Just Jake

Declaration of media independence

2009-11-08T12:41:00.000-08:00

A journalism professor has issued a manifesto to turn the media upside down.
He declares that the media and journalism schools must “jettison the illusions of neutrality that have hampered their ability to monitor the centers of power” and develop “real critical thinking for students.”
The professor is Bob Jensen of the University of Texas, Austin. He comes from a profession not known for radicalism. Yet Jensen has written what may be the most radical statement ever made by a journalism professor.
His manifesto continues: “Journalism’s business problems provide an opportunity for journalism education to remake itself. It should start with a declaration of independence from the mainstream media and a renunciation of the corporate media’s allegiances to the existing power structure.”
Jensen, writing recently for the online CommonDreams, said “if journalism education is to be relevant in the coming decades, we must change course dramatically.”
Jensen sees the world on the brink of disaster: political, cultural, economic and ecological. He particularly frets about the tremendous gap between the rich and the poor.
Then, like a latter-day Marxist prophet, he argues truly: “We face a world that is profoundly unjust in the distribution of wealth and power and fundamentally unsustainable in our use of ecological resources.”
The traditional way of the media and journalism schools is woefully inadequate for a world with multiplying crises.
Jensen: “The task of journalism is to deepen our understanding of these challenges and communicate that understanding to the public” while fostering “meaningful dialogue necessary for a real democracy.”
Journalists, he rightly argues, are “trapped in corporate-directed subservience to the status quo. What is needed is a journalism that ”speaks truth to power” instead of echoing “the platitudes of the powerful.”
“In a world in which an increased predatory global capitalist economy leaves half the population living on less than $2.50 a day, can we ignore the cry for justice?”
No, we can’t.
Jensen ends with a ringing call: “Mass media have a moral responsibility to produce journalism for justice.”
Yet few journalism faculties will even discuss Jensen’s argument. They prefer what they always have done.
As Jack Newfield of the Village Voice wrote decades ago: “The men and women who control the media are not neutral, unbiased computers. They believe in capitalism, God, the West, the family, property and the two-party system. These are the values in society in which publishers, editors and reporters operate.”
While some newspaper staffers agree with Jensen, they will not speak out for fear of losing their jobs.
Certainly journalism schools should train students for media jobs. But they must “search for the values and ideas that can animate a just society.”
The sacred canon of objectivity is the overwhelming problem of the media.
Journalists report the he said-she said but leave the truth dangling. Journalists too often rely on official sources, leaving out essential truths.
The late Molly Ivins put it well: “The press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie halfway between any two opposing viewpoints. Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done its journalistic duty.”
The media value impartiality more than validity.
Jensen writes in his book “Citizens of the Empire”: “I want to examine the intellectual and political collapse of the United States and confront the sense of alienation and isolation that so many feel in the face of the triumphalism common in the country.”
He wants Americans--and hence the media--to confront the “illegal and immoral war on Afghanistan.” He wants them to confront the fact that America has no business being in Iraq. He wants them to summon up “the courage to stop being Americans and become human beings.”
In another online essay, Jensen urges Americans to face their terrible war culture, face their everlasting wars, face their grotesque interventions in the affairs of other nations and their desire for world dominance.
As Henry Giroux has written in the online Truthout: “War is so anesthetized by the dominant media that it resembles an ad for a tourist industry.”
Jensen wants to change this. Perhaps he is hopelessly optimistic. But if the media abandon their bogus neutrality they have the power to make this a more civilized and humane nation.
A media drumfire against the injustices of wars and wrong-headed policies could put this country on the path of righteousness.
Even a CEO of Coca-Cola once admitted that the worst media trait is “preoccupation with objectivity and balance at the expense of context, perspective and judgment.”

Danish cartoons spawn gutlessness

2009-10-30T15:00:00.000-07:00

The Yale University Press has carried political correctness to amazing depths: it has published a book about the 12 controversial Danish cartoons without printing a single one of them!
It is as if an author wrote a life of Christ without mentioning the Sermon on the Mount, omitting the Good Samaritan parable or failing to cite the passage from John about the woman “taken in adultery.”
Muslims worldwide were incensed by the cartoons, particularly one showing the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.
Rioting, burning and vandalizing ensued. About 200 people were killed. Ambassadors were withdrawn. A boycott of Danish goods was demanded.
But what provoked such outrage was difficult for Americans to assess. Almost no U.S. newspaper printed the cartoons. This censorship is understandable. Newspapers are short on courage.
Even the journalism school at the University of Nevada, Reno, supposedly devoted to truth and learning, did not show one cartoon at a seminar supposedly about the Danish cartoons. What a wonderful lesson for journalism students: it’s OK to censor some things.
Irony aside, censorship is inexcusable in the Academy. And it is inexcusable for a university press.
The Yale book is called “The Cartoons That Shook the World” yet readers are unable to see what is so world-shaking.
The press also refused to publish such an innocuous illustration of Muhammad as a drawing for a children’s book. It refused to publish a sketch by French artist Gustave Doré showing the prophet being tormented, a scene from Dante’s “The Inferno.” Never mind that the scene has been depicted by famed artists like Blake, Botticelli, Dali and Rodin.
Reza Aslan, author and religious scholar, rightly deplored publishing the book without illustrations.
“What kind of a publishing house doesn’t publish something that annoys some people?” he asked. “This is an academic book for an academic audience by an academic press. It’s not just academic cowardice. It is just silly.”
So let’s give an award to the Yale University Press: the Most Gutless Publisher in History.

