- Carolina’s got no culture ’til the mushrooms kick in…

Doco burned the house down last night. Unfortunately, nobody was in it at the time.

The house, in this case, was the Little Bear in Evergreen, CO, a well-respected venue that hosts everything from local mainstays to up-and-comers to significant national acts. And Doco is a band we’ve mentioned before here: Trevor (guitar, vox) and Josh (bass) Booth are the sons of our colleague Jim Booth, and they’re one of the most talented young acts you’re likely to run across.

But any young band trying to put a dent in the market knows nights like last night. Mid-week, playing a town where nobody knows your name. Five people in the audience: four friends from back home and the bartender. Your take won’t buy the gas to get you to the next show.

But you’re a pro. You treat those five people like they were 5,000, because once word gets around you know that five can turn into 50 can turn into 500 in a hurry.

This post isn’t a review of a Doco show, really. Short version: a fusion of funk, rock, rap, white-boy reggae and blues from three kids who can by god play their instruments. I once wrote, in a ten-second music review for my mobile content service, that they “burned with an intensity no single genre could contain.” That tone may lack the critical restraint for which I have become known, but it’s essentially true, even on laid-back nights where they’re basically rehearsing in front of a few friends.

No, instead this is a plea on behalf of hundreds, thousand of bands you’ve never heard of. If you’re a musician these days radio has abandoned you and you can forget all about a label system that invests in artist development. That’s where the golden age of classic rock came from, but the next golden age is going to have to come from somewhere else.

In truth, there is a kind of musical golden age happening, if only you know where to look for it. Yeah, there’s a lot of noise in the system, a lot of bands that really don’t have much going for them aside from a passionate love of music. But there are also more really worthy bands than almost anybody realizes. Hundreds more.

You have to work at it a little. You have to surf Net radio. Check out MySpace pages every time somebody mentions an act you haven’t heard of. Check eMusic’s new arrivals and charts. And whatever you do, stay the hell away from American Idol.

Also, make it a point to go see bands you haven’t heard of. You never know when one of them will turn out to be your new favorite, and I say that from experience. That’s how I found Fiction 8. That night I accidentally wandered into a favorite band, two great new friends, an eventual collaborator, and a series of events that have rippled through significant portions of my life for the past decade or more. Literally.

So heads up to Crested Butte, Winter Park, Park City, Moscow, Pullman, Seattle, Vancouver (WA), Ashland (OR), then California, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama: Doco is coming your way. And if they aren’t playing your town, that’s okay – some other band is.

Lend them your ears, huh?

But think about the story we’re being sold: The National Enquirer pubs a story saying Tiger is stepping out on his wife. A couple nights later, at two or three in the morning, Tiger decides to leave the house for no apparent reason. While trying to back out of the driveway – stone sober, the reports insist – he manages to wrap the Escalade around a tree. With me so far? Good. Then his wife comes out and tries to “rescue” him by bashing out the windows with a club.

If none of this smells a tad overripe to you, call me. I’m working a sweet real estate deal – waterfront property in south-central Florida, as it turns out – and am looking for partners.

Anyhow, we’re not here to snark over the fact that Woods lives in a town with the most gullible CSI unit in America. We’re here to discuss what this case tells us about the brave new world of public relations and crisis communications in the land of the ubiquitous, 24/7/4ever tabloid news cycle.

The Ugly Choices

Say you’re a PR counselor. And you represent a client who encounters a personal crisis of the general shape and/or size of Tigergate. What do you do?

You say this:

Client, you have a choice, and I can’t make it for you. On the one hand, you have a right to privacy, despite what the howling jackals of the free press would like us to believe. You’re entitled to say nothing and to deal with your personal life behind closed doors. They may stalk you for the rest of your days, but you may, if you choose, ignore them. You don’t even have to acknowledge their existence, and if they get out of line you can get restraining orders and hire security to keep them out of your immediate personal space.

Or you can face the music.

Now, if you choose option B, you’ll need to be fully forthcoming. If they smell a lie, a dodge, a rhetorical two-step, any hint at all that the truth they’re getting is even slightly varnished, well, it’ll be worse than if you’d stonewalled them. And a calculated, cynical faux press conference event like the one staged by that Tiger look-alike robot a couple of weeks back? Yeah, I’d avoid that like I would pigeon tartare.

So option B = 100% transparency. Think about all the things that means. Like, what’s your self-respect worth? How you feel about being on your knees before the drooling, unwashed masses?

If you opt for route A, though, understand something – and this is critical. Your brand is going to take an epic nard-stomping. It may never recover. Even if it does, it may take a very long time. If your livelihood depends on your public reputation, the question becomes how much money do you need to live on? How much are you willing to sacrifice? And I mean this literally, Client. This is a math question – how many dollars do you have, how many do you need, and how many are you willing to forego?

Hell Hath No Fury

Sadly, options A and B are more or less mutually exclusive. That sucks, I know. It’s not fair that a person should have to make this kind of choice. But that’s the world we live in.

Once upon a time a newspaper arrived in the morning and the news came on TV in the evening. Like a dog that knows dinner time is 6pm, the public was acclimated to this information rationing routine. In that world a pro like me could control the flow of data. Gatekeep like a sumbitch, you betcha. Top-down, one-to-many them until the cows come home. Rover is going to eat at six, and he’s going to eat what I put in front of him, by god.

Those days are gone, though. With the ubiquitous tabloid infotainment cycle in which we now find ourselves morally adrift, you’re no longer facing the well-heeled family dog from your basic ’50s sitcom. These days Rover rolls with a posse and an attitude. Kibble at six? Fuck you, master. I’ll eat when I want, and if you don’t like it I’ll head over to the Johnson place. Dogs are a too-rare commodity these days, and unless you’d like me to become the neighbor’s faithful hound, there better be something tasty in that dish around the clock.

Forgive me if I’m torturing the metaphor, but hopefully the point is clear. In a world with 24-hour “news,” always-on Internet and now an exploding mobile landscape, where that ubiquity is never further away than your pocket, the rules have changed. And not in your favor.

Your Life May Belong to You, But Your Brand Belongs to the Public

See, today’s public has gotten entitled. They’ve gotten accustomed to the immediacy, the comprehensiveness of the on-demand infocycle. Key word: demand. Something happens, they find out within seconds. And if it’s even remotely interesting, there are dozens (hundreds, even thousands) of outlets and individuals on the trail, relentlessly scouring the story for every minute scrap of detail, no matter how banal or trivial.

It’s their right to know … well, whatever the hell they want to know. Information wants to be free. Information is power. They’ve paid for their phones and their cable and they endure the ads on their favorite Web sites because they want content. All of it. Now, bitches. Understand that, at least subconsciously, they feel like they have paid for the right to know whatever they want about you. Your private life is their property. You’re public domain now. That may seem perverse, but there it is.

If you get righteously indignant and insist on option A (that’s the “respect my privacy route”), Client, one of two things is going to happen. On the one hand, people may respect your courage and principles and give you the space you need to get your life back tog…[snzrrrk...hrrf...BWAHAHAHAHA....] Hoo. Thanks, thanks. I’ll be here all week. Remember to tip your waitress.

Aherm. So no, I was just kidding. That’s not one of the things that might happen. I just wanted to see that cute little glimmer of hope leap into your puppy dog eyes again. I know, I’m a hateful, soulless bastard. You knew that when you hired me, though.

