Offbeat Moments with the Republican B Team

Tempted by the Huffington platform, I sat through the televised debate at Morgan State University, which was to address issues of concern to black and brown Americans and promptly was dissed by all four top Republican contenders who said they were busy. It was less painful than I expected although there were molar-grinding moments and plenty of unintended hilarity. I got to compose a snide round-up afterward, including this:

"Ron Paul, speaking for the many libertarian anarchists in black Republican ranks, plumped for eliminating government and giving the state of nature another try. Tancredo caromed issue after issue off the Mexican border wall, and Hunter repeatedly intoned his former life in the ‘barrio’ although he stopped short of trilling his double-Rs. "

But the most striking aspect of the debate, for me, was the nature of the questions posed by a panel of one Hispanic and two black journalists. The issues raised and the assumptions behind them were entirely different from what we've come to expect, illustrating what I'll call a 'white slant' that filters into our everyday discourse. So it was no great loss that the Giulianis and the Romneys and the McCains didn't come to speak, but it's too bad they didn't come to listen.

Read the whole piece here.

Onto 'Off the Bus'

My, my, this brave and narcissistic new blogger world is full of surprises. I have been recruited to expand my musings from this comfy, half-lit and paradoxically private little niche to the glaring headlights of the Huffington Post. A new feature on that site, named Off the Bus, is pulling in pieces on the presidential campaign from people like me who think they can document their opinions or at least back up their wisecracks. In my condition as a recovering journalist, I have been solicited to submit contributions on an array of topics, from issues that I may even know something about to more general concerns relevant to the gathering Twilight of the Bipeds.

The invitation is irresistible, despite the threat of being drawn into polemics, which was not the point of inventing BT at all. Verbal fisticuffs of the sort clogging the Internet’s arteries do not interest me in the slightest, and I hereby swear not to answer the typing bipeds who will undoubtedly try to assault my sanctuary. I express my observations and reflections in a spirit of self-indulgent glee, much as someone who talks incessantly to himself simply because he likes hearing his ideas expressed aloud.

Of course, rules are made to be broken, and many thoughtful people, including you, dear Reader, do manage to provide well-pondered feedback. I wish there were some way to install a internet filter for distinguishing between ideas and thought-spam, but alas, this technology awaits future generations. As if a dozen penis-enhancement offers weren’t enough, one has to scroll past obsessive opinion-monitors determined to increase the importance of their intellectual genitalia as well.

But I digress. My first contribution to the Off the Bus addresses the debate on healthcare reform based on a Kaiser-sponsored interview this week with John Edwards. I found that although the candidates rush to agree that our healthcare system is a sick duckie,

". . . from the tone of the discussion so far, they must think that to perform major surgery on this moribund patient, first we have to anaesthetize the voters."

Read the whole piece here, but please, esteemed Visitor, when you’re done, hurry back over to my sitting room. We’ll have tea and chat.

Twilight Highlights: What better illustration could we ask for of our complete moral bankrupcy as a nation than the current constellation of simultaneous events: Bush asks for another 50 billion dollars to throw down the Iraq sinkhole the same day he announces a veto of healthcare for children from low-income families as ‘too expensive’, then utilizes African-American children as props in his No Child Left Behind renewal announcement. We should be ashamed that he could even dare to show his face in public.

No End in Sight

Now here’s a term that should make any adult instinctively reach down and cover his billfold: ‘moderate’. You see that label taped onto guys like senators Lugar and Warner because they are beginning to conclude that the earth might be round.

Real moderation, decency and good sense don’t normally win that ‘moderate’ moniker. Look at Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel author: he acknowledges the genocide against Armenians and immediately becomes a ‘controversial’ figure. ‘Moderation’ in this case would be keeping quiet and pretending nothing had happened. Of course, that wouldn’t work in Germany, but then moderate is as moderate does. Being in the middle of the road doesn’t say nearly as much about an individual as about the highway they happen to be on.

Speaking of taking the ‘moderate’ position, it’s easy to see why the latest film on Iraq, No End in Sight, is having such a vigorous run here. It shows in crushing detail the arrogance and stupidity that have characterized that criminal conspiracy from the beginning. Its targets are venal Republican operatives, and it’s popular in this Democratic town. The reviews laud it as even-handed, ‘no left-wing screed’, as one put it, and it builds a convincing case.

However, walking out one is left with the impression that if the war had just been done right, things would be kind of okay, if not downright hunky-dory. Filmmaker Charles Ferguson explicitly endorses that reaction and agrees that he set aside any questioning of the moral and policy implications of staging an unprovoked attack on false premises. This is not a Michael Moore film, he said in an interview, reminding the reporter that he has a Ph.D. in political science.

