you.

Now, before you tell me that the images could hardly be described as pornographic, let me direct you to Two Girls One Cup. If this is sufficient to cause some people to immediately discombobulate themselves in their trousers, I’m fairly sure that security camera images will be hot-stuff. Plus, imagine the job advert:

“Wanted: mature individuals to look at images of naked strangers of all shapes, sizes and ages for hours at a time while alone in a secluded booth; don’t worry, it’s not child porn if you do it for security reasons.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I fully appreciate the security difficulties faced by the world’s major transit authorities. There really are people out there who are out to kill us. But there are lots of ways to cause mayhem in a public place without resorting to actually getting on a plane.

And, we live in the information age. If the image exists then the image is public. Telling us, as Sarah Barrett does, that, “The images are not erotic or pornographic and they cannot be stored or captured in any way,” is just so much bullshit. Give that security guard a camera-phone; oh, wait, he has one already.

Yes, the technology is possible. No, this is not an acceptable use of that technology. Find another way.

If beating terrorists involves giving away all the privacy, confidentiality, liberty and respect for the individual that we are supposedly fighting so hard for, then we’re not really beating the terrorists.

Maybe it’s just that this technology is lazy. These images should be digitised, processed and then only random bits shown to security for final analysis. There are ways to ensure that this is entirely depersonalised. Otherwise profiling is likely; age, gender, even cultural origin are likely to be visible in these images.

Leave the embarrassing personal pictures to teenagers posting on Facebook. The rest of us are just travelling, nothing to see. And nothing we want you to see.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

The problem was deeper—Griffiths has written a straight history here, but without the philosophic context. We’re told that Paine was a great man, and we hear bits and pieces of his writings, and we see him engaged with both the American and French revolutions. But we don’t get a clue about his seminal importance, or about why Paine changed the world, and for the better. To be fair, Paine had such an eventful life that it’s difficult to get it all in a two and a half hour production. But what was left out was much of the meat, and the key to why Paine was important—one of the most important men who ever lived, in fact. It was still an enjoyable evening at the theatre—but also a frustrating one. If you knew something about Paine, you were probably bothered by what was left out; if you didn’t know much about Paine (which is certainly the case here in the UK), you left the theatre no wiser, really. I almost hate to say this, but this would have been a more interesting play if Tom Stoppard had written it. That way we wold have had endless conversations about the philosophical and political issues that Paine dealt with–and these were intensely important at the time, and still are.

Richard Attenborough has been trying to raise funds for a movie of Paine’s life for decades now. Attenborough also is behind this production, which actually seems to be adapted from the screenplay that Griffiths is developing for Attenborough (Griffiths was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for Reds). What a movie Paine’s life would make! I bet Craig T. Nelson would make a great elder Paine, with Ed Norton playing the younger Paine. As a young man, he apprenticed to his father’s trade as a staymaker, making corsets. He later ran away to sea and joined a successful privateer. His stays in London and Lewes before moving to the colonies were characterized by a range of activities, including attending Royal Society meetings in London. His peripatetic and not very successful businesses career included several years as an excise agent for the Crown, and after the death in childbirth of his first wife, his second marriage was never consummated, ending in a permanent separation. He made his way to the colonies (barely surviving the voyage) bearing the endorsement of Benjamin Franklin, whom Paine had met in London. In America Paine added an “e” to the spelling of his name, engaged in what he is now best now for, pamphleteering, and served in Washington’s army during the first years of the campaign. After the war, Paine engaged in anti-slavery activities (apparently writing the preamble to the Pennsylvania law that abolished slavery, the first of many in the United States), continued to write on behalf of the new American government, and pursued his scientific interests.

Following his return to England 1787, Paine spent most of his time writing pamphlets on various subjects, and designing and seeking funds for the construction of a single arch iron bridge. Paine received patents for his bridge in England, Scotland and Wales, and was able to develop a model for public view. (A version of the bridge was later built on the river Weir in Sunderland, although it appears Paine never received any funds from this.) Bridge design epitomized 18th century engineering technological and engineering investigations, given the importance of river traffic during this period. In 1791 he published the first instalment of Rights of Man, primarily as a response to Edmund Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution. This book was also wildly successful (and, incidentally, has never been out of print), and led the English government to attempt to prevent its publication and circulation.

Fleeing to France in 1792, he was tried in absentia for seditious libel in England, and convicted, during which time he published the second instalment of Rights of Man. This laid out the foundations of the modern welfare state—including universal suffrage and state care for those over fifty. Initially he was welcomed by the new French government, to which he was appointed a member, but later fell out of favour by virtue of his support for the Girondists and his opposition to executing the deposed King. During the Reign of Terror, Paine narrowly escaped the guillotine he was meant to face by the efforts of his fellow prisoners while he almost died of fever. During his year in prison, he did manage to have The Age of Reason published, and it became Paine’s third best-seller, astonishing for a work whose main characteristic was an attack on organized religion, particularly Christianity. Eventually freed in 1794, he remained in France (apparently never learning to speak French) before finally returning to the United States in 1802, and published his fourth book, Agrarian Justice, an attack on land holdings, in 1797.

By this point Paine had become extremely unpopular in both England and the United States. In England, he had been declared an outlaw and under sentence of death following his conviction for seditious libel. In America, his attack on George Washington (which was not completely unjustified, since Washington apparently did nothing to get Paine out of French prison when he had the opportunity to do so), and the attack on Christianity in The Age of Reason, ensured that he was no longer a popular figure. He was even denied the right to vote. But Paine remained undaunted, even refusing a deathbed conversion in 1809 while he lay dying when pestered by priests. What a pain in the neck! What a movie!

The traditional view of Paine was that after an undistinguished career in England he somehow appeared, out of the head of Zeus, as a radical thinker in America. Griffiths’ play perpetuates this view to some extent, although it does make some nods to Paine’s interests in science and engineering—but these aren’t really developed as being integral to Paine’s character. Craig Nelson (yes, a different Craig Nelson), in his admirable biography of Paine published in 2007, argues, however, that Paine was not radical by Enlightenment standards—rather, he was square in the mainstream of much enlightenment thought. Paine, according to Nelson, is an example of what the Enlightenment produced in England, but even more so in America—-the self-made man who prospers from self-improvement.

As Nelson points out, Paine was born into the segment of the population that came to refer to themselves as “mechanics”—the purveyors of manufacturing and industry before the Industrial revolution. Paine spent several years in London attending lectures at the Royal Society and other scientific organizations. He spent time in coffee houses, forming friendships with other mechanics who were engaged in similar pursuits (and coming into contact with Franklin in the process). He bought himself a set of globes and various scientific instruments. His scientific interests were well-known at the time both in England and in America. He became an accomplished public speaker and debater. None of these attributes were unusual in late 18th century England or America. Following the colonist revolt, Paine returned to science, developed several inventions (for which he obtained patents), and pursued his interests in bridge design. His close friendships included the chemist Joseph Priestly.

It was precisely this segment of society, both in England and in America, that embraced the Enlightenment fully. The growth of the merchant class in England (and Scotland) and America was driven by mechanics who developed and embraced new technologies, new forms of business, new ideas of science, and new ideas of government. They were endless tinkerers. Their intellectual mentors were men such as Newton, and Hooke, and Franklin—especially Franklin. These were men who conversed regularly with one another through letters, or in coffee houses in cities such as London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Birmingham and Philadelphia. They represented the emergence of a meritocracy, and if this concept became popular in England, it found a virtual home in America. No wonder Americans were ready to listen to Paine’s arguments in favour of the natural rights of men to govern themselves, and against the evils of hereditary monarchies. Paine’s genius lay in his ability to present these views to as wide an audience as possible. Jon Katz, in a long article eminently worth reading, has suggested that Paine should be regarded as the moral father of the internet, and he’s right.

John Adams, second President of the new United States of America, had little regard for Paine, whom he considered a radical and a rabble-rouser. Here is how Adams described Paine in 1805:

I know not whether any Man in the World has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between Pigg and Puppy, begotten by a wild Boar on a BitchWolf, never before in any Age of the World was suffered by the Poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

For most of his life, this was often the view of Paine from those in power. Paine happily reciprocated, regarding Adams as a potential despot, on the basis of Adams’ support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, which represented the first (but, sadly, not the last) attempts by members of the American federal government to limit the rights of its citizens.