Seriously, though. One thing that might happen is rampant outrage. How dare you clam up on us? Hell hath no fury like a consumer scorned. They’ll carry on like you betrayed them personally, even though they may never have been in the same time zone with you.

This will be very bad. But not as bad as the other thing that can happen, which is that they move onto some other shiny thing and forget about you completely. That yawning sound you’re hearing is the sound of your personal brand sloughing onto the heap of permanent irrelevance. It’s a very different sound than the clink of gold coins being dropped into your pockets, isn’t it?

This Is Your Life

I’m sorry, Client, I’d say. This is all I have. I can explain the landscape, detail your options, and execute like a hall of famer along the course you choose, but I can’t pick that path for you. This is the rest of your life we’re talking about. You have to decide which cup of poison to drink.

I mean, sure, if you were Tiger and I had a hot tub time machine I’d be happy to jacuzzi back a few years and try to explain to you the deleterious impact that unsanctioned cocktail waitresses can exert on your cash flow position, but let’s be honest. You’d listen to me about like Senator Fatback listens to a lobbyist who shows up empty-handed, wouldn’t you?

And in truth, we can carp about the system all we want, but if it weren’t for this over-the-top, completely ludicrous system your brand probably wouldn’t be a percent of what it is today, anyway, right? Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I know none of this is what you want to hear, Client, but you called me to manage the crisis. Which means I arrived shortly after we lost control of important parts of the game. So now we play the hand we’re dealt.

There is an edict that was always true about crisis management, but it’s about a million times more important today than it once was: the best way to deal with crisis is to avoid it. The lesson is a simple one. People will find out. So if you don’t want to see it on TMZ and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, don’t fucking do it.

As I say, simple.

Don’t look to me for a defense of Stupak’s horrendous abortion amendment to the House bill on health care reform. I know the Congressman. And while i like the Congressman, he and i have opposing points of view on more than one issue. I figure that’s to be expected in a free country. On the other hand, i deeply resent his attempt to legislate his religious morality. A morality, i might add, that has no Biblical basis but is a product of his church. Silly me for thinking that Church and State were separate in my nation.

I won’t threaten to not vote for him, if only because i’ve already vowed to never vote for another Democrat for the rest of my life. Try and fool me once (Clinton), shame on me…even if i didn’t vote for the guy. Try and fool me twice (Obama) and you can fuck right off.

Stupak, however, might gain an exemption this time around if he does vote against that monstrosity of a “health care reform” bill. He may be doing it for all the wrong reasons, but each and every politician who votes for that hideous affront to all that is hopeful in America will actually surpass Jimmy Buffet on my “If i ever see him/her in public i’ll kick ‘em in the groin” list.

Oh, i’m for reforming America’s dysfunctional health care system, but i’m against preemptive bailouts of monopoly industries that don’t add value. And i’m certainly against the federal government acting as a collections agency for corporations. I’d be all for socialized medicine or mandated universal coverage provided by private insurance at no profit. Other than that, the Democrats can stick Truman’s dream where the buck stops.

But let’s get back to the progressive blogosphere’s new found interest in Michigan’s first congressional district. You’ve found a primary challenger willing to run well to Stupak’s left. Congratulations.

Here are the logistics. It covers 25,000 square miles and boasts a population of just 662,563 people. (that would be 26.5 people/sq mile) Let’s just call it rural, shall we? The biggest city in the district is where i live; our population is just shy of 20,000 plus students. Developing name recognition in this district is no easy task, and the wonders of teh internetz will only help you so much in a place where not everyone has it and a great many people still access it via dial-up modems.

Should i mention that the district is pretty conservative? Collect five dollars from everyone up here who says on election day, “I would have voted straight ticket Republican, but I vote for Bart,” and you’ll have a hefty war chest. He doesn’t win those votes because he’s so conservative (he endorsed Edwards). Many of his constituents don’t agree with his political party or his stands outside the abortion issue, but they know him and they like him and they trust him.

So the great plan is to run an unknown to the left of him in a district that leans conservative. A district that the GOP has been hoping to pick off for years but can’t find a candidate capable of unseating Stupak. And if all that wasn’t enough, you’re all backing a Troll.*

Good luck, but remember, if you were a real progressive you’d want this bill dead many times over…no matter how it gets killed. And if it dies then the Stupak-Pitts amendment dies with it. Get the picture? Instead it sounds like you’ve got your marching orders from the Party and you’re ready to crush whoever gets in your way, even if it means coming into my house and trashing the place to make yourself feel better.

You won’t give a shit about my pleasant little place after we end up with a nutjob Republican representing us. I was frothing mad at Bart for this, but frankly the progressive response to his actions make me want to defend the guy. Maybe the rest of the Democrat Party and its supporters could learn something here. This is what a spine looks like. These are convictions. And while i disagree vehemently with Bart on this, i can at least respect him.

I wish i could say the same for all the people working for a Pyrrhic, political victory because they refuse to stand for anything.

*A Troll is any Michigander who lives south of the Mackinac Bridge. Yoopers live north of the bridge, but one can only be born a Yooper, never become a Yooper. A Troll who moves to the U.P. is a Trooper. But a Yooper that leaves is, and always will be, a Yooper.

by John Harvin

My sister in law is lazy. Bone lazy. Dog lazy. Lazy lazy.

She’s the only one in her family like that. My wife, her sister, goes like a hamster on meth–working, child-raising, charities, training for the New York marathon—you name it. My brother in law works ten hard hours each day, comes home and teaches himself stonework so he can build a new wall in front of his house. My sister in law complains.

But this post is not about her, it’s about a litmus test for laziness. Wonder if you’re lazy? Here’s how to tell. 100% guaranteed.

After my father-in-law died, four of us cleaned out his Ohio house. My wife, brother-in-law and I worked six non-stop hours clearing twenty years of accumulation in the garage—it’s amazing how many half-full cans of WD-40 one man can own—while my sister-in-law spent the morning chatting with the realtor about “marketing strategies.” Just as we finished, the realtor left. My sister-in-law descended into the empty garage, saw the three of us sitting on the now spotless floor drinking pop, sighed and walked past us to a coat-rack, where she removed three hangers, and said with all seriousness, “I guess it’s up to me to do everything.”

That’s the test for laziness. If you think you aren’t, you are. If you think you are, you aren’t. My sis-in-law thinks she works non-stop, and complains more than my right knee on a black diamond slope. My work-a-holic wife thinks the day is too short because she can’t do everything she wants to get done.

There are three types of personal characteristics: ones that people seem to get pretty much right, a set which people tend to fudge a bit, and another set, like laziness, that people seem to get exactly 180 degrees wrong.

For example, ask someone if they’re good at math. People know. No one ever says they’re good when they’re not, or vice versa. Or handy with tools. Or good with directions. Or athletic. People know exactly where they stand.

Then there’s another set of attributes that people fudge on. Ask someone if they’re attractive. Very few people will actually say, “No, I’m repulsive.” Instead people fudge. They say “In my own way,” or “Some people think so,” or “I’m beautiful inside.” Ask someone if they’re clean, and they will rarely say, “I’m a slob. The CDC has an entire wing devoted to tracking the pathogens in my bathroom sink.” Instead they might well say, “I’m clean, but messy.” I’d guess most traits fall into this bucket. Good with money. Or smart. Or likable. We would all fudge if asked those questions. Most of us see our personal glass two-thirds full rather than half-empty.

