Adults and kiddies

Despite serious shortcomings in the domestic department, Obama’s handling of the country’s affairs on the road has been masterful. Diplomacy obviously taps his major strengths like calm reasonableness, empathy and charm and exploits his celebrity status. W gave him a terrific honeymoon set-up, too, by being such an asshole. All he needs to do is show up and ask an informed question, and he looks great.

We don’t know how he’ll respond to the inevitable conflicts, but the Somali pirate episode suggests a low-key public stance and competent management. The Fox News wacko brigade plays right into his style by responding with instant hysteria to everything and looking like schoolchildren. They score points with their base, but those of us who don’t put on tinfoil hats each morning can feel that our affairs are being handled by an adult.


Speaking of wackos, I’m not sure what to make of the secession talk from Texas and elsewhere especially since I spend a lot of time in the South where that kind of talk led to civil war and half a million deaths a while back. It’s rather amazing that defending our civil liberties post-9/11 was considered treasonous, but open sedition by the losing side in an election is taken to be amusingly folkloric.

Reports of the resuscitation of ultra-conservative and neofascist groups is always disturbing, too, but that and the secession fantasy all suggest the dying yelps of the beaten who know they can’t get back on top through argument or the electoral process and can only dream of coups or Alamo-style self-immolations. The Republican Party’s kneejerk obstructionism fits this mindset, and while they undoubtedly can run substantial interference, they look petulant and nasty and clueless about why people turned against them.

Obama won’t prosecute CIA torturers, but he doesn’t have to

‘One tortured, always tortured’, said a French resistance figure who survived capture by the Nazi occupiers and knew what he was talking about. He meant that the experience left him irrevocably changed in ways no therapy, no rest, no return to normal life could ever repair.

I think the principle works in reverse, too, that once having tortured, one cannot return to the pre-torture state of grace. That goes for nations too, so we should now prepare for the long, troubling, discomfiting descent into the realization that as a society, we wasted no time in trading in our moral compass for the promise of safety and authorized, passively for the most part but no less definitively, Bush’s goons to torture their way through Bagram and Guantánamo in search of the mythical ticking bombs.


The release today of most of the hidden, but hardly ‘secret’, memos prepared by Bush’s thug lawyers to authorize torture gives us another piece of the puzzle, and the announcement that the Obama Administration will not pursue the criminal acts contemplated therein for prosecution will disappoint many.

I am among them, but having been through all this before, I know it’s far from the end of the story. The Chilean state had much more power to immunize its gorilla squads and cover up their sadistic work. But there’s just something about torture—it doesn’t go away even when the victims’ bodies have been dropped into oblivion at sea.

I have no idea exactly how the symbolic corpse of the tortured will bob all bloated and mutilated back into the national consciousness. But I haven’t the slightest doubt that it will.

Maybe there will be criminal prosecutions in foreign lands, a grand opportunity for Limbaugh to denounce dastardly Europeans. Perhaps Congress will dare to investigate. Perhaps repentant underlings will publish their memoirs. Or as occurs to this day in Chile, maybe the victims will post flyers on telephone poles pointing out that a former torturer lives at such-and-such an address and that his wife is president of the PTA. Maybe it will all come out on Facebook.

But it will occur in due course. I am young enough that I will gleefully trumpet my I-Told-You-So’s from the rooftops when it does.

Tancredo Tanks

The disruption of racist idiot Tom Tancredo’s speech at the University of North Carolina last night strikes me as a significant new development.

Yeah, yeah, free speech, the right of assholes to makes their views known, etc., etc. Don’t bore me. I’m as close to a free-speech absolutist as you can get, but I’ve been around political battles long enough to know that’s not really the point in this case. The Ku Klux Klan has the right to march through Harlem, but it wouldn’t be too smart for them to try to exercise it.

When the heat rises, people’s emotions take over, and shit happens, sometimes including flying mojones (or broken windows, like the one Tancredo’s appearance engendered). Enough people’s lives have been destroyed by the wave of xenophobic hatred unleashed by Tancredo and his nativist followers that the Colorado congressman should be grateful he escaped with his nalgas still attached to his lower back.

Youth for Western Civilization [sic], the UNC student group that invited Tancredo, is busily lamenting the takeover of their meeting hall by barbarian hordes. But the fact is that Tancredo was chased out of town by 200 students and no doubt some ‘outside agitators’ too. I think that means the fury isn’t just on one side of this debate any more—‘bout time.

Fags Forever

Last week’s House passage of a bill to place tobacco products under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration looks at first glance like a no-brainer, especially given its hefty list of backers, which includes everyone from the American Cancer/Heart/Lung etc. societies to the anti-smoking group Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Society of Chest Surgeons and the ‘Justice and Witness Ministry’ of the United Church of Christ. All the iconic liberals are on board, too, from Ted Kennedy to Henry Waxman, along with some retired cabinet secretaries, a former CDC director, a surgeon-general, three French hens and a partridge in a pear tree. And the tobacco-state pols are predictably hostile to it.