Paine was the most influential political writer of the 18th century. He was not a political philosopher, such as Hobbes, or Hume, or Locke. Paine was a proselytizer. He crystallized American and European discussion of two of the defining political questions of the age—why should we need kings? Why should not the creation and operation of government be the work of all men, and not a select few? Paine’s influence derives not solely from the fact that he was able to effectively articulate arguments that all men had the right to govern themselves, but also because he was able to explain these issues in a way that all men, not just the Republic of Letters, could take part in the discussion. As a result, Common Sense, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason were the best selling books of the 18th century. Paine chose not to profit from the books, donating proceeds to the American and French governments instead. Proceeds from Common Sense went to purchase mittens for Washington’s troops. Unsurprisingly, Paine was broke for much of his life.

After his 1774 arrival in the colonies he became, almost by accident, editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, which shortly thereafter became the most widely-read publication in the colonies. Paine’s writings, even before the publication of Common Sense, had a notable impact on the debate regarding whether America should declare itself independent from England. (America was not then “The United States of America”, a term actually coined by Paine.)

And pamphleteering was an established form of intellectual and political exchange during the 18th century. Paine was participating in an established literary tradition. Common Sense itself was a remarkable and unprecedented publishing phenomenon—-in its first year of publication, an estimated 250,000 copies were published (rising to about 500,000 over the next several years, including counterfeit editions), in a country of 3 million. It was translated into multiple languages, and was a best-seller in France. Paine’s pamphlets during the war (collectively given the title The Crisis), especially in the winter of 1776-1777, were of critical importance for maintaining support for the conflict during the early (and darkest) days of the war. The line “These are the times that try men’s souls” derives from the first of these, at a time when Washington’s army was in danger of collapsing.

But it was Common Sense that established Paine’s reputation. Prior to its publication, the majority of colonists (as well as the majority of delegates to the second Constitutional Convention, which convened in late 1775, and culminated in The Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776) were still in favour of some sort of negotiated settlement with England over the issues of taxation and the rights of colonists, according to Nelson. Following its publication in January 1776, sentiment swung strongly towards total independence from England.

What were Paine’s arguments? First, he argued for the superiority of representative government over a monarchy. Paine’s arguments here mostly focussed on the evils of monarchy and aristocracy, or any social system where power resided in hereditary privilege. (One wonders what he would make of the raging nepotism in today’s media.) The second argument focussed on why this was the appropriate time to break from England, and throws in lots of statistics on subjects such as the cost of maintaining navies. But Paine’s main argument, that America’s parent country was Europe, not England, had a particular resonance among Paine’s readership. While most of the leaders of America (and the revolution) were of English descent, Paine suggested that only about one-third of the colonists were of English descent—Paine believed the majority had come from a broad range of European countries. There’s a bit of sleight of hand here—there were significant numbers from Scotland and Ireland at that point, but Paine specifically does not call them English. In Pennsylvania, where Paine lived, Germans made up a third of the population by 1770. Paine would be including slaves in the population as well, and at 1770 there would have been about 700,000 slaves in the colonies. But, whatever Paine’s numbers, the arguments all carried weight, and had an immediate impact at the optimal time for the emerging nation.

Paine called himself as “a citizen of the world,” although he also insisted that he was an American citizen. But Paine spent most of his life in England and in France, not leaving for the colonies until his 37th year in 1774. He returned to England in 1787, from which he then had to flee following publication of Rights of Man in 1792. He went on to live in France for ten years, before returning to America in 1802, where he died in 1809. One is reminded of Nietzche’s comment to his mother that he wasn’t sure if he was a good German, but he hoped he was a good European.

This year is the 200th anniversary of Paine’s death, and the two Thomas Paine societies, the one here and the one in the US, have been having all sorts of events to commemorate the occasion. And not a moment too soon, either, considering the pressure on the rights that Paine held dear by any number of governments, including that of the United States, a government (and a country) which is unlikely to have ever emerged without Paine.

In Jack Shepherd’s wonderful short play, In Lambeth, Paine and William Blake are having a conversation in Blake’s garden the evening before Paine flees for Paris, while angry royalist mobs roam the streets. (The meeting really did take place.) Paine says of himself:

I’ve been called a firebrand! A fanatic! A traitor! A devil! Now that seems just a bit of an overstatement to me. I’m a fairly ordinary and above all a reasonable man. And I want the country to be governed in a reasonable way. And that’s all I want. But if that means turning the word upside down, then I’m the man to do it! And if it then entails taking the world by the ankles and giving it a God-almighty shake, then by jumping Jesus I’ll do that too!

And he did.

The above stamp is the only one ever issued anywhere to celebrate Paine, as far as I can tell. It was issued in 1968, and designed by Robert Greissmann, after a painting by John Wesley Jarvis.

(Full disclosure–much of this cribbed from an earlier post, to be found here)

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on.

In 1966, Erika Schinegger was the world champion women’s downhill skier.  The young Austrian was preparing for the Olympics in 1968 and a hoped-for gold medal.  However, 1968 was no ordinary year.

The politics of the time saw Communist countries forcing significant anabolic steroids on their athletes in an effort to ensure victory.  The concern was not just for the future of competitive sport, but also for the health of the athletes.  The East Germans, in particular, were serial abusers.  Manfred Ewald, architect of their doping scheme, was convicted and jailed in 2000 for his part in this.

Besides doping, though, many male athletes were entered as women to ensure an additional level of success.

Schinegger was one of the first Olympic athletes to undergo a gender test.  She discovered, to her shock, that she was actually male.  She was disqualified and had a sex-change, becoming Erik, a man.

Gender is not as simple as visually inspecting a person and deciding whether they are male or female.  Much of what we are comes down to the expression of our genes.

For hardened racists, it can be somewhat troubling and disconcerting to discover that we are both all and no races.  That a person who may live in Europe and whose family has been there for generations has components of their genetic code that prove incontrovertibly that they have African ancestors.

This doesn’t matter unless you enter a situation where hard rules are enforced, like South Africa’s racial rules of the Apartheid era.  The same is also true of gender.  It doesn’t much matter unless you wish to have children, or to compete in sporting events.

During the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, the female egg has its X chromosome complemented by either of an X or Y chromosome from the sperm.  This results in a typical XX or XY paring.  However, in one pairing per thousand, something slightly different happens.

According to the Textbook of Sexual Medicine, “During the first weeks of development, genetic male and female fetuses are anatomically indistinguishable, with primitive gonads beginning to develop during approximately the sixth week of gestation. The gonads, in a bipotential state, may develop into either testes (the male gonads) or ovaries (the female gonads) depending on consequent events.”

The most common cause of sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an endocrine disorder in which the adrenal glands produce abnormally high levels of virilizing hormones.  This results in genetic females (XX chromosomes) producing male characteristics as they become extremely sensitive to male hormones.  Conversely, a genetic male (XY) could become insensitive to androgens, resulting in female characteristics.  And there are a wide range of other variations.

Milton Diamond, a prominent gender researcher, says this, “Foremost, we advocate use of the terms “typical,” “usual,” or “most frequent” where it is more common to use the term “normal.” When possible avoid expressions like maldeveloped or undeveloped, errors of development, defective genitals, abnormal, or mistakes of nature. Emphasize that all of these conditions are biologically understandable while they are statistically uncommon.”

In other words, while some of the impacts of these gender events can be disturbing for some, and statistically rare, they are all normal aspects of our genetic makeup.  Far from making race and gender simpler, modern genetics has made pure categorisation almost impossible.

All of this may be scant support for Caster Semenya as she undergoes the public scrutiny which has followed her victory in the 800 metres at the World Championships.

In every-day life, it certainly doesn’t matter what gender she may be. 

In the brutal world of competitive athletics, it is important.  This has nothing to do with the politics of gender or race, but it does with the arbitrary limitations required of competitive sport. 

Life is full of arbitrary definitions: from the legal voting age, to official retirement, to age categories for sporting events. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is enforcing its rules no less arbitrarily, but those happen to be the known rules for international competition.