Instead, we get a run-down of the operational disasters, by now somewhat familiar although the combined effect is devastating. The wise men in the picture are establishment figures like Richard Armitrage, the guy who outed Valerie Plame and threatened to bomb Pakistan ‘back to the Stone Age’ if they didn’t cooperate with the war on Bin Laden. Now there’s a moderate guy.

It’s conceivable although perhaps optimistic to suppose that the Iraq disaster will get wound down somehow in the next administration. But to the underlying principles of unprovoked invasion and territorial conquest in the pursuit of oil there is truly no end in sight. Such a suggestion in the rarefied circles this film inhabits would be highly immoderate.

MSMs (reprise)

It’s double standard time again and a great opportunity to witness how the pack mentality leads to suspension of all the supposedly sacrosanct rules. How many sordid autocrats and sleazebags of one sort or another parade through Columbia University’s overrated international affairs school every September during UN week without stirring much of a ripple? Can we imagine anyone being rude to, say, an important Saudi prince for his country’s harboring the appalling Idi Amin for two decades?

Pretty much anyone holding down the presidential sash can and does get a hearing up there, with nothing more than an occasional heckler slipping through to be immediately shushed by the august dons. You’d need something like the entire Burmese junta in full-dress uniform wearing shades and human ears as necklaces to interrupt the devotion to polite power-worship and realpolitik.

But all that goes out the window when the country and our tabloid MSM have decided on an enemy’s list as occurred when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got a platform to speak at Columbia. The big guns were out and threatening retaliation against the school, and voila the university’s president himself was there to insult him personally beforehand.

Ahmadinejad is a major creep and deserves what he gets, but officially introducing him as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘ignorant’ is just grandstanding. The fact that Ahmadinejad subjected himself to such treatment suggests to me that the mullahs he fronts for are seriously cut off from reality and have had retainers fawning on them for far too long.

The whole scene took me back to a speech I heard at the National Press Club in Washington years ago when a certain Ariel Sharon came to town after the most recent conquest of Lebanon. Sharon hadn’t yet been found complicit in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacres—that would come later—but they had just occurred and were certainly fair grist for some journalistic queries.

But the crowd was so enchanted with the wisecracking Israeli general that the 100-strong audience merely chuckled at his jokes and enjoyed a bountiful lunch. His dubious war record didn’t even come up. No official censorship or boardroom conspiracies were necessary to keep Washington's entire MainStream Media quiet. Somehow, they just knew.

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Twilight Highlights: Speaking of MSM, Mahmoud should look up Larry (‘I’m not gay’) Craig while he’s here. Ahmadinejad replied to the question about executions of teenaged boys for homosexual acts by saying ‘gays’ didn’t exist in Iran. I suspect he’s right as far as that goes—public hanging would put a damper on the coming-out process. Craig did his best to suppress the public expression of homosexuality too even while allegedly making whoopy in toilets. They both have too much faith in appearances, including their own. I’d bet money that the underground gay scene in Teheran is torrid, despite or because of the dangers. And if experience is any guide, Ahmadinejad will have a couple of closet-case homophobes among his own enforcers. Like the old saw about left and right bending backwards and touching each other, these twisted theocrats don’t realize how much they have in common. God help us if they ever become allies.

Greed Is. . . Oops!

So Wall Street is back on a roll after the Fed gave up the half-point interest rate cut it was angling for last week. How nice for all the gang who work downtown—we read last December that the average salary in one of the big investment banks was 600 thousand a year, and that’s including the receptionists.

Meanwhile, the people who got bamboozled into taking the scam mortgages will continue to lose everything. Let’s see if our Democratic party guys, eyes lifted toward Hyde Park and the grave of FDR, will step up and find a way to give them a similar break.

I have to admit to mixed feelings about the whole thing for selfish reasons: my retirement accounts run by these geniuses both announced to me in their monthly statements that they managed to lose 11% of my total assets in the month of August. Good going, guys. The blurbs in these depressing statements I’m getting in the mail are quite similar: it was a ‘perfect storm,’ they insist, entirely unprecedented, a freak combination of events no one could have predicted.

Yeah, right. They say they’ll make it back, and no doubt they will. But even I, a mere curious lay mortal, noticed signs of trouble in the financial pages for months, not to mention the anecdotal evidence: a friend of mine told me her roommate, who works for minimum wage in a fast-food shop, got a mortgage for a condo in June with no down payment required. You didn’t need an MBA to know that something was screwy and couldn’t last, but none of the financial sharpies in charge of my old age thought to take a more conservative approach and scramble for the exits.