But then there are the Catch-22 traits, the ones where our self-perceptions are the exact opposite of reality. Like laziness. Or being garrulous. Ask a windbag about people that talk too much and you’ll get an hour lecture on how much he hates people like that. Or boring. Or cheap. Cheap people think that since they paid for the Thai food in 2004, that pretty much clears them for eternity. Or, strangely enough, color blindness. I’ve known three color blind people, all of whom insisted they could see colors perfectly well, even though they always looked like they dressed in the dark. Once in an earlier life, I tortured a color blind co-worker by giving him pop quizzes, using the various bits of colored wire from a phone cable. After he failed each quiz, he would take the piece of wire and find someone else in the building and ask them. Of course they would tell him it was purple or whatever. But instead of helping him understand he really was color blind, this merely convinced him there was a vast conspiracy out to get him. Which brings us to another of those 180 traits: paranoia. If you think you’re not paranoid, you are. Etc.

Clearly our current political discourse is all about 180 degree perceptions. Rush calling Obama a racist. Sarah calling people clueless. Karl worried about government encroachment on people’s rights and budget overruns. And the same rules pretty much apply. Anyone who says they’re not at least a little racist, probably is.

So my question to the S&R crew is: What’s the full list? What personality traits or characteristics are always perceived by the owner exactly opposite of reality?

OK, OK, I know this topic is not as profound as Dr. Sammy’s series on religious scope-creep or as revealing as Wufink’s analysis of expectations bias in earnings announcements. But then again, it’s easy for them to think big thoughts, they don’t have to deal with my sister-in-law.

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Times article points out that legal and constitutional scholars are pretty much of the view that this is mostly a bunch of hot air. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring state lawmakers from shouting a lot. It turns out there’s something called The Patrick Henry caucus in the Utah legislature which, according to The Times, “formed last year and led the assault on federal legal barricades in the session that ended Thursday.” There’s also something called The Tenth Amendment Center, which prides itself on pushing this sort of thing, as if Article 6 of the Constitution didn’t exist. It’s worth a quick look just to see how bizarrely some of this stuff can be dressed up.

We’ve been here before, of course, as we noted in our comment on the secessionists last summer. And, once again, it’s useful to drag out that interesting data from The Tax Foundation on which states are Givers and which states are Takers. Givers, remember, are states whose federal tax payments exceed money received back from the federal government; Takers are states who get back more in federal taxes than they pay. This is actually a useful way to look at the world, because, as is often the case, when you follow the money (or lack of it), a different story emerges. We might think of giver states as, say, Parents, and taker states as, say, Deadbeat Offspring. All sorts of potentially colourful labels emerge, but we’ll leave it at that.

Because, once again, you have to wonder if anyone knows anything anymore. Let’s take that Patrick Henry group in Utah, who probably think they’re choosing between Liberty or Death. If we check the good old Tax Foundation data for 2005 (the most recent year for which they present data), it turns out that Utah is—yes!—a taker, getting back $1.07 in federal spending for every $1 in federal taxes paid. So, Utah—a deadbeat state. South Dakota–ditto. South Dakota gets back a whopping $1.53 for every $1 paid in federal taxes. That’s pretty impressive. Wyoming? Check—it gets back $1.11 for every $1 paid. Oklahoma—a state with lots of oil? Hey, look, Oklahoma gets back $1.36 for every $1 paid.

Most of this, according to The Times, is driven by conservative ideology:

“There’s a tsunami of interest in states’ rights and resistance to an overbearing federal government; that’s what all these measures indicate,” said Gary Marbut, the president of the Montana Shooting Sports Association, which led the drive last year for one of the first “firearms freedoms,” laws like the ones signed last week in South Dakota and Wyoming.

In most cases, conservative anxiety over federal authority is fueling the impulse, with the Tea Party movement or its members in the backdrop or forefront. Mr. Herrod in Utah said that he had spoken at Tea Party rallies, for example, but that his efforts, and those of the Patrick Henry Caucus, were not directly connected to the Tea Partiers.

But not all:

And in some cases, according to the Tenth Amendment Center, the politics of states’ rights are veering left. Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin, for example — none of them known as conservative bastions — are considering bills that would authorize, or require, governors to recall or take control of National Guard troops, asserting that federal calls to active duty have exceeded federal authority.

Actually, this is potentially interesting—Vermont is a taker ($1.08), but Wisconsin is one of the 17 (yes, only 17) giver sates (at $0.86), and Rhode Island gets back exactly as much as it pays out. And Montana? Right, Montana gets back $1.47 for every buck it gives to the dreaded and overbearing federal government.

Really, the solution to this is pretty simple. Just pass a Constitutional Amendment that would prohibit states from receiving more in federal disbursements than it pays in federal taxes. If residents of Montana and Utah and the Old South (where secession talk has been cropping up more frequently) want to moan about the overbearance of the federal government, they should man up and agree not to take any more money from the federal government than they pay in. Gee, I wonder how that will turn out. Otherwise, let’s just laugh at them for being the hypocritical deadbeats that they are, and if we live in a Giver state, start leaning on our representatives about why we continue to subsidize these states whose legislatures clearly don’t appreciate it.

Much of this is played for laughs, and the audience around us laughed a lot during the first two acts. They were clearly surprised (as the West End Whingers were surprised) when a bunch of violence erupted in the third act, even though it was hard to not see this coming. Butterworth’s telegraphing throughout the play is a bit on the heavy side, frankly, but critics and audiences still claim to be surprised. Rylance, who is a fine actor and who is given considerably less to work with here than people think, plays Byron as an irascible rogue who is supposed to reflect some deeply held English values, but it’s a stereotype—he’s incapable of being anything other than an irascible rogue, even though he’s also, you know, deep, because of those long silences in the third act when he’s facing eviction. Sadly, most of the characters in the play are stereotypes as well. And those are just the ones who make some sort of sense. Among those who don’t make sense are the highly implausible former girlfriend and the six year old child who is Byron’s—Byron himself looks to be in his 50s, and we’re supposed to believe he’s irresistible to all women, especially those under the age of 16.

What’s irritating here is that Butterworth seems to have had the right idea in the first place—the marginalized in rural England, who here, as in real life, consist of the unemployed, and the unemployable, and the young (who often overlap), and the old. There is a real play in here somewhere, but Butterworth needed an editor or something. And some focus. He has attempted something major, trying to connect the myths of England with the realities of the marginalization of modern England for much of the population. But he loads it down with entirely too much verbiage, and implausibility, and a bit too much of the “England for the English” mentality that is driving some of the British Right these days. Yes, you can see the violence in the third act coming a mile away—but that doesn’t make it any more plausible in the context of the play itself. Chekhov’s pistol in the first act is supposed to be used, certainly, but it’s also supposed to have a reason to be there in the first place.

We were so surprised at this wreckage of a play, in fact, that we went home and tracked down every review we could think of. Whingers, as I noted above, loved the play, even though they admitted there were parts of it they just didn’t understand. Here’s a sample of some of the thinking going around:

When the comedy stops and the violence begins it’s a bit of a shock and we have to confess that we didn’t really know what it was all about. Butterworth’s teasing juxtaposition of the mystic and the mundane (Stonehenge and custard creams) is all very well but when we were just left with the mystic the Whingers were way out of their depth.

And yet they happily admit they would go sit through all three hours and 20 minutes again. Jeez.