The debate about racism or sexism is pitched as being about accepting predefined stereotypes and labels, not about chucking them in the bin.  Race is an arbitrary measure of human difference.  So is gender.  Yet we don’t throw away the labels, we just force people into them and then demand tolerance of people because of those labels.  Isn’t that discrimination as well?

The real hope of this current row over the gender of one person is that maybe we can start accepting people for what they are, rather than in stereotyping people and then choosing whether to accept or reject those stereotypes.

[Cross-posted from Africagenome.com]

Further reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008.gender

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/23/caster-semenya-athletics-gender

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1055314

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

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

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

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

Republicans vs. the Republican Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I could go on. But do I need to?

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

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

The Mandate

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

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

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

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

My first experience with the UK was registering my company and opening business bank accounts. In South Africa, as a local, it takes two months to register the company and another three months to then open the bank accounts.

In the UK, it took 24 hours. And I walked away with a personal credit card, despite having no credit history. This, by the way, after the collapse of the credit industry. Not that I’m complaining.

This vote of confidence allowed me to rent a small apartment just outside the centre of Oxford. I was told that, living alone, I could apply for reduced rates. I’m used to dealing with municipalities. So, I fortified myself with a jug of coffee and a book, and phoned.

An actual human being answered, which was a surprise. I was expecting one of those multiple-guess things.

“Hi, I have just rented an apartment and I live alone. I gather I can have the rates reduced. Who do I speak to?”

I now prepared myself for the inevitable paper-chase. The chap asked for my account number and then followed up with, “Right, and how else can I help you?”

“No, just that,” I said.

“OK, well then, thank you so much for calling and please call again should you need anything else.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I stammered. “Are we done?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “All done. I’ll send you a letter just confirming these changes.”

And that is what life in the UK is like. People do their jobs. That is startling. But, I’ll put that in perspective for you in a bit.

Love

My then partner and I struggled with contact. We spoke every day. We were able to see each other on the rare occasions that the broadband connection in South Africa held and we could use Skype. The rest of the time were the daily spoken words. Of love. Of missing someone else beyond the bearing of it. Of hoping and begging the universe that, one day, we will be together.

But it would never be an easy decision for her to leave, for reasons too personal to write about in such a public forum.

In September, she visited, at the tail-end of the English summer. She fell in love, as I knew she would, with the country and the people and the beauty of it all. In a really ugly restaurant that a friend had recommended, with mannequin heads and arms fighting out of the walls, I proposed.

It wasn’t romantic, but it was inevitable.

I returned to South Africa in April to be married.

A year away had changed me. The edge that I had – that protective screen – was gone. I could see, for the first time, how brittle everyone in South Africa is. How you act to protect yourself from others. How close to the surface the violence and rage is.

In the UK, if someone stops you in the street to ask for directions, you’ll probably tell them and chat briefly in friendly conversation. In South Africa, outside of a few obvious tourist spots, you will be pushed away with a look of fury and fear.

I felt like I was suffocating. I hated it. I was scared and worried. I only wanted to get away. To be safe.

My new wife and I would be leaving for the UK together. Starting a new life. But first, we would have to settle the old one.

We queued at the Department of Home Affairs for our official marriage certificate. It took a whole day to move, slowly, through the queues. There were only two people assigned to handling a queue of 70 people. Behind them, papers were piled randomly, yellowing, damp and rotten. Dozens of people sat in the open office and drank tea, oblivious to doing their jobs.

“Your certificate will be ready in six weeks,” we were told.

“When will it really be ready?” I asked.

“In three months.”

“Really?”

“Maybe.”

I left the documentation with my parents. It is now four months since we put in the application and Home Affairs tells us they have no record of the application (despite receipts, copies of applications, copies of receipts of applications and my father’s regular calls to verify progress) and can we please apply again. I’m thinking it’ll be easier to simply get remarried in the UK.

A few months ago, frustrated beyond measure while waiting for an identity book – without which a South African cannot work, cannot live – a young man walked into a Johannesburg Home Affairs office and held the entire management at gunpoint for several days. It is a mark of the national despair with bureaucracy and inefficiency that he was celebrated and cheered as a hero.

Work

South Africa has a new glass ceiling. It is a limitation on professional work. The country has an appalling skills shortage. But the shortage is not of top analysts, engineers or scientists (which they don’t have either) but of artisans and managers. In summary, the layer of people who are sufficiently skilled to even understand the intense and intellectually-driven computational analysis that I do no longer exist.

I’ve discussed this with colleagues and my business partner. South Africa is still a grand investment destination for capital assets (mining, plant, machinery) but definitely not if you are in the services sector. South Africa’s income inequality is legend. But it is very distorted.

Relative to their efficiency and productivity, both the unionised unskilled and the CEO manager-level are overpaid and underworked. The skilled level of professionals are underpaid relative to any measure you care to name. That is why the bulk of them are emigrating.

Companies in South Africa are conservative and unlikely to try new approaches to risk management (my profession). My only work in the last two years in South Africa was the equivalent of license-plate manufacturing.

In the UK, I travel extensively. I have worked with some of the largest companies in the world where my ideas and opinions are listened to, discussed and frequently employed. It is, professionally, one of the most fulfilling periods of my life.

Life

A month ago, South African newspapers were crowing about the sudden return of many expatriates to the country from the UK. “Life isn’t as good over there,” was the general consensus.

But, again, let’s put that in perspective. A person who graduates with a weak high-school certificate is in the minority in South Africa amongst so many who don’t graduate at all. You are considered “skilled” and in demand in labour-intensive businesses.

The 25% of long-term unemployed South Africans are, in fact, unemployable. They have no skills or abilities that are of any use at all. If the government hadn’t introduced minimum wages and minimum rules of employment, perhaps they could get a job in a Chinese-style sweatshop. That — without debating the merits or concerns of such an approach — isn’t permitted.

So they remain unemployed.

This gives many South Africans a false sense of superiority. Graduates arriving with these qualifications in the UK find that they are not in the middle, they’re at the bottom. For, even in South Africa, these are the absolute minimum requirements to secure work. But here, the majority have these skills.

Young South Africans find themselves competing with Indians and Poles and Australians for the same jobs. Many give up.

Yet the highly skilled, such as myself, are in demand. My wife was employed only a few weeks after starting to look for work here, and is still receiving job offers. An astonishing number of local businesses are owned by South Africans; all doing very well.

Skills are skills, even in an economic downturn.

And the quality of life is outstanding. Certainly, there are issues (and I could spend hours writing about the dismal performance of state-run healthcare) but life is treasured here.

And that is a good thing.

The last year has been difficult, but it has also been rebirth.

—

Return to Part 1: One year an immigrant: a resolution

I have seen snow before, but never lived in a place where snow thrusts itself into your daily life. The familiar landscape of fields, farmlands and wilderness was utterly transformed. I could see just how much wildlife lived around me. Bunnies hopped. Deer loped. Birds scratched.

I took a morning off, just to go see what the massive Port Meadow would look like. I got only a few yards on my bicycle before becoming glued in the snow. So I walked. It was magnificent.

I arrived in Oxford at the end of April 2008, leaving South Africa for good on 27 April: Freedom Day. Ironic. The day that South Africans celebrate as the day of the start of majority rule has now become my own private memorial to personal liberty.

A pain that only has one resolution

I have a friend who owns a micro-coffee roastery back in Cape Town. He has burned millions of rands over the past few years as he tries to get South Africans to enjoy high-quality coffee. It is killing him, that slow awful and agonising murder that the self-employed experience. Every day you are reborn and die again.

Business people aren’t the only ones to experience this pain. Maybe you had a relationship like that? A love which is on fire and filled with light and colour and texture, and agony. For you never quite connect in the most critical places; that of mutual respect, adoration and compromise. One of you is making all the running while the other lives exactly as they please, ignorant and immune to the consequences.

It’s a destructive relationship. You put everything you can in, but you’re burning yourself out.

Maybe that relationship turns around. But there comes a point where, no matter how that relationship ends up, it no longer has meaning for you.

I’ve been through a few of those. Personal, business and ideological relationships that I put my soul and spirit and determination into. Even where they worked I found that the success was ashes in my mouth.