So why are so many people in the tobacco-control community deeply worried? The lusciously titled ‘Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act’ would empower the agency to regulate the contents of tobacco products, publicize their ingredients at long last, prohibit flavored cigarettes, require much larger warning labels and restrict marketing campaigns, especially those geared toward children. Isn’t this good?

For a hint about why it might not be, consider why the Philip Morris parent company, Altria, is a firm backer of the bill. A top Philip Morris priority, according to an internal document, is to ‘stop the decline in, and start re-building, the social acceptability of smokers and smoking in society’. The bill is a step in that direction.

The worldwide tobacco industry has invested considerable energy and funds in something called ‘corporate social responsibility’ to try to show themselves in some kind of positive light while steadily donating millions to charity and the arts. The idea is to admit that while a given company may market a controversial ‘product’, it itself somehow is not.

Tobacco Free Kids has been a big proponent of the bill from its inception, and although the tobacco-control community is careful to keep its internal disagreements as quiet as possible, it’s not hard to find some rather pointed comments about the origins of this bill to put tobacco under the FDA in TFK’s secret negotiations with PM dating back to 2001.

The arguments against the bill are several: Jeffrey Wigand, the real-life figure played by Russell Crowe in The Insider, says the FDA is totally inadquate to regulate what is on its plate now, much less add tobacco products. ‘One only needs to read the recent history of their regulatory competency’, he wrote acidly.

Another fear is that FDA oversight of tobacco will translate in the popular mind—no doubt subtly helped along by the tobacco companies—into FDA approval of same. After all, that’s what the FDA does: it reviews substances used for human consumption and either approves or prohibits them. Other commentators say that at the very least the measure ‘perverts the mission’ of the FDA by giving it supervisory responsibilities without—for the first time ever—empowering it to ban the poisonous substance involved: nicotine.

Given the industry’s expensive and ongoing legal problems, critics also warn that FDA supervision/regulation of tobacco products may be used in court by the companies as a shield against lawsuits. We are just doing what the government says we can do, might go the argument, certainly a plausible, if devious, one.

Given all the distractions we’re facing these days, it’s no wonder this dubious and strangely uncontroversial measure is flying toward passage. It would be a shame to find that the tobacco industry plying its deadly trade with greater impunity as a result of a laxly-designed ‘anti-tobacco’ measure.

[Curious parties can read more at Anne Landman’s hair-raising account, ‘The Untold Story of How & Why Philip Morris is Pushing for FDA Regulation’ at the Center for Media and Democracy website www.prwatch.org]

How soon they forget

April 9 was the anniversary of the triumphant 2003 American conquest of Iraq, a day filled with stirring, martial imagery of American flags flying in the desert winds and the toppling of Saddam’s Stalinesque statuary.

Curious that hardly anyone took note of that fact in the United States. I guess we’re not feeling all that triumphant any more given the utter failure of the U.S. armed forces to achieve their long-term war aims. Let’s review: these included introducing a new ‘democratic’ era throughout the Middle East, intimidating Iran and eventually overthrowing the mullahs, and advancing a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian mess. Hmm, that would be a batting average of roughly .000.

It’s one thing to blast your way into a country and kill the enemy. It’s quite another to create something viable out of the rubble.

But instead of taking a moment to meditate on this discomfiting truth, we are off to the next showdown with the latest enemy du jour—is it North Korea or Iran? I can’t remember.

Israeli P.M. Netanyahu is doing his part to shift our attention by thumping the drums about Iran’s nuclear weapons, which do not exist, while remaining silent about his own, which do. The U.S. political class, including President Obama, dutifully echoes this surreal refrain although Obama, to his credit, raised the principle of nuclear weapons possession in his Prague address. As long as they are ‘used’ as a means of intimidating the enemy (as Bush and Cheney did regularly with their threats to nuke the Iranians), every country on earth will be tempted to obtain them.

Simultaneously, the predictable debate is now taking place about whether to ‘dig up the past’ and hold to account those responsible for institutionalizing torture as state policy. The establishment and its media, as Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com and others note, are eager to push all that under the rug, which they will fail to do because torture doesn’t go away.

But the real point, to my mind, is the desire to forget about our military failures as quickly as possible, just as occurred in the post-Vietnam epoch. Less than a decade after the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime there, we had forgotten that the Vietnam war had produced over 50,000 American deaths and countless physical and psychological injuries, and all for nothing. (And who even remembers the Vietnamese casualties?)

Soon, Reagan was president, and it was time to rearm, face down the Russians and invade Caribbean islands. The smell of napalm in the morning!

I wonder how long it will take to get over the Iraq and Afghanistan hangovers, and what new narratives will emerge from the militarists as Obama tries to salvage something from the debacle they created. The fight over understanding what happened, just like the culture wars over the meaning of Vietnam, is crucial to determining what we will do with our warmaking capacity in the future.