And here’s Charlotte Higgins over at The Guardian:

The English love a rebel, a non-conformist: I began to think about the levellers, the diggers, the wonderful and outre sects thrown up by the English revolution and so beautifully described in Christopher Hill’s classic, The World Turned Upside Down. At the same time, Byron – fabulist, chancer, dangerous, oddly tender – seems to have some kind of indefinable connection with the land, with its ancient beating pre-Christian heart, that seems so rooted in the south-west of England. In Butterworth’s play, this stuff is all the more powerful for being so lightly sketched. Personally, I have a soft spot for England’s deep mythology (I read a lot of Susan Cooper books as a child). Overworked, it could all turn a little Wagnerian.

Lightly sketched—that’s an understatement. The fact that the play doesn’t hold together between the hystrionics doesn’t seem to register on Higgins.

I don’t mean to just pick on the Whingers and Higgins—they’re just representative of a theatre-going class that doesn’t seem to mind the fact that what they see on the stage often makes no sense whatsoever, but as long as it makes them laugh, they don’t seem bothered. What does seem to unify all these folks is the appearance that Butterworth is addressing something deeply serious–Englishness. Well, of course he is—that’s why we’re disappointed. Yes, it’s a non-mainstream view of Englishness which is messy and dirty, which is what everyone seems to find so appealing. And yes, rural England is in trouble. The Labour party has been no better than the Tories in their ongoing war against the English countryside, and people who make their living from the countryside—a tradition in England that goes back thousands of years, and which is still a significant economic and social sphere for a sizable percentage of the English population—find themselves adrift, both socially and economically.

We’re way outside of the mainstream here, and it is to Butterworth’s credit that he takes them seriously, or seems to, anyway. But treating everyone as a certain kind of stereotype does not help, nor does enobling Bryon when the reasons for it aren’t clear. Yes, he’s supposed to be an archetype, but it’s awfully vague about what. It’s that very vagueness that most audiences find appealing, I suspect. Any further clarity and Byron probably becomes quite unappealing—he sells drugs to teenagers, makes a public nuisance of himself, seems to have casual sexual relations with minors, and has long given up responsibility for what most of us take responsibility for. But because he sacrificed himself (in one of the weirder backstories of the play), and listens to the birds, and has seen giants, we’re supposed to find him deeply moving and symbolic. Rylance does his best, which is considerable, but Byron’s mythical status escaped us.

Butterworth is addressing something serious here, or seems to think he is, but he’s addressing it in a frightfully lazy, disjointed and possibly racist way (although only Dominick Cavendish of The Telegraph seems to have commented on this latter point). And it’s not much different from the “Englishness” that we’ve seen for decades on English television, ranging from Rab C. Nesbitt way on back to Steptoe and Son. We want this to be a better play, not the condescending one that it is. But maybe we’re just missing something. The fact that much of it is outright blather without an ounce of dramatic tension doesn’t seem to bother anyone else. There’s clearly a hunger out there for plays about this. I expect so see many more of them coming along. All you need, apparently, is some dialogue about ley lines and trailer parks and you’re all set.

The 62,000 or so folks in that Upper East Side zip code who don’t rent live in domiciles worth, on average, just under a million bucks. And those people in 10128 have donated $1.7 million in the 2010 election cycle to federal candidates, national parties, or PACs. (Sorry, Rush: Your neighbors preferred Democratic entities.)

But the folks in 10128 are cheapskates compared with the real money farther south on Fifth Avenue. The 100,000-plus people who live in 10021 have given $3.3 million. In fact, eight zip codes surrounding Central Park rank in the top 20 zip codes nationally in political giving by individuals for this election cycle, their residents having coughed up $17.4 million. 10021, 10022 and 10024 are the top three individual donor zip codes in the nation.

I was going to tell you this a few months ago. I had intended to point out that zip codes in and around Washington, D.C., where the real money is, ponied up $22.9 million in this election cycle. I’d planned to tell you that individuals in the top 50 zip codes in the nation had so far contributed nearly $74 million to federal candidates or committees.

But these numbers summarizing individual donations direct to candidates or parties have become meaningless. That means I will likely end four years of writing about them.

The totals provided here, courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that aggregates Federal Election Commission records to make them easier to understand, represents donations exceeding $200 by individuals. Federal election law limits individual candidate contributions to $2,400, up to an aggregate total of $45,600 per election cycle. Individuals may also give an aggregated total of $69,900 to national parties and PACs per cycle. Bottom line: An individual may make $115,500 in campaign contributions per election cycle.

Well, that’s chicken feed now, so there’s no reason to write about campaign contributions by individuals any more.

You all know why: The Supreme Corporate Court of the United States struck down provisions of campaign-finance law in its 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, overruling precedents. (So much for stare decisis.) The bottom line: The government may not ban corporations from spending unlimited amounts of money on broadcast political ads prior to primary or general elections. (This is not the first episode of judicial activism by the “pro-corporate wing” of the Roberts Court.) Says The New York Times:

For the first time, though, as a result of the [Citizens United] ruling, corporations will be able to spend unlimited amounts of money on “electioneering communications” (i.e., broadcast advertisements) expressly advocating for a candidate’s election or defeat. While the court upheld the ban on direct contributions from corporations or unions to candidates, it also clears the way, for the first time, for corporations to donate money to nonprofit groups that place advocacy advertisements.

But, because the Supreme Court has not yet struck down the remainder of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, corporations may spend limitless money on ads supporting or opposing candidates while individual contributors continue to face limits on their donations direct to candidates or parties.

That means all those donations by folks in the top 50 zip codes for this election cycle — $74 million and counting — are small change now. Those who used to be big players in the Election Power Grab Sweepstakes are now bit players. Corporations — those newly minted artificial beings with more power than individual human beings — can outspend them.

In fact, perhaps many of those well-to-do folks in the zip codes surrounding Central Park, those able to afford that $115,500 aggregate limit, might be high-ranking executives of corporations. Maybe they’ll just stop donating as individuals and leave it to the corporation to pay the advertising freight charges to influence election outcomes.

The Screw Democracy Game™ — spend large amounts of money on behalf of political parties and candidates with expectations of a beneficial return on that investment — has changed, it seems. We’ll know for sure as the 2010 mid-term elections near. To what extent will corporations pour money into television advertising to support candidates they prefer? Will they overtly or covertly threaten candidates holding positions unfavorable to business and corporations by dumping millions into advertising support for those candidates’ opponents?

Will Congress require full, public disclosure of direct corporate (or union) spending on “electioneering communications” (even though they may be unlimited financially) and include immediate online disclosure? Will Congress mandate a “I’m the CEO, and I approved this message” tag for corporation-funded, televised political ads? Will Congress close the door that allows corporations (and unions) to hide massive financial support of political entities by passing corporate (or union) money anonymously through nonprofit civic leagues and trade associations? Says The Times:

That means that those nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, can now use corporate contributions to buy political commercials, and the corporations can potentially operate behind the anonymity of their donations. [emphasis added]

The Court’s ruling means it has become useless for me to continue to root through the records in the FEC’s database of individual donations to candidates, parties or PACs. Similarly, how useful will be such data aggregated by categories provided by the Center for Responsive Politics? True, the center is “a clearinghouse for data and analysis on multiple aspects of money in politics—the independent interest groups called 527s committees, federal lobbying, Washington’s ‘revolving door’, privately sponsored congressional travel and the personal finances of members of Congress, the president and other officials.” It will continue to provide an important public service. Perhaps it will find a way to track this new, unlimited spending on “electioneering communications.”