South Africa had become like that to me and the only solution was to leave. Frank McCourt who, more than any recent writer, has done so much to lift the “glamour” of poverty had this to say:

“Very little is written about poverty…You see part of it. You see Dafur. You see Chad. That’s African poverty…you see this all the time. You almost become accustomed to it…you can send in rice…but that doesn’t heal them…beware of giving energy to desperate people. They are going to use it.”

Beware of giving energy to desperate people. Good advice. But, when I left, I also left behind a life, friends, favourite places, favourite things, and my fiancée.

Putting it in perspective

I had a long chat with a Swedish chap who was complaining, “Don’t you find England dangerous? I hate the public transport and I never feel safe. By the way, what’s South Africa like?”

I looked at him, dumbfounded. “If this is how you feel about the UK, you’ll probably not want to get off the plane when you arrive in SA.”

So, my perspective is coloured by a comparison to a country with one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, the highest rape rate, a government so corrupt that the cabinet now is dominated by convicted (and accused) fraudsters who have dismantled the judiciary and appointed apparatchiks to head up the newly emasculated state departments.

There’s a joke about Jacob Zuma, the morally suspect new president, which goes like this.

President Zuma suffers a heart attack while having sex with his seventh wife, a 14-year-old school-girl from the rural North. He gets taken, by accident, to a public hospital, but the doctors are out on strike and the nurses are all asleep in an unused theatre and he dies without ever receiving attention.

He ascends to Heaven and stands at the Pearly Gates where St. Peter greets him.

“Welcome to Heaven,” says Saint Peter, “Before you settle in, it seems there is a problem. We seldom see a Communist around these parts, so we’re not sure what to do with you.”

“No problem, just let me in; I’m a good Christian; I’m a believer,” says Comrade Jacob.

“I’d like to just let you in, but I have orders from God Himself. He says that since the implementation of his new Affirmative Action Policy, you have to spend one day in Hell and one day in Heaven. Then you must choose where you’ll live for eternity.”

“But I’ve already made up my mind. I want to be in Heaven,” replies Zuma.

“I’m sorry … But we have our rules,” Peter interjects. And, with that, St. Peter escorts him to an elevator and he goes down, down, down … all the way to Hell.

The doors open and he finds himself in the middle of a lush golf course. The sun is shining in a cloudless sky. The temperature is a perfect 22C degrees. In the distance is a beautiful club-house. Standing in front of it is Thabo Mbeki and thousands of other Communist luminaries who had helped him out over the years; Tokyo Sexwale, Peter Mokaba, Tony Yengeni, Schabir Shaik and thousands more. All the ANC leaders are there, everyone laughing, happy, and casually but expensively dressed.

They run to greet him, to hug him and to reminisce about the good times they had getting rich at the expense of ’suckers and peasants.’

They play a friendly game of golf and then dine on lobster and caviar. The Devil himself comes up to Zuma with a frosty drink, “Have a tequila and relax, Jake!”

They are having such a great time that, before he realises it, it’s time to go. Everyone gives him a big hug and waves as Zuma steps on the elevator and heads upward.

When the elevator door reopens, he is in Heaven again and St. Peter is waiting for him. “Now it’s time to visit Heaven,” the old man says, opening the gate.

So for 24 hours Zuma is made to hang out with a bunch of honest, good-natured people who enjoy each other’s company, talk about things other than money and treat each other decently. Not a kanga, or scantily-clad woman amongst them. No fancy country clubs here and, while the food tastes great, it’s not caviar or lobster. And these people are all poor. He doesn’t see anybody he knows and he isn’t even treated like someone special!

“Whoa,” he says uncomfortably to himself. “Robert Mugabe never prepared me for this!”

The day done, St. Peter returns and says, “Well, you’ve spent a day in Hell and a day in Heaven. Now choose where you want to live for Eternity.”

With the ‘Deal or No Deal’ theme playing softly in the background, Zuma reflects for a minute … Then answers: “Well, I would never have thought I’d say this. I mean, Heaven has been cool and all but I really think I belong in Hell with my friends.”

So St. Peter escorts him to the elevator and he goes down, down, down, all the way to Hell.

The doors of the elevator open and he is in the middle of a barren scorched earth covered with garbage and toxic industrial wasteland, looking a bit like the eroded, befouled informal squatter camps around South African cities, but worse and more desolate.

He is horrified to see all of his friends, dressed in rags and chained together, picking up the roadside rubbish and putting it into black plastic bags. They are groaning and moaning in pain, faces and hands black with grime.

The Devil comes over to Zuma and puts an arm around his shoulder.” I don’t understand,” stammers a shocked Zuma, “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and a club-house and we ate lobster and caviar and drank tequila. We lazed around and had a great time. Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and everybody looks miserable!”

The Devil looks at him, smiles slyly and purrs, “Yesterday we were campaigning; today you voted for us.”

—-

Continue to Part 2: One year an immigrant: so you see…

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.

You will want to know what happened. You may not immediately want to know what someone else thinks or feels about what happened. That may come later. You first want someone to tell you clearly and with minimal subjectivity what happened with no opinion or impression attached.

You live in a second-hand world. You need someone to observe the world first-hand when you cannot. Who will you trust to faithfully do that for you?

Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this half a century ago in the book The Politics of Truth:

The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced, and their own experience is always indirect.

The quality of their lives is determined by meanings they have received from others. Everyone lives in a world of such meanings. No man stands alone directly confronting a world of solid facts. …

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images — provided by strangers and dead men — are the very basis of his life as a human being.

Your information needs may be summed up by three questions: How does the world work? Why does it work that way? What will be the impact on me?

The answers reflect the raw data of empirical observation and a neutral explanation of phenomena eventually followed by analyses laced with points of view. Those “crowds of witnesses” offer that information in many forms — books, movies, art, advertising, television, music, and the various means by which journalism and pseudo-journalism are distributed.

You first need to know what happened. But doesn’t it increasingly seem that your principal sources are also those who didn’t witness the event first-hand either? Doesn’t it seem as if your first notice of what happened comes from a second-hand source who is not a witness at all? Is that source someone using the pretense of a witness, someone who imbues that initial report with analysis laced with a point of view, pre-coloring and presaging your first impression? Which do you need first — a subjective point of view or one as objective as possible?

Reflect on your information needs. (Not your wants — that’s a different post.) What do you need to know? Why do you need to know it? Who will credibly tell you?

Mills’ analysis of understanding the human condition anticipates the digital world you live in. Your second-hand world consists of, in Mills’ words, “stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations.” From what source do you not receive pre-digested reports?

If you want information without a point of view shaping it, perhaps you need Anne. She is a Fair Witness in Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Her employer, Jubal Harshaw, is asked to demonstrate her capabilities. Harshaw points to a building and asks Anne its color. Her reply: “White on this side.” In Heinlein’s fictional world, a Fair Witness has total recall, is fully impartial, and makes no intuitive or analytical leaps beyond what she can witness (such as assuming the color on the side of the building she cannot see).

A Fair Witness is the antithesis of a Spin Doctor. Anne, the Fair Witness, is a source of unfiltered fact. You are left to divine the meaning of that fact in a context uniquely yours.

In the midst of this high-noise, low-signal digital information age one S&R writer called “Shoutworld,” no Fair Witness appears to exist. Traditionally “objective” sources of information increasingly have colorized what happened through an ideological, self-centered, or selfish lens. The numbers of those sources who minimize the predigestion of what happened declines daily.

You eventually may find that subjective witness reports are necessary to help you ascertain context, importance, and meaning. On what basis, however, do you trust their authors?

If all your information sources tell you what it means before telling you what happened, how certain are you of what, indeed, did happen?

Wu Tao stands at the front of the bus, microphone in hand, radiating charm.

Wu “Harry” Tao (right) talks with St. Bonaventure
professors Carl Case (left) and Darwin King at the
Winter Palace in Xi’an.

As our group rides around Xi’an, Wu Tao serves as our tourguide. He stands in the bus’s center aisle and regales us with stories about the city’s past. He wears a dark t-shirt with a big numeral “8” on it—which has made him easy to find in a crowd—jeans, a pair of open-toed sandals, and a million-yuan smile.

When he points something out to us and tells us its name, he carefully repeats it and even spells it out for us to ensure we can follow him.

Tao is his given name while Wu is his family name, but Chinese custom puts the family name first, then the given name: Wu Toa.