The Market, praised be its name, has its own logic and order, to which its high priests bow down with predictable slavish awe. Many commentators have remarked on the inexorable force of any bubble and how smart speculators will and in fact should pile on even while knowing that it will burst as long as they can bail out in time.

That suggests that our Goddess of the Invisible Hand is just as temperamental and dangerous as Hera and Athena and requires the balancing intervention of other deities. Greenspan, despite his long-standing godlike status, never bothered using the Fed’s regulatory faculties to protect us. (Perhaps he feared getting nailed to a rock and having his liver eaten by an eagle.) Let’s see if the new crop of anointed fiscal emperors can use this gigantic opening to do better.

The Jena Principle

It’s great to see thousands of people marching against the racist railroading of teenagers in the Jena 6 case. Let’s hope the grotesque injustices taking place there and no doubt in a dozen other places that aren’t as notorious as the Louisiana town are overturned. Too bad it takes a resuscitated civil rights movement to restore basic equality before the law.

But I have another question since my job takes me to Louisiana and other southern states all the time: why weren’t the national Latino leadership all over this issue, lending support to the marches and calls for racial justice? Here was a golden opportunity to defend a principle and forge a link with Latinos’ natural allies for when the time comes to debate repressive immigration laws and racial violence directed against Mexicans and Guatemalans. Why don’t La Raza and LULAC and all the rest of the official Hispanics have any strategic sense?

It’s depressingly consistent among our biped brethren that we are stirred to outrage only when bad things happen to us, our relatives or the people we identify as our peers. When it’s the next guy, we don’t exactly ignore injustice—it simply doesn’t register on our mental radar.

I saw it in stark relief when living in South America and hearing people say how glad they were that the military regime had ‘restored order’ or ‘reduced crime’, then witnessing the same individual switch gears and squawk about an abuse committed against their Uncle Pedro.

In Jena you heard it in the comments of the white townspeople: the incidents were ‘blown out of proportion,’ they said consistently, meaning the case didn’t bother them since it was just the kids from across town whose lives were being wrecked. For the 16-year-old facing a murder charge for a schoolyard fight, the proportions were already pretty substantial.

If these inconsistencies are part of biped make-up, it’s up to our cultural and political traditions to combat them actively and explicitly. We need to teach children and adolescents that human selfishness is our default reaction and that to maintain a decent, safe polity we need to swim against that current through an act of will. What a contrast to the messages we’re getting from the repugnant Bush crowd that nothing matters except our safety and that a thousand innocent people tortured matters not at all if a single terrorist act against ME is prevented. To which the great majority will readily, if silently, agree.

Our Loss

I accidentally caught a few minutes of a great guy on C-SPAN this morning, someone people under 30 may never have heard of: George McGovern.

It’s remarkable that someone so unfairly hammered by the political mafias could retain such a kindly, bemused air. He was talking about the 30th anniversary of the Food Stamp Act, which he co-authored and promoted tirelessly, demonstrating more basic human decency than you could squeeze out of the entire crop of today’s presidential candidates if they were bound and griddled with prairie butter.

McGovern, for whom I worked as a freshman college student in Washington (there was no payment, but I did get to meet film star Veronica Lake one day at his office), was always too focused on people’s well-being to be very effective as a slash-and-burn pol, which is why he’s remembered the way Nixon’s goons painted him, as a wild-man left-winger. In fact, he was always a solid social democrat in the European mold and only looked radical because the political center here is so skewered.

But George also had something few of these bobbleheads can lay claim to today: he believed in things. He said the Vietnam war was an immoral waste, and he was proven right. Nixon slaughtered him at the polls in 1972 but two years later was himself bounced ignominiously out of the White House. I never forgot that. Sometimes it makes more political and practical sense to take a principled stand and not budge from it than to focus-group and sound-bite your party into purveyors of meaningless pap.

After he lost his Senate seat, McGovern faced personal tragedy. One of his daughters struggled with alcoholism her entire adult life before finally dying of exposure in a Minnesota snowstorm. He wrote a book about it and encouraged people to learn about the disease and treat their alcoholic family members compassionately.

George is 85 and was looking a little feeble at the podium. He’s still capable of sharp polemics, but his instinct is all uncle, all the time. He ended his remarks with an offhand suggestion to Republicans and Democrats to get working on ‘these important issues’ for our country. You don’t see much of that quiet, statemanslike spirit emerging from Washington these days.