But in light of five men’s decision to dramatically change the face of election financing, the role I’ve played — finding out what individuals gave how much to whom with what effect — appears pointless.

Political advantage is gained or lost through television advertising. Corporations can now spend unlimited amounts of money on such advertising to influence the outcome of elections with more effect than an individual’s maximum donation of $115,500 direct to candidates or parties can accomplish. More importantly, corporations have the legal means to hide that spending.

But, supporters of the Court’s decision argue, individuals can spend on broadcast political ads without limit, too. They are only constrained on direct donations to candidates or parties.

Yes, if you, as an individual, are sufficiently wealthy, you may spend unlimited money on “electioneering communications” just as corporations now can. But can you, the wealthy individual, match the political ad spending of the wealthy corporation? Or corporations, plural?

This means sorting through aggregations of FEC data on individual campaign contributions has lost interest for me.

Now I need ideas, new techniques, to track all this corporate money that will be spent on “electioneering communications.” Suggestions, dear readers?

My friend, like me, married young – at least by today’s standards. We are in our late forties. And our generation seems to be one in which women are making this decision in droves, turning the old stereotype of the male midlife crisis on its head, leaving behind hurt and often clueless husbands who are incredulous that this is happening to them.

It didn’t strike me till recently that eight of the ten divorces I’ve been aware of among my circle of friends and colleagues in the last five years have been initiated by women. In every case, these have been women with children who have been devoted to their families for years. None is wealthy, none is leaving on a caprice after which they reinvent themselves with cosmetic surgery and a convertible. And none is a pop-culture cougar, pursuing her own youth via a younger man in a new version of the classic life upheaval.

For all these women, divorce means that comfortable family homes in which they have lived for decades have to be sold, the material accoutrements of lives pruned and retooled to cram into an apartment with a daunting monthly rent. Many are struggling to bring old resumes into the 21st century digital job-seeker realm. Some have prepped in advance for this day, already lining up a couple of low-paying jobs – front office at their kids’ school, piano accompanist for the school choir – before taking the plunge.

Child custody is negotiated, usually jointly, and kids start shuttling back and forth between mom’s and dad’s new residences. And for the majority of these women who have not left their marriages for someone else, most will be facing singlehood as they approach or enter their fifties. There is the online dating realm to wade into some months later, with a steady stream of not-quite-right E-Harmony candidates to fit in dates with around the kids’ soccer games and prom dates and SAT tutoring sessions.

It’s not a very romantic picture.

Granted, while the situations I am pondering are anecdotal and each is distinct, I’ve done enough casual research since my surprising ‘discovery’ to identify a trend. It’s not just here in my Boulder, Colorado bubble that midlife women are the ones choosing to upend and move on.

Several years ago AARP magazine reported that the number of people ending marriages after 50 is increasing. Two-thirds of those divorces are requested by women. And, the article notes, while women do the walking, men don’t see it coming.

In 2008, Oprah.com ran an essay by Ellen Tien called “Confessions of a Semi-Happy Wife,” in which the author suggests her “Mid-Wife Crisis” is that of Everywoman stuck in a “thumpingly ordinary” marriage who yearns for freedom, novelty and alone time.

In “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in The Atlantic last summer of ending her 20-year marriage, garnering criticism for universalizing what some saw as a selfish, petty move to jettison a good guy (and dad). Yet she seems to speak for many women who look ahead to a second half of life in which they no longer wish to settle for tedium and mediocrity, even if it means venturing into a vast, unknown sea tossed with some frightening gales.

I remember asking my grandmother, as part of a college oral-history project, how it was that she and my grandpa had managed to stay married for 47 years, and her best friend across the street for nearly 50, when each had at least one child who had divorced.

“I don’t suppose we thought we had a choice,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s clearly not the case today.  So what is going on?

I have a theory.

I call it the gender-generation gap. Here’s what happens: you start with a woman who’s a Gen-Xer or at the tail-end of the Boomers, who came of age in a rather heady era in which she imbibed feminist visions of possibility trumpeted by her predecessors, women who had burned bras and pushed ceilings, lobbied for daycare and flextime, hashed out a new vocabulary in which ‘head of household’ and ‘housewife’ were swapped for visions of ‘co-equal’ partnership.

The young men they married in the 1980s, however, weren’t reading advice for career girls or ‘how to have it all’ in Glamour magazine, let alone Gloria Steinem in Ms. The greater numbers of girls who had joined them in college classes was an added bonus, not a social trend to scrutinize. And when they went home on weekends, typically they re-entered a nest in which their needs were cared for by a traditional mom who fed them, kept them in new clothes, did their laundry and probably made their beds.

What we are seeing some 20 or 30 years later, I think, is a glaring gap in gendered expectations of what marriage would – and should – be.  The men who are husbands in their 40s and 50s today — despite being a decade into the 21st century, despite feminism existing in the minds of their children as a history-book relic, despite taken-for-granted rhetoric of equality – are grappling with a world framed by legions of June Cleaver moms – or at least Carol Brady — yet shared with wives who thought they’d be Claire Huxtable.

And when these wives realized, rather quickly after the kids came along, that TV show images were just that, most seemed to resign, buckle down, and get on with the task of getting babies raised and keeping a family in order. All that partnership stuff they expected? Even the best-intentioned husbands seemed to be good at “helping,” for which they are commended by their wives’ more traditional female friends, suggesting they not be taken for granted. These husbands were, after all, a good step more progressive than Ward Cleaver.

But 25 years down the track, it doesn’t seem to be enough. One thing these divorcing women friends of mine have in common is years spent begging their husbands for help in improving things. To listen to them. To divide duties and manage details. To summon empathy. To support their goals and passions. To take them seriously.

In virtually every case I’ve observed, when a woman finally files for divorce she believes she has exhausted all other possibilities for a life of meaning and satisfaction. By this point, her desire to save her marriage is over. She’s already moved on, when her husband is at long last just waking up, slammed out of inertia by this utterly unexpected step – even when she’s raised or threatened it before.

“I want a divorce” falls on male ears as inscrutably as if she had been speaking Estonian or Swahili.

Tien, who like Loh has reaped plenty of criticism for seeming to advocate leaving perfectly good, well-intended husbands, has this to say:

As one girlfriend remarked, it’s the age of rage — a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it’s the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room…

In the beginning, we felt obliged to join the race to have it all; being married was an integral part of the contest and heaven forbid we should be disqualified. Flash-forward to 10 years later, when we discover that we can get it all but whose harebrained scheme was this anyway? We can get jobs, get pregnant, get it done. We can try — with varying levels of success — to get sleep, get fit, get control, and get those important Me-moments where one keeps a journal with thought-provoking lists that go ‘I’m a woman first, a mother second, a laundress third.’ We get upset, we get over it. What we don’t always get is: Why.

Conventional wisdom decrees that marriage takes work, but it doesn’t take work, it is work. It’s a job — intermittently fulfilling and annoying, with not enough vacation days. Divorce is a job too (with even fewer vacation days). It’s a matter of weighing your options.