Like many Chinese, Wu Tao has an American name, too: Harry. “Like Harry Potter,” he says with good-natured amusement. A lot of things appear to amuse him. He smiles freely and chuckles often.

The students are wild about him.

“I just want to go up there and pinch his cheeks,” one of them says.

Harry didn’t get his American name from the fictional British character, though; he got it from his school teacher, a ex-patriot from Toronto who’d come to China to teach English.

“He gave everyone in the class English names to help tell us apart,” Harry explains. In China, there are too many people with the same name—like Wu, for instance—so the teacher doled out America names in order to be able to distinguish his students when he called on them in class. It’s a typical practice throughout.

In college, Harry majored in English and tourism, which landed him in his current job at a state-run tourism agency. It’s a gig he’s been doing for fifteen years. He handles some sixty groups a year.

Between stories about Xi’an, Harry tells us a lot about himself and gives us insights into the lives of ordinary people in China.

Harry lives in a three-bedroom apartment with his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old son, Yoyo. “Like the violinist,” Harry says. Yoyo has an American name, too: Harrison. “Because he is Harry’s son,” Harry explains with another of his chuckles, and his whole face breaks out into another huge smile.

Chinese couples can have one child, although if the parents are, themselves, each single children they can petition the government for a birth certificate to have a second child. They children must be spaced at least four years apart. Having a child illegally means the child won’t have access to the health care or education systems. In the countryside, the government enforced the rule less stringently.

Harry’s parents also live with them. “It is hard to have privacy,” he admits, “but they do so much to help us. So much. That is the nuclear family in China: four grandparents, two parents, one child.”

Harry’s parents take their grandson to kindergarten in the morning, then typically go to the park for exercise. His father will do tai chi while his mother will line dance—an activity involving parasols, far removed from the American version.

Harry’s father will usually bring his pet bird with him in its small cage, and he and other retirees will have birdsong contests.

Harrison will spend the day in kindergarten from 7:45 a.m. until 6:30 p.m., when Harry’s parents will again pick him up. The schedule, including three meals, two snacks, and a nap, is designed specifically with working parents in mind.

As with most American families, Harry and his wife both work. In Xi’an, the eight-hour workday runs from eight a.m. until noon; after a two-hour siesta, workers go back from two p.m. until six.

For school kids beyond kindergarten, the day is similar. They’ll take four classes between eight a.m. and noon, get a two-hour break, and then take two classes between two o’clock and three-fifty. They might have sports or exercises after school.

Middle-school students at dismissal time on a
Sunday afternoon

Students aiming for the country’s prestigious colleges will enroll in middle and high school programs that frequently require work on the weekends. Each year, some 7.1 million kids will take college entrance exams—all on the same day across China—and about fifty-five percent pass.

College tuition in Xi’an runs about 2,800 yuans—about $415—plus room and board. Tuition in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai might run anywhere from between five thousand to twenty thousand yuans.

Ping pong is the country’s most popular sport, although soccer is gaining popularity. Basketball is huge, too, in part because of the success of NBA star Yao Ming, the seven-foot, six-inch center for the Houston Rockets, who hails from Shanghai. Basketball is also so popular because most schools have the space to accommodate a basketball court, while the space for a soccer field is tougher to come by.

Politics gets much less attention from people. “Ordinary people don’t care about politics,” Harry says. “Ordinary people care about our food, our clothes, our house, our future.”

Citizens gain the right to vote at sixteen, and they have nine parties to choose from, although the Communist Party is the only one that matters. “Look at [our political system] as one big red flower with eight tiny green leaves on it for decoration,” Harry says.

“Do people vote?” a student asks him.

Harry pauses. Pauses. Pauses.

“We have the right to vote,” he finally says, chuckling, his face breaking out into another of his smiles. “Most people don’t care.”

For all its influence, only one in twenty-four people belong to the Communist Party, giving it a membership of about 68 million.

Party members are not allowed to have any religious affiliation. In China, though, that hardly seems to be a problem. In the shaanxi province, where Xi’an is located,only about 750,000 people belong to a religion, Harry says. The province has about 250,000 Christians, about 150,000 Muslims, and another 350,000 fall into a variety of other sects like Buddhism and Taoism, although Buddhism is the largest organized religion in the rest of the country. “Most have no belief,” Harry says, adding that he and his wife are among them.

He chats freely with the students, answering their questions with politeness and honesty. When someone asks him about free health care for everyone, for instance, Harry shakes his head: “In China, there are too many people. Impossible.”

At one point, he mentions the fact that many young people from the countryside aspire to go into the army after they graduate from school because service guarantees a government job, which is better than farm life. “The People’s Liberation Army has three million soldiers,” he says.

“Three million soldiers to protect one-point-three billion people?” a student asks. “That doesn’t seem like enough.”

“We also have nuclear weapons,” Harry reminds her.

Harry and me outside the Xi’an airport

Harry remains with us during our entire trip, all the way through the check-in process at the airport as we head off to Beijing. Students stop to get their photo taken with him. I grab one too. He graciously allows us to snap away with our cameras.

“He was so good,” one student says. “He was awesome,” says another. The flock around him like he was one of the Beatles.

“Your trip is so smooth, my job is so easy,” Harry tells us with another of his smiles. “I hope you enjoy rest of your time in my country!”

What follows is a series of key quotes from Gingrich’s prepared remarks that illustrate his deceptions.

Gingrich’s claimOur current energy import strategy is entirely a function of our own government’s anti- domestic energy policies. The United States government blocks the development of new energy sources and inhibits the use of existing energy and then explains that we will have a shortage of energy. It is an artificial, government imposed shortage not a naturally occurring phenomenon.

This is a gross distortion of reality. Our import strategy is mostly a function of the capitalistic nature of our oil industry, not of domestic energy policy. When oil prices were high, the oil industry lobbied hard (and largely successfully) for drilling subsidies and the opening of the outer continental shelf (OCS). But now that oil prices have fallen well off their peak, oil companies are stopping their domestic drilling in order to focus on more profitable foreign sources.

Put simply, oil companies and low oil prices are the reason that there’s not much domestic energy production.

Gingrich’s claim Make no mistake about it: This bill amounts to a $1-2 trillion energy tax levied on a struggling economy, which is destructive and wrong.

Carbon capitalism is not a tax. Gingrich is repeating a GOP talking-point that declares capitalism is taxation in the hopes of scaring people into believing that black is white and the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.

In addition, Gingrich didn’t even read the entire Waxman-Markey bill and admits to that fact before even starting to read his written testimony (The statement is at about 2 minutes in the CSpan video of Gingrich’s testimony. He stopped at around page 230 of a 600+ page legislative draft – when the portion about carbon capitalism starts on page 322.

Gingrich’s claim [E]xpect utility bill increases up to $3,128 per year per household.

This is a lie for a number of reasons. The most important is that the MIT study from which this wrong number was calculated was conducted in 2007, and paper author Dr. John Reilly has not updated the conclusions for the details of of the Waxman-Markey ACES draft legislation that Gingrich was testifying about. Furthermore, Dr. Reilly had the following to say at Climate Progress: “it is inappropriate to draw conclusions on the costs of Waxman-Markey.” After all, ACES has a number of cost-containment provisions specifically designed to prevent revenue gained from carbon capitalism such as offsets, public investment in energy efficiency, and an unreasonably low estimate of fuel prices for 2030 between $2.10 and $2.40, while the EIA estimated in it’s 2007 Annual Energy Outlook that gasoline prices would be $3.20 in 2030.

It also doesn’t help that the wrong GOP number would only be correct if you turned all that money into a giant bonfire.

Using an out-of-date study to tarnish current legislation is a misrepresentation of the MIT study at best, and an attempt to mislead Congress and the American people at worst.

Gingrich’s claim According to the Heritage Foundation, the cost of cap-and-trade, with even only a small percentage of allocations being auctioned, would be $1.9 trillion.

While Gingrich is accurately reporting what the Heritage Foundation’s study found, Heritage has a history of misrepresenting economic data and faulty logic as applied to climate, and as such their analysis cannot be trusted. The EPA has analyzed the carbon capitalism portions of the ACES draft and found that the total cost to the national economy is only $22 billion in 2015 and between $54 and $64 billion in 2030. The increase in household energy cost (excluding gasoline) over a reference projection for “business as usual” is 9%, or approximately $200 per year. In addition, the EPA analysis contains a literature review at the end that points out that the Heritage study doesn’t even define the baseline from which it projects the supposed $1.9 trillion, making the results of the analysis and the underlying assumptions impossible to verify.