Laborers

Charleston, South Carolina, where I just spent three days was the site of the opening salvo of the Civil War. It preserves parts of its planter architecture and has a curiously ambiguous relationship with the plantation culture that brought it about.

It’s striking to an outsider how fascinated South Carolina remains with Confederate wartime heroics. The seafront peninsula is dotted with statuary lauding their exploits as is the Fort Sumter monument in Charleston harbor where the secessionist forces shelled the federal garrison in April of 1861.

No one doubts that slave labor built the city’s marvels, and the tour materials are pretty explicit on that topic. At the same time, the museum curators can’t resist including a long quote from a defender of slavery telling off that Harriet Beecher Stowe as a cheap librettist. Our tour guide explicitly promised not to tilt towards one side or the other as he related the facts for fear of ruffling sensibilities of anyone in the tourist crowd.

The same defensiveness filters into individual conversations too. Questions about Obama drop into uneasy silence or quick clarifications that the state is just like anywhere else: ‘Some people like him, and some people don’t.’ But South Carolina doesn’t feel like just another of the 50 states.

Governor Mark Sanford was making national headlines during my visit by trying to turn down federal stimulus money, arguing that the state needed first to reduce its debt burden. He even has the state Republican Party riled up as ideology doesn’t usually interfere with the prospect of getting federal dollars to flow into the home districts.

Sanford argued that South Carolina was heavily indebted and that he couldn’t control what happened to most of the federal largesse because the state constitution provides for a weak executive and a powerful legislature. But he could dictate the terms of one portion and had determined not to spend it. That was the money for public schools, which—by mere coincidence—would benefit the state’s large black population.

My work involves the burgeoning numbers of Latino immigrants throughout the South, and we had the opportunity to attend a bilingual public meeting on the state’s new immigration law, which severely penalizes employer and employee alike for the use of undocumented labor. The hall was jammed with over 200 Mexican and Central American laborers who sat transfixed trying to quiet their squirming children while lawyers explained the many ways South Carolina had devised to stack the system against them.

Tomato farmers out on the sea islands haven’t planted this year because the new fines for hiring illegals are too stiff to risk, and vigilantes are eager to phone up the police to denounce the crime. Locals repeatedly assured me that no white or black citizens would spend any part of the blistering summer picking tomatoes for $2.50 a bucket either, so the crop simply won’t be grown this year.

I suspect the local Lou Dobbses will be indignant if tomatoes go to $5.00 a pound and will find a way to blame someone else, like maybe the meddling government in Washington, for it. A place that glorifies its secessionist past and continues to call the practice of chattel slavery a ‘peckuliar institution’ from yesteryear probably will be slow to appreciate the irony.

Needed: one new Montesquieu, a Keynes and a James Madison

Hearing the day-to-day updates on our economic travails, it’s easy and probably psychologically necessary to forget that we managed to create vast wealth and then squander it. In addition to the immediate drama of unemployment and debt-induced penury, it’s tragic to observe what a range of socially worthwhile activities were ignored while we had the money to perform them in the rush to build more exurban tract McMansions and to peddle ever-greater piles of consumer goods produced by Chinese industrial slaves.

Here in New York we are facing cutbacks on all fronts, new taxes chipping away at our earnings and a devastating crisis in public transport funding, one of the greenest and most efficient aspects of life for the 14 million people who live here and a huge contributor to the cultural and intellectual life of the city. But instead of devoting some of our enormous accumulated capital to improving it, we saw our trillions disappear into hedge fund salaries and war profiteering while half the country applauded.

We need politico-economic thinkers on the historical scale of a Smith, a Hamilton, a Veblein and a Karl Marx to unspool the complexities of biped foolishness and pack mentality and from there construct new ways to protect us from ourselves. Just as the overthrow of Roman republicanism and French monarchy and the ensuing catastrophes led historians and philosphers to look for better ways to organize the state, the break-down of the capitalist engine ought to stimulate real innovation of thought and deed.

So far, however, the disaster, big as it is, remains too small to engender that kind of radical review and revision. Geithnerite gradualism prevails, and the system is subjected to the kinds of superficial tinkering that will leave most of its dangerous tendencies largely intact, especially if the threatened cataclysm is averted.

Simultaneously, the rhetoric of everyday economic life is only slightly dislodged from the Reaganite ideological straitjacket. Our on-air commentators nod to the extraordinary times but quickly return to the comfort zone of objections to increased taxes and doubts about the role of ‘gummint’, a tendency fed by populist revolt against the bankers’ sneaky opportunism.

But the bankers are only doing what the logic of their tiny world demands, and if those objecting to their sleazy ways were part of it, few would resist similar blandishments. The rules of our game, freely agreed to for the most part, permitted quick riches, ostentation and blithe unconcern, tempered by a dash of pity and a check to the United Way. No asset relief management scheme will overturn that Weltaunschaaung, and a two-year recession, rough as it promises to be, won’t either.