For more and more women, it seems the option of chucking the drudgery of ‘tried and true’ for untried potential is a risk worth taking. Life isn’t over for women at 40 or 50 anymore; as Tien remarks, “We are still visually tolerable if not downright irresistible when we’re 30 or 35 or 40. If you believe the fashion magazines — which I devoutly do — even 50- and 60-year-olds are…pretty hot tickets.”

What worries me, though, is what sort of social legacy will be left by this growing heap of crumbled marriages. There is the inevitable splitting up of holidays at multiple parents’ and stepparents’ and then grandparents’ homes (for some kids – as was my case – parents don’t stop at just one divorce). There is the financial fallout. For every divorce, you’ve got families trying to get by on half (or less) of the resources that were once there, and almost twice the energy and environmental impact generated by dividing those material essentials into two households.

One of two things has to happen, I think, for marriage to revitalize its future and become appealing to women again. Either a current generation of young people needs to get in synch with their respective expectations for gender roles in a marriage, or marriage needs to be rethought and redefined, as Loh provocatively contends, to permit more autonomy and less demand for fidelity, if we’re talking how to sustain a 60- or even 70-year commitment.

As a mother of a 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, I am comfortably situated in one of those ‘stable, utilitarian’ marriages.  I worry about what lies ahead for my kids as they consider such a commitment one day. While I’d like to think my son will be a different sort of husband – a genuine partner, a true equal in all things domestic and relational – he is nonetheless being influenced by parents who fit the generalities I’ve outlined above: an aspiring, frustrated mom and a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned dad who nonetheless strives against the apron strings of his own traditional upbringing.

It distresses me that young men today still have visions of that gratifying lifestyle in which they go off to a great job and come home to a doting wife who makes their domestic realm an oasis. Researcher Barbara Kerr, who studies gender differences in gifted students, observed in a 2000 speech called Gender and Genius that most young people, even those with superior intelligence and higher goals, succumb to society’s conventional image of what constitutes achievement.

Kerr cites responses to a study she did on gifted students’ “perfect future day” fantasies, a favorite vision of what they might be doing in 10 years. I will quote her at length because the results are telling, and disconcerting:

A typical college male’s fantasy goes something like this: I wake up and get in my car — a really nice rebuilt ‘67 Mustang– and then I go to work, I think I’m some kind of a manager of a computer firm, and then I go home and when I get there, my wife is there at the door (she has a really nice figure) she has a drink for me, and she’s made a great meal. We watch TV or maybe play with the kids.’ Here is the typical college female’s fantasy: ‘I wake up and my husband and I get in our twin Jettas and I go to the law firm where I work, then after work, I go home and he’s pulling up in the driveway at the same time. We go in and have a glass of wine and we make an omelet together and eat by candlelight. Then the nanny brings the children in and we play with them till bedtime.’ What’s wrong with this picture?

Women dream of dual career bliss, while men still seem to nourish the hope that they might find a woman who wants to stay home and take care of them and the children. Despite extraordinary changes in the career expectations of women, many college men have yet to acknowledge the changes in gender roles that women’s expectations imply.

Kerr adds that “it is likely that even more men who publicly endorse equity in relationships secretly wish for a more traditional lifestyle. On the other hand, college women have as their goals romantic yet egalitarian relationships for which they have no roadmaps.” Just as their mothers did, who are now driving into a new wild blue yonder with no GPS.

How do we, as a culture, create these new roadmaps?  How do I teach my teenage son what it looks like to be a partner with women — and more importantly, to want to be?

Loh suggests we need to contemplate entirely new avenues, some that may verge into French (and other) territory in which the ideal of lifelong fidelity is put out to pasture to accommodate the vicissitudes of long relationships and the realities of day-to-day life that simply cannot sustain the romantic — and utterly unrealistic — demands we place on it.

One thing seems certain amidst all this uncertainty: now that women have a choice, marriage is going to have start adapting if it is going to survive.

To give you a flavour of Malema’s oratory, consider this official statement made during soon-to-be President Zuma’s rape trial of women who are raped:  “when a woman didn’t enjoy it, she leaves early in the morning. Those who had a nice time will wait until the sun comes out, request breakfast and ask for taxi money.”

The ANC said nothing about this.  Malema has become a divisive figure and represents all that is going bad in South Africa.  However, for the moment, the courts still work and today (miracle of miracles), they found Malema guilty of “hate speech” and instructed that he pay a fine of $5,000 to a women’s shelter for rape victims.

Malema is currently standing trial for a more recent event where he sang the very charged ANC struggle song, “Kill the farmer, they are rapists.”  This song has already been declared as “hate speech” in a previous case and the sentiments behind it, and nominal “encouragement” that the ANC provides in venting these thoughts, has led to South Africa having an astonishing rate of farm murders, where farmers and their families are regularly (i.e. some 65 violent attacks since November 2009) slaughtered by criminals.  Does this matter?  Well, as little as five years ago South Africa was a net agricultural exporter.  No longer.

South Africa’s courts are in a precarious situation but they still appear to have some level of respect for the law.

While it’s comforting to know that I won’t have to move all my stuff 1000 miles, again, I can’t bring myself to tell my parents. They’ve never been anywhere farther north than Kentucky, a weekend that still sends them both into the shivers. I don’t know what happened in Lexington back in 1964, but I think that, just like everything else in the Bluegrass Sate, it involved mint juleps and racing horses. Somewhere between the bar and the track something took place, and it sent them rushing back to Tennessee with a vow never again to venture north of Nashville.

But they’ll find out eventually. I suppose on some deep level, I knew this was going to happen. I found myself defending the north when I stopped by to see cousin Dennis last year.

“You’ll never get me to live up there,” said Dennis. We had gone south for a brief visit last July, in the middle of a hellish drought, when the temperature was over 103 six days on a row. I was melting and couldn‘t breath. The only movement of air was the dry heat rising from the driveway. “I wouldn’t move to Franklin and that’s just 12 miles north of here, but they’re strange up there, too. I hate the thought of moving. You’re gonna stay up there so you won’t have to move again.”

“What are you looking for?” I asked. Dennis was peering over my shoulder down the length of Elm Street.

“Mr. Jackson has three new dogs and they don’t like strangers,” he said. “And you smell funny. No offense, but you smell like one of those people from up there.”

“Clean?” I asked.

“Oh, har, har, har,” he said. “A water restriction ain’t funny.”

“You’re right, and I apologize,” I said. “But I like it up there. It did smell funny at first, but that’s because we were so close to the water. This air smells old and hot.”

“They call this part of Tennessee the Great Basin,” he said. “Summer air gets stuck in here and can’t get out. Don’t know what’s so great about that. Great if you’re afraid of kites, I guess. It is hot, though. I saw a dog chase a cat yesterday and they were both walking. But I’ll take our summers over your winters. I’ve heard that in the winter, they have this kind of snow that’s not like our snow. Their snow falls on the ground and it stays. It stays for months! I’ve also heard that it snows year round.“

“No, it stops snowing by June,” I said. “Usually.”

“They play their high school football games on Saturdays,” continued Dennis. “That ain’t right.”

“Some high schools in Connecticut don’t even have a football team,” I said. “Some high schools play field hockey.”

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” replied Dennis. “No football team? What the hell do they have high schools for?”

“You got me there,” I said.

“They don’t love animals, neither. They don’t let their dogs run around free as God intended. They keep ‘em on leashes all the time. I’ve seen a man on television, a grown man, walk around behind his dog with a plastic bag on his hand to pick up the dog’s… you know, the dog’s business.”