Gingrich’s claim In a recent paper for the Tax Foundation, Andrew Chamberlain concludes that the costs of this energy tax would be “disproportionately borne by low-income households, those under age 25 and over 75 years, those in Southern states, and single parents with dependent children.”

The effects of energy price increases on struggling households would be a serious concern if it weren’t for one very important fact: everyone who studies carbon capitalism is aware of this problem and so writing legislation and/or regulations to correct for the disparity will actually be quite simple. In other words, this is a non-issue and an attempt at fear mongering.

Gingrich’s claim A recent estimate from the Tax Foundation shows that cap-and-trade could cost America 965,000 jobs, and reduce economic output by $136 billion per year.

This isn’t a false claim by Gingrich so much as it’s a false claim by the Tax Foundation repeated by Gingrich. However, economist Kristen Sheeran, Ph.D., of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has addressed this directly: “[The Tax Foundation] report assumes that in a cap-and-trade system, there are no carbon revenues recycled back to households to offset the impacts of higher energy prices…. [A] cap-and-trade system where all permits are auctioned will generate a revenue stream that can be recycled back to households in these ways. This is well established in the literature, and the Tax Foundation report makes no reference to this literature at all.” (quote via 1Sky).

Gingrich’s claim The United States government failed to regulate Wall Street correctly, and the result has been trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to clean up the mess that politicians and bureaucrats created.

The U.S. government did fail to regulate Wall Street properly, but to claim that “politicians and bureaucrats” created the problem is a lie. In fact, a number of economists suggest that one of the men most directly responsible for regulatory failures of Wall Street was former GOP Senator Phil Gramm, author of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 that overturned many of the financial regulations that had maintained financial stability since 1933.

Gingrich’s claim Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were charged with managing mortgages, and in 2008 we saw a collapse of the United States housing market.

This is a lie that the GOP has stated repeatedly – and that S&R has exposed repeatedly. See the links for a more detailed deconstruction of the lie itself, but put simply, deregulation of the financial system was the cause of the housing market bubble and subsequent meltdown, not the number of mortgages insured by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and economic data supports this conclusion.

Gingrich’s claim The first good thing in it is a provision that restricts the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating carbon, which the EPA is currently positioning itself to do. This would be a power grab of staggering proportions….

This is a lie. The Supreme Court of the United States decided on April 2, 2007 in Massachussets et al v. Environmental Protection Agency et al that the “EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases” due to the the fact that the definition “includes ‘any air pollution agent … , including any physical, chemical, … substance … emitted into … the ambient air … ,’ §7602(g) (emphasis added)—embraces all airborne compounds of whatever stripe. Moreover, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are undoubtedly ‘physical [and] chemical … substance[s].’”

In addition, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that the EPA could choose not to regulate: “Under the [Clean Air] Act’s clear terms, EPA can avoid promulgating regulations only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do.”

In other words, the EPA not only has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases (GHGs), the Clean Air Act requires that the EPA regulate GHGs if they’re a public health hazard via the effects of climate disruption. When Congress requires that the EPA act on a pollutant, then it’s false to claim that following the law is a “power grab of staggering proportions.”

Gingrich’s claim Before anyone gives the Department of Energy sweeping new powers they should consider the absolute failure of the Department of Energy to keep its 2003 commitment to build an innovative “green coal” pilot project [FutureGen] by 2008.

The FutureGen program was canceled in 2008 by the Department of Energy (DoE). However, it’s interesting to point out that the failure Gingrich is complaining about happened under President George W. Bush. Painting the Obama Administration’s DoE with the same brush as the Bush era DoE is inaccurate at best.

Newt Gingrich was also caught in a bind by Representative Inslee when the latter pointed out that only two years ago, Gingrich had been a strong proponent of cap-and-trade:

Media Matters also has some interesting quotes further supporting Inslee’s point.

In his testimony before Congress, Newt Gingrich did what he always does – distorted facts, manipulated data, proved himself a hypocrite, and outright lied. If this was the best that the minority of the House Energy and Commerce Committee – Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment could do, then the draft version of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 is well on its way to becoming part of the U.S. Code.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What side are you on?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Karens, as well as other ethnic groups, actually arrived in Burma before the majority group known as the Burmans (as opposed to the Burmese, all the citizens of Burma). But, in the sixteenth century, the Burmans conquered most of Burma and proceeded to impose their will on the ethnics.

But the modern “origins of the ethnic hatred. . . can be traced back to the Anglo-Burmese wars,” writes Benedict Rogers in his 2004 book World Without Evil: Stopping the genocide of Burma’s Karen people. The Karens assisted the British in their efforts to conquer the Burmans. The British, in turn, allowed them a measure of autonomy (in part, also, because they were too far-flung to rule). The ethnics’ first taste of freedom was an ironic byproduct of British colonialism.

During World War II, Burmese forces joined the invading Japanese in mercilessly attacking the Karens, who feared they were destined for genocide. But the Allies turned the tide on the Japanese and the Karens helped drive them out. The Karens hoped that they would be rewarded with statehood, but during the war Mountbatten of Burma had authorized a secret deal with the Burmans that left the Karens out in the cold.

Once Burma was granted its independence, the Karens sought to co-exist with the government. But, in 1949, General Ne Win, later the leader of the coup that installed junta rule, led militias on a rampage of Karen territory. In response, the Karen National Union (KNU) emerged to fight for the rights of the Karens and the establishment of Kawthoolei, the state around which their dreams revolve.

The recently appointed vice-chairman of the KNU, David Thakabaw, furnished us with the Karens’ version of that period when we contacted him. “The Burman regime led by U Nu started war against the Karen people with the help of fascist Ne Win [the general who led the coup in 1962]. The United States probably encouraged Ne Win to [later seize power in the coup] as U Nu was too neutral for its liking. Later, the United States gave aid to Ne Win to fight the communists, after the 1967 Burmese-Chinese riot.”

Meanwhile, Thakapaw continues, the “British labor government gave military aid to the Burmans, in the belief that [it was the Karens who] started the war and committed atrocities. [But the atrocities] were committed by Ne Win’s pocket army troops wearing Karen uniforms.”

In recent years the disintegration of ceasefire talks has been a pretext for junta offensives against the Karens. Others include a perceived need on the part of the junta to engage in wholesale destruction of Karen villages to make room for large dam-building projects, as well as relocation of the capital from Yangon (Rangoon). Or, as an SPDC official quoted by Benedict Rogers said in 1992, “In 10 years all Karens will be dead. If you want to see a Karen, you will have to go to a museum in Rangoon.”

As of today, hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities have been forcibly relocated by the Burmese army, their villages burned to the ground. Tens of thousands have fled across the border to Thailand. Meanwhile, the army not only tortures and executes those villagers suspected of working with the insurgent groups, but forces others to labor as porters.

Adding insult to injury, the army uses children as soldiers, seeds the Karen territory with land mines, and then forces Karen people to act as mine-sweepers by traversing the terrain ahead of the army. As in Cambodia, citizens missing a leg, or parts of one, are common in the Karen regions.

But neither is the KNLA (the Karen National Liberation Army, the armed wing of the KNU) blameless. It too has been known to lay mines and use child soldiers. Also, according to Phil Thornton in his 2006 book, Restless Souls: Rebels, Refugees, Medics and Misfits on the Thai-Burma Border, one of its officers told him that because it can’t afford to feed them, the KNLA often kills prisoners on the spot.

Cross-posted from Huffington Post.

Part 1

That happened to me earlier this week. For the first time in 14 years, I smelled cigarette smoke and it smelled good….

Now, I was never seriously addicted to nicotine like so many of my family and friends have been at one point or another. I smoked 3-4 cigs a week for two months, stolen from my mother and my neighbor’s emergency stash. As an outsider, I wanted to be cool and hang with someone – anyone – who would let me hang around. In my junior high school, the stoners in my school were less off-putting than anyone else outside my geek clique. I didn’t need the stoners’ respect, but I was tired of being targeted because I was smart, took geeky classes like drafting, and played trumpet in the band and orchestra. And smoking cigarettes was the rite of passage.

But I quit after only two months because an opportunity to get something I craved more than belonging came along – track season. And by God I wanted the respect of the jocks that came with being willing to compete, even if it meant losing all the time. This was especially true after the popular kids dropped out because they couldn’t handle the pain or weren’t willing to come in last. In fact, the jocks who I so desperately wanted to like me, or at least to respect me, came to hold nothing but disdain for the popular kids who whined and quit after less than a week. That disdain for the quitters morphed into respect for anyone who at least stuck it out, and somehow I got the feeling that some of them were amazed that I would step out onto the track every meet and run my legs off even knowing that I was going to come in dead last every time.

But after smoking even that those few cigs for two months, when I first started running that season, I couldn’t breathe. It felt like my lungs were collapsing in my chest, that my heart would explode, that my eyes would pop out of their sockets as I pushed myself to run without oxygen. And so I quit cold-turkey one morning, told my stoner “friends” that I couldn’t smoke and run track at the same time, and found myself mostly alone again – except for the other stoner baseball player who also quit a couple of months later for the same reason.

I didn’t feel the need for a cig again until I was a junior in college. I’d turned 21 and was at a club when everyone around me was lighting up. I’d noticed that the smell of cigarette smoke always lingering in the clubs had, over the months since turning 21, stopped bothering me and was even slightly appealing. And so I asked to take a drag. It was like coming home – and like being a naughty teenager all over again. I bummed one whole cig from someone at the table, sucked down beer and smoked, and then it was last call and time to head back to my dorm.

When the bite of the early spring, late night central Pennsylvania air hit my lungs that early Saturday morning, I could barely breathe again. And I felt that way all that weekend long. My roommate Jeff smiled and would only repeat “That’ll learn ya.” No shit. And I haven’t craved a cig since.

Until a couple of days ago, that is.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the smell of uncharred tobacco. Pipe tobacco reminds me of my dad smoking his pipe before he quit, and to this day I occasionally want to open up a humidor just to snnnnniiiiifffffffffffff in the luxurious smell. But cigarettes? Unless I’m the one doing the smoking, it smells like ash and road grime. The smell permeates everything – furniture, clothing, cars, even the walls. And at this point, if I ever actually took up smoking again, I’d have to be prepared to lose my wife and both of my kids in the process – too much asthma and allergies in the family for a smoker to coexist in the same family day in, day out. Hell, tobacco smoke makes me sneeze in even low concentrations (low as in “barely visible”), and I know that it wouldn’t do my blood pressure any good. All perfectly rational, good reasons to avoid cigarettes.

So why the hell did the fumes from burning sticks of this noxious weed make me want it? I’ve lost friends and family to cancer related to smoking. I expect that cigs will eventually kill more of my friends and family, cutting short their time with my family and I, and it saddens me profoundly. Smoking is one of the few things that bothers me enough to overcome my generally libertarian views on drug policy. And yet. And yet.

It still smelled good for a fleeting moment.

There has to be a reason or two that my own body and mind would betray me in this way. I’m hardly an expert, but I think there are two reasons. The first reason is largely psychological. I think that the smoke reminds me at a deep psychological level of what it was like when I was young and my parents scared away the mummies who were chasing me in my dreams. I was comfortable and safe, and I think that part of my unconscious associates the smell of tobacco smoke with those feelings.

The second reason is neurological. I was 15 when I smoked for the first time, and articles that I’ve read over the years have said that the brain is undergoing massive restructuring at that age. Which is why kids who start smoking tend to stay smokers for the rest of their lives – their developing brains get biologically dependent on the nicotine and can’t function as well without it. And there’s evidence that male brains are still developing into the early twenties, when I smoked my last cigarette. In other words, I think I bookended both sides of my brain’s development with nicotine.

The fact that I never got seriously hooked means that I either had a lot of willpower, I got lucky, or both. But merely walking by three people smoking cigs in a parking lot sent me back to a place I thought I’d left behind me 14 years. If that can happen to me, I’m not sure I can even imagine how hard it must be for people who have suffered from and overcame actual addictions.

If this essay has, against all odds, somehow made its way to your desk, please, bear with me. It’s longish, but it winds eventually toward an exceedingly important conclusion. If you’ll give me a few minutes, I’ll do my best to reward your patience.
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In the 2008 election, Barack Obama won a landmark political victory on a couple of prominent themes: “hope” and “change.” He has since been afforded ample opportunity to talk about these ideas, having inherited the nastiest economic quagmire in living memory and a Republican minority in Congress that has interpreted November’s results as a mandate to obstruct the public interest even more rabidly than it was doing before. Reactions among those of us who supported Obama have been predictably mixed, but even those who have been critical of his efforts to date are generally united in their hope that his win signaled the end of “movement conservatism” in the US.

There are perhaps reasons for optimism. Politics in America can be cyclical, and by that thinking our current reactionary hegemony may have run its natural course. The Millennial Generation, which is between 75-100 million strong and extremely active socially and politically, skews heavily away from the policies that have defined the nation since Reagan. And some believe that Obama is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime charismatic who, like John F. Kennedy, can redirect the course of the culture through sheer force of vision and will. If any or all of these things are true, then there is room for … hope.

But while hope is an occasionally helpful frame of mind, it’s no substitute for intelligence, insight, planning, hard work and cash.

As I consider the state of the Republic some 49 days into the Obama era, I find in that formulation a variety of reasons to worry. For starters, it strikes me that very few people – very few, even, of the most visible lights in the progressive firmament – truly understand the magnitude of the conservative climb to power or the nature of the strategy employed. It’s not well understood how long it took, for instance, or how complex the effort was, or how deeply the foundation was poured, or how much it cost. The shallowness of our popular history is a dangerous condition in an age of instant gratification, when winning a skirmish is all-too-easily mistaken for winning the war, and it’s nothing short of terrifying to think that some saw January 20 as the end of the struggle instead of the beginning.

Yes, it was a triumph, and we were right to pause and celebrate, to mark the achievement of a critical milestone, but afterward the collective sigh was nearly audible. I don’t want to overstate the effect, though. I’m not suggesting that a majority of American progressives think the hard part is over, that we can put our society on cruise control and that the wicked Republican Nosferatu is dead once and for all, because that’s simply not the case. Instead, I’m suggesting that we may not sufficiently understand the nature of our opponent and that the failure to stake it through the heart now, while it’s down, assures that it will rise from its all-too-shallow grave to terrorize us once more. The landscape has changed, for sure, but the fundamental engines that propelled the modern reactionary right to power in the first place are alive, well, and already hard at work plotting their resurrection.

The Long War Against America

Let’s take a second to understand a few of the relevant facts regarding the war that still rages around us.

1: The conservative revolution was a generation in the making. Those who laid the groundwork for the eventual ascent of the Republican kwisatz haderach took a long view – an astoundingly long view by American standards – and accepted the occasional tactical setback so long as the eternal march of the faithful continued. One of the godfathers of the movement, Daniel Bell, published his foundational The End of Ideology in 1960, and his intellectual contributions to the landscape we now inhabit can hardly be overstated. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), for instance, he gushed about the coming “information age” and painted a rather rosy picture of the life of the “information worker.” This new post-industrial age would be marked by certain significant shifts in axial principles, and among his more powerful claims was the assertion that growth in the information sector resulted necessarily in prestigious knowledge-based employment. Information sector jobs were depicted as automatically better-paying and more fulfilling.

Krishan Kumar’s 1978 retort (Prophecy and Progress: the Sociology of Industrial and Post-industrial Society) aptly demonstrated the fallacies in Bell’s reasoning. Information-based enterprises, like the industrial sector enterprises which preceded them, have a set of basic operational needs which are neither information nor expertise-based. A software operation, for example, requires the same custodial services as a manufacturing operation. Bell’s rhetoric, however, counts such menial employment by the same standards it uses for programmers and managers. In many practical respects, though, the daily operations of service sector businesses differ little from the industrial sector, and claims that a shift in the type of “product” offered from goods to services equals a change in the fundamental structure of employment ought to be greeted cautiously.