“Some people don’t mind that,” I replied. “For me, I still have bad dreams about the pack of dogs that chased us around the junior high school when I ran track. People in Tennessee just buy dogs and turn them loose.”

“And that’s good for us,” said Dennis. “It keeps us alert. A mind can’t get too lazy when it knows it can be dog food at any moment. Now, I don’t know how long you and Nancy plan to stay up there in, what is that place where you live?”

“We live in Connecticut,” I said.

“I can’t say that. Say it again.“

“Connecticut,” I said slowly.

“That’s just like you,“ he scoffed. “Couldn’t move to New York or Maine or Marsacharsetts. Nope, cousin Terry had to move to the one state that nobody can pronounce. Well, you need to start thinking about moving back home next summer, since we all need to… Run! Run! The Jackson’s dogs are a coming this way!”

We really didn‘t have to hurry. It took the dogs an hour and a half to get across the back yard. It was really hot.

What I couldn’t tell cousin Dennis or any of my other relatives is that we like it here. We like the bookstores and the museums. We like Boston and New York City. We like Vermont and New Hampshire, or at least we will when we get some time to go up there. The people are friendly, the autumns glorious, the springs breathtaking, and the summers have wind, real breezes that are coolest when you most need them. True, the winters do seem to stretch out five months longer than seems normal, but how can I complain when I look out the window of my classroom in January and see bald eagles soaring down the length of the Thames River. We like the churches and the lakes and the history in the Northeast. New England is the birthplace of our country, and in the red granite slabs you can see the faces of our ancestors.

And if we stay, that means I won’t have to move again. I hate moving. The packing and the lifting and renting a new place in a new state and learning new people and getting new tags and new driving licenses. I just might stay here forever because that means I won’t have to move again. Three days in a U-Haul does things to a man.

And the dog thing doesn’t bother me at all. Nope, not me. I’m a cat person. They hate moving as much as I do, and when it’s time to do business, they don’t need me or a plastic bag, if you know what I mean.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First she was one of the 20 worst CEOs of all time. Now she’s angling to be one of the 20 worst film producers of all time, too. Talk about versatility!

Part 2 of 2. (Read part 1…)

It’s Time to Separate Church and State, Once and for All

If you recall, anti-Catholic prejudice was once a problem for Catholic politicians in the US. John F. Kennedy went so far as to address the issue head-on in his 1960 campaign – probably because he didn’t feel he had much choice. Here’s what he told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association on September 12 of that year:

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President who also happens to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my Church on public matters — and the Church does not speak for me.

He went on to assert his respect for the separation of church and state and vowed that Catholic officials would not dictate policy to him. As noted in part 1, the times, they have a-changed.

In 1960 it was “anti-Catholic prejudice.” In 2010 it’s “empirical evidence of improper behavior by the Roman Catholic Church.” And it’s time it stopped. Cold.

If I were a Congressman, I’d introduce a bill yesterday stripping all US operations of the Roman Catholic Church of their tax-exempt status. At the press conference announcing the move I’d also say something along these lines: “I won’t be running for re-election – what could possibly be the point? However, between now and the day I leave office, I’m going to raise hell 24/7/4ever over this issue. I know that I’ll probably never get my bill into a committee hearing, let alone get it out of committee, but if Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens can draw as much attention as they have, I feel certain that I, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, can get booked on every talk show in America. Rest assured, my fellow citizens, this is going to make for some epic television.”

Of course, I’m not Congressional material. If you want to know what Congressional material is, recognize that representatives of a foreign theocracy are inside Congress shaping policy … and not a damned one of the spineless sacred whores on Capitol Hill has uttered a fucking syllable in protest.

Did I miss something?

“America is a Christian nation.” It certainly is. Sort of. It’s a Christian nation in the same way that it’s a white nation, a heterosexual nation, a right-handed nation and a nation with brown hair. That is, “Christian” is the majority position. Boy howdy, is it the majority position, with a majority of the population saying it believes angels and demons are active in the world and 80% saying they believe in miracles. Hell, even our atheists and agnostics sound a little religious. A snapshot of American religious affiliation that I offered up back in 2007 is instructive:

• Polls show the percentage of Americans identifying themselves as Christian ranging as high as 85% or beyond.
• The president is a Christian…
• …as is the VP.
• The Speaker of the House is Catholic…
• …and the Senate Majority Leader is Mormon.
• Well over 90% of our Congressional representatives are Christian, with a majority of the remainder being Jewish.
• The Supreme Court features seven Christians and two Jews.
• All of our major presidential candidates in both major parties.
• Almost all of our past presidents; depending on how you count Unitarians, you have to go all the way back to Lincoln (ironically enough, the founder of the GOP) to even find one to debate over;
• Hell, even sports franchises are starting to build their operations around the evangelical litmus test.
• It seems unlikely that a similar review of the legislatures and courthouses in the 50 states would reveal too much variation from this overpowering Judeo-Christian norm.

There’s no denying that we’re a Christian culture – in many ways, that’s a simple math question and it’s about as controversial as noting that whites of European descent are the racial majority. But Christian culture and Christian government aren’t the same thing, and the United States is most emphatically not a Christian state. Not yet, anyway.

Reflecting back on my “if I were a Congressman” fantasy from above, I suppose I’d spend the remainder of my time in office asking the audiences of those TV shows to think about a proposition: to wit, while most Americans are Christian, “Christian” describes a lot of different things and not one unitary thing. Dr. Sid’s “modest proposal” from a couple of months back was more about provoking than persuading, but at its core there’s an important question. If you’re a Christian, you may want to see a more Christian government. But if you’re a Baptist, do you want to see a more Catholic government? If you’re Catholic, how are you going to react when the Texas School Board is co-opted by Mormons and all of a sudden the nation’s textbooks are filled with lessons that transform the hallucinations visions of The Prophets into stone cold fact? If you’re a member of the Foursquare Bible Congregation in Smallpond, Alabama, you probably agree with the Stupakers on abortion, but how do you feel about the idea that your duly elected representatives are keeping counsel with that German eunuch in the pointy hat?

Think about it, Christian supermajority. Think hard.

Crawling Toward a More Rational Future

Evidence suggests that there may be hope in the long run.

From USA Today:

The percentage of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ ” says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

From FutureMajority:

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) also found that a movement towards claiming no religious affiliation is “a general trend among younger white American.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported “people not affiliated with any particular religion stand out for their relative youth compared with other religious traditions.”
…
The National Journal profiles a growing faction of non-religious youth – the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). Their motto is “Mobilizing Students for a New Enlightenment.” The SSA’s chapters have grown from 42 in 2003 to 129 this year and they currently have a network of over 14,000 students. Their mission is “to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics.”

From AlterNet:

We are on the verge — within 10 years — of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

So perhaps in the 2020s and beyond the Bible-thumping Jesus Jihadi yahoo will be a thing of the past – or at least, his inexplicable influence on the course of government will be. But that’s of little comfort today. Just because the good guys win the war eventually doesn’t mean they don’t lose battles along the way, and lost battles mean casualties, measured in lasting damage to real human lives. Even if it’s just ten years until we’re free of these crusaders, understand that a lot of mischief can be done in a decade. If I might put it in more meaningful terms, remember how long George Bush was in office? Add two years to that.

Not that it will do any good, but your Senators and representatives need to hear from you that it is not acceptable for the Catholic Bishops to be meddling in the people’s business. Separation of church and state. Today.