So, there you have a pointed exchange from Daniel Bell and Krishan Kumar, two men that you’ve probably never heard of. But ask yourself, which of the perspectives strikes you as rhetorically familiar? Which argument have you heard, and in service to what kinds of policies?

Right. And here’s how complete the rout was. The most enthusiastic parroting of Bell’s construction I’ve ever run across came from Al Gore when he was Vice President. The Democratic Vice President. Take this snippet from a 1994 speech to the International Telecommunications Union:

Approximately 60% of all US workers are “knowledge workers” — people whose jobs depend on the information they generate and receive over our information infrastructure. As we create new jobs, 8 out of 10 are in information-intensive sectors of our economy. And these new jobs are well-paying jobs for financial analysts, computer programmers, and other educated workers (Gore 1994).

One assumes “knowledge” companies don’t need janitors. Regardless, when we reach the point where our “liberal” leaders are reading directly from the script authored by conservative intellectuals, it’s safe to say that the progressive possibility is in deep, deep trouble.

2: The conservative revolution was built on a strong intellectual and academic foundation. (I do not, by the way, use the term “intellectual” to signify correctness or moral righteousness – one can be intellectual while being wrong and evil.) Given how effectively conservatives have kneecapped education in America, it’s remarkably ironic how important academics were to empowering the movement. Daniel Bell is noted above; he and other intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk and those associated with a host of conservative “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution worked diligently to re-engineer the very DNA of America’s popular ideology. They sought to understand the collective psyche in ways that could be shifted, altered and exploited, and their efforts to deconstruct and re-encode our shared vocabulary is among the grandest achievements in the history of human propaganda. Turning “liberal” into a dirty word was barely the beginning.

These efforts mattered more than it is possible to quantify. As the neo-Marxist scholar Stuart Hall explains, the “battle of signification” is everything. Whoever wins the struggle to dictate to vocabulary used will win the debate.* Think about the abortion “debate” and the clever, almost-always unchallenged construction of “unborn human life.” If that phrase is allowed to stand, the pro-choicer has nearly zero chance of winning the argument.

3: The conservative movement was incredibly well-funded. And still is. One source estimates that between the late 1970s and late 1990s alone 12 major conservative foundations funneled hundreds of millions of dollars – at least – to think tanks, policy organizations, individual scholars, media apparatuses, legal organizations, advocacy groups and more. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Family foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Scaife Family foundations and the Adolph Coors Foundation are five of the biggest donors.

In 1988, the Olin Foundation alone distributed $55 million in grants. The Scaife family has donated more than $200 million over the years. Million dollar annual grants to individual think tanks are routine.

These Foundations have also been instrumental in creating the most famous think tanks. The Heritage Foundation, considered the leading think tank in America, was created in 1973 with $250,000 in seed money from brewery mogul Joseph Coors. The Cato Institute, the nation’s leading libertarian think tank, was founded in 1977 by the Koch family foundations. )

….
According to the Center for Policy Alternatives, the major conservative think tanks in Washington had a combined budget of $45.9 million, while the major progressive think tanks had a combined budget of $10.2 million. What this means is that far-right think tanks are better able to publicize their findings, stage more conferences, lobby harder for their policies, and present more and better-packaged information before Congress.

Not too put too fine a point on it, but conservative interests have a lot of cash and they’ve proven conclusively that they’re willing to invest it in programs that assure their continued political, social, cultural and economic domination.

And while I hate to oversimplify complex dynamics, it must be said that the points I have just made go a long way toward explaining the last 30+ years of American political history. Yes, there are other factors, but subtract the cash and the intellectual groundwork it bought and our current landscape would look dramatically different. Whether that’s a good thing I’ll let you decide for yourself. My opinion is probably obvious, but I’m not a billionaire.

What Must Be Done

In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman does a meticulous job of explaining how we got here from there – “there” being the New Deal society that stands today as the Golden Age of American prosperity. Toward the end he sounds an optimistic note, suggesting that some of the factors that played key roles in the rise of movement conservatism are waning – racism, for instance – and that without their broad mobilizing power the conservatives are in deep kim-chee. There is ample evidence supporting his claims, so perhaps he’s right. I certainly hope so. But if I might return to my vampire metaphor from earlier, when you have the soul-sucking undead bastard down, you don’t stand around hoping. You drive a stake through its evil, demonic heart.

Right now, almost 50 days into the Obama administration, we have Dracula on the canvas. And this is where you, my friends, come in. The way we assure an enlightened future for our nation is to act, and act resolutely, to make sure that movement conservatism stays down. In order to accomplish this, we need to proceed along the following fronts:

We must empower progressive intellectuals the way the Right has empowered theirs. As researchers like George Lakoff have demonstrated, much of the conservative success emerged from how they framed issues and re-encoded the very language we all speak. Political lingustics is an important field – as noted earlier – and if we can successfully keep the English language from being transformed into Newspeak we will hamstring the conservative noise machine in a meaningful way.

However, Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute recently closed its doors and various of its brightest lights are currently seeking to find funds to build on its work. Put simply, the bright lights on the Right are living well while our brightest and best are, as is so often the case, struggling to survive.

We must restore credibility and integrity to the media. As I’ve noted elsewhere, things began to unravel in earnest when Reagan’s newly appointed FCC apparatchiks were allowed to decree, with a straight face, that “the public interest is what the public is interested in.” Newspeak, indeed. Now reporting has been replaced by “fair and balanced” and there is a frighteningly real risk that journalism – real journalism – is dying.

Its future, if it has one, perhaps lies in endowment. I’ve heard a variety of ideas tossed around, including Mother Jones’ new tilt at non-profit journalism. I can’t say what the successful model will look like at this point, but if it emerges, it will center on the insulation of reporting and analysis from the influence of cash and spin.

We must revitalize our educational infrastructure around the imperatives of intellectual inquiry and critical thought. We have seemingly convinced ourselves that the only proper function of education is job training, and that’s an ideology that serves an identifiable master. Specifically, let’s ask ourselves who benefits when an ed system cranks out people with “marketable” skills but no capability for asking uneasy questions about their condition.

There is no surer innoculation against tyranny than a critically minded citizenry. To this end we must invest in education – and I say “invest” instead of “spend” because every dollar you spend is returned to you several times over – and invest mightily. Invest in educational innovation, in new ways of teaching everything from basic math and science to advanced reasoning skills. Invest heavily in early childhood reading programs, because nothing better energizes subsequent, lifelong learning. And most of all, invest in public education. The next time you hear somebody ranting about the marvels of vouchers and “competition” in education, remember a few things.

First, America has historically out-learned, out-taught, out-researched and out-innovated every nation on the face of the Earth. The people who did that were, in most cases, the products of public education.

Second, we’ve always had alternatives to public ed – “competition,” if you will. Private schools, parochial schools, and so on. If competition cured all ills, then how do we explain the state of contemporary public ed?

Third, we have more alternatives than ever today. We have the options noted in the previous item, plus Montessoris and Charters and again, all this competition seems not to have solved our problems.

Finally, the next time you hear rosy conservative rhetoric that seems at little at odds with the empirical world you live in, remember – we live in an age where the language has been re-tooled to serve the ends of a narrow minority. It’s possible, just possible, that you’re hearing propaganda instead of fact. And always feel free to backtrack the data. It may just come from one of those marvelously well-funded conservative “think tanks.”

In summary: Dear Progressive Billionaires, America needs your money. And I don’t mean a million here and million there. I mean hundreds of millions, even billions. If we are to realize any meaningful dreams of hope and change, we must have a world where our brightest and best can apply their minds to our shared problems as professionals. When their intellects are doing it for a living and ours are trying to carve out a couple hours after work, we lose. When their brightest minds are primarily concerned with crafting winning policy and ours are constantly distracted by desperate concerns about their ability to feed their families, they win.

Money isn’t everything, but since you’re a billionaire I’ll assume that you understand a thing or two about what it can accomplish.

Thanks for your time. If you find some value in what I’ve said but aren’t sure where to start, click the Contact button and drop me a line. I know people who are worthy of your generosity and people who will reward your support a thousand times over.

Sincerely,

Sam Smith

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* See “The work of representation.” in Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage/The Open University, 1997), 13-74.