When Jesus attacks, the proper course of action is to smack him in the nose with a crowbar. It says so, right there in the Constitution.

Part 1 of 2.

I tripped across a provocative headline in the Wall Street Journal the other day: “They Need to be Liberated from Their God.” Turns out the story was about Mosab Hassan Yousef and his spying on Hamas. Which was a little disappointing. There’s no doubt that Palestinian Muslims need to be liberated from their god, but given the recent explosion in documented attacks by US Christians on their fellow Americans (as well as on reason and basic common sense), I thought perhaps the WSJ was going to be the first mainstream “news” outlet to do a story on Jesus Gone Wild!

I keep a running tab of stories that strike my interest. Taken individually, each might suggest a particular narrow social pathology, which is to be expected in a nation of 300 million. But over time they accumulate into a gestalt, with all the small pictures adding up to a disturbing big picture. For instance:

Item: Pope warns against witchcraft in Angola

(AFP) – Mar 21, 2009

LUANDA (AFP) — Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning against witchcraft Saturday during his visit to Angola, after calling on African leaders to battle corruption and drawing a tough line against abortion.

Item: Pope in Africa reaffirms “no condoms” against AIDS

YAOUNDE, March 17 (Reuters) – Pope Benedict on Tuesday reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS as he started a visit to Africa, where more than 25 million people have died from the disease in recent decades.
…
“It (AIDS) cannot be overcome by the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, they increase the problem,” he said in response to a question about the Church’s widely contested position against the use of condoms.

The disease has killed more than 25 million people since the early 1980s, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and some 22.5 million Africans are living with HIV.

Item: Rape row sparks excommunications

By Gary Duffy
BBC News, Sao Paulo

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

The girl, aged nine, who lives in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, became pregnant with twins.

It is alleged that she had been sexually assaulted over a number of years by her stepfather.

The excommunication applies to the child’s mother and the doctors involved in the procedure.

The pregnancy was terminated on Wednesday.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother’s life is at risk and doctors say the girl’s case met both these conditions.

Police believe that the girl at the centre of the case had been sexually abused by her step-father since she was six years old.

Item: Did the Mormons baptize Obama’s mother, after her death, without his knowledge or consent? A: Yes, they did.

A reader contacted me last week, saying that last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, the Mormons had posthumously baptized Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Baptizing the dead of other faiths, secretly and without the consent of their families, is a common Mormon practice. For the past fifteen years the Mormons have caused quite a stir by forcibly baptizing Jewish Holocaust victims – in other words, converting them to Mormonism – despite strong objections from the Jewish community.

Thus, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine the Mormons’ doing this to Obama’s mother. Still, I had no proof. Then yesterday, I received a document. It’s allegedly a screen capture of the registration-only section of the Mormon-run Web site, FamilySearch.org. In that screen capture, excerpted above, is clearly the name and correct date of birth and death of Barack Obama’s mother (Stanley Ann Dunham, born 29 Nov 1942 in Kansas, died 07 Nov 1995) and the date of her alleged post-death baptism by the Mormons.

Item: Catholic schools bans child whose parents are gay

Last week, a standing policy of the Archdiocese of Denver denied a child from enrolling in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic School for kindergarten next year because the student’s parents are lesbians.

Currently the student is in the school’s preschool program and will be allowed to finish the year, according to Jeanette DeMelo, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

“It’s clear if they only accept students with perfect parents, they would have almost nobody,” said Beth Osnes, an organizer for the protest. “I know they have the right to, but why would they want to?”

Inside the church, the Rev. Bill Breslin addressed the issue in his sermon. He also posted his comments on his blog.

“If a child of gay parents comes to our school, and we teach that gay marriage is against the will of God, then the child will think that we are saying their parents are bad,” Breslin said on his blog. “We don’t want to put any child in that tough position.”

Please note: this is happening in the People’s Republic of Freakin’ Boulder!

That’s some big picture, huh? It’s gotten so bad that even former president Jimmy Carter, a man as responsible as any for introducing the poison of evangelical influence into the mainstream of modern politics, has had enough.

Of course, you live here. You read the news. That a lot of Christians are out of control isn’t a real revelation, is it? But lately, the goddamned Catholic Church has been making an unusually immoral and anti-Constitutional nuisance of itself. For instance:

• The Catholic Church is ending its long-standing relationship with St. Charles Medical Center in Bend over a surgical birth-control technique. Note, that’s Saint Charles the place is named after.
• The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a directive for Catholic health care that insists on inflicting artificial “life” sustaining techniques on dying (or functionally dead) patients despite the wishes of the patients or their families.
• And it doesn’t matter whether you’re even Catholic or not – all you have to do is be in the building.
• 300,000 Terri Schiavos, anyone? Let’s face it, the opinion of one reactionary geezer in Rome has now trumped centuries of ethical progress.

Still, we’re talking about their facilities and they’re paying the bills, and they have the right to control their operations the way they see fit, no? Well, maybe, maybe not. Ignoring the wishes of the patient, especially when those wishes are legally expressed in something like a living will, that’s pretty appalling, but I guess you could make the argument.

Even if you won that argument, though, get a load of the latest shenanigans from our friendly Catholic Bishops, who have now offered their “help” in wrangling an outcome in the Senate. You know, because that would make democracy better and stuff.

The Roman Catholic bishops signaled Thursday that if agreement is reached with House leaders on anti-abortion language, the church would work to get the votes needed to protect the provisions in the Senate — and thereby advance the shared goal with Democrats of health care reform.

“We would strongly urge everyone, Democratic and Republican, to vote to waive the point of order,” Richard Doerflinger, an associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told POLITICO. “Whether it would be enough to get to 60 votes, I can’t predict. We would certainly try.”

“I think it’s something we should explore,” said Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.), a longtime opponent of abortion. “It could be something that could carry out the bishops’ objective.”

And why not? The Bishops have “helped” before, after all.

In November, the bishops drove a tough bargain, winning an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) that would severely restrict the ability of even private companies to provide abortion coverage under new state insurance exchanges. That House deal — since weakened by the Senate — is what the bishops want to revive now as part of Obama’s final push on health care. But to survive the Senate, any revisions would need 60 votes to overcome points of order under the expedited reconciliation procedures being contemplated.

David Dayen observes, astutely enough, that “the Catholic bishops want to show a measure of dominance over the US government.” His nuanced look at the tactical knife fight of this particular backroom liturgical drama is helpful to those trying to understand how sausage law gets made.

Meanwhile, those of us out here beyond the Beltway can perhaps be forgiven for saying “wait a sec – back the truck up.” An organized cabal of Roman Catholic aparatchiks are so far up Congress’s ass that they’re openly discussing how they’re going to inject Vatican dogma into a US health care bill?

Excuse me?

The Constitution is clear that what you believe is your business, and I have no problem with that. But when your beliefs inspire actions that hurt the innocent, that systematically victimize those who believe other things, then I start to care. When those beliefs fuel actions that harm me and impinge on my freedoms, well, that’s the point where it becomes self-defense, isn’t it?

Tomorrow: Divide & Conquer

Oh, and now there’s a Scholars & Rogues persona. Because you just can’t be one of the hip kids without it, I suppose. Here’s the how-to:

• Get Firefox 3.6
• Add Personas
• Get your scrogue on with the S&R persona

Y’all have a nice day.