Only in America
Sarah Palin, the erstwhile governor of Alaska and whilom pretender to the vice presidency, is a dimwit with nothing important to say. Yet the publisher of her 400-page memoir has already printed 1.5 million copies.
As the great H.L. Mencken wrote: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Ad link curse
The newspaper business has always been plagued by its reliance on advertisers.
The latest baneful example comes from Hartford, Conn. The consumer affairs columnist for the Hartford Courant was fired for the “crime” of offending advertisers.
The columnist, George Gombossy, had been with the Courant for 40 years. He started the consumer watchdog column three years ago after getting excellent performance reviews as business editor for 12 years. His popular column was heavily promoted by the paper.
But things changed in March. The Chicago-based Tribune Company took over the Courant and installed a business manager as publisher.
Gombossy was pressured by the new management to “be nice” to the angry advertisers. But he rightly insisted that “being nice” was a gross violation of newspaper ethics.
The last straw for management was his column about a state investigation of Sleepy’s, a mattress maker and a major advertiser. Sleepy’s was accused of selling used mattresses as new.
Gombossy was fired in August. “Crime” does not pay.

Chronicle deserves to die
I wrote this letter to the San Francisco Chronicle:
“I sympathize with the terrible plight of the newspaper business in this Digital Age, circulation declining and advertising plummeting. But severe dilution of the quality of your paper will hardly reverse the trend.
“You no longer publish Mark Morford, acerbic and excellent essayist. You no longer publish liberal columnist Robert Scheer,. You no longer publish liberal columnist E.J. Dionne. But you do publish many rabid conservatives.
“When you tear the guts out of your newspaper you deserve the death that many industry watchers forecast for newspapers.”
The letter was not printed.
You would think Scheer and Dionne perfectly suited for the liberal Bay Area. But Scheer made one intolerable “mistake”: castigating Israeli policies.
The truth is that the Chron is not really a liberal newspaper. America does not have one. The New York Times is Establishment to the core although it is liberal socially.
The Sparks Tribune stands out in the gloomy newspaper landscape. My column has regularly criticized the Jewish state. The column is socialistic and atheistic. It constantly criticizes U.S. policies at home and abroad.
It criticizes newspapers, universities and the seamy history of America. It criticizes mankind, manners and morals. It is often vitriolic.
Yet the Trib has run it for 21 years. No other newspaper or magazine would. My gratitude is immense.

Obama all hat, no cattle

2009-10-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

An absurd world got more absurd recently when President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Republicans, right for the first time since Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, asked what Obama had done for peace. The answer is obvious: nothing.

Obama is fighting two and one-half wars. He maintains a perpetual warfare state. He commands armed forces in 144 countries. He has just ordered 13,000 more troops to the wasteland of Afghanistan. That hardly merits a peace prize.

Obama, as they say in Texas, is all hat and no cattle. He makes wonderful promises but never delivers.

A man of integrity would have refused the prize, declaring that he was not worthy of it.

Obama admitted: “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by the prize, men and women who have inspired me and the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.”

Nevertheless, he will accept the award as “a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century.” Noble rhetoric. But, alas, just words.
Obama’s one accomplishment is establishing an anti-Bush tone in the White House. He wants to cooperate with the world, not rule it unilaterally. He repudiates Bush’s imperial presidency. But that too is hardly worth a peace prize.

Moreover, it is just his pledge to close Guantánamo and deal with its prisoners constitutionally. It is just his pledge to rid the world of nuclear weapons. It is just his pledge to combat global warming. It is just his pledge to abide by the Geneva Convention. It is just his pledge to end the don’t ask, don’t tell policy. He is just his pledge to achieve gay marriage.

Obama pledged universal health coverage but gave away the store by abandoning the public option in order to get Senate approval of a worthless bill.

He pledges to bring peace to the Middle East. But he lacks the intestinal fortitude to crack down on Israel’s refusal to do anything about its illegal settlements. Withdrawal of some of the billions in U.S. aid to Israel would greatly concentrate the mind of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Now look at some of the “illustrious company” Obama says he will join as peace prize winners:
• President Roosevelt (1906), cited for his “role in bringing to an end the bloody war” between Russia and Japan. Yet Roosevelt was a warmonger, helping seize Cuba from Spain, conquering the Philippines and congratulating one of his generals who massacred 600 harmless Filipino villagers.

• President Wilson (1919), cited for playing a decisive role in winning World War I. Yet he involved America in that bloody, senseless war. His bombardments of Mexico were despicable. His troops occupied Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

• Secretary of State Kissinger (1973), cited for negotiating a ceasefire and pullout of American troops from Vietnam. Yet Kissinger was a war criminal. He expanded the war unnecessarily and viciously into Cambodia and Laos. As songwriter Tom Lehrer put it: satire died the day they gave Kissinger a peace prize.

The Nobel Foundation in Norway has not always been that ridiculous. It did choose some worthy Americans. Among them:

• Martin Luther King (1964), cited for “being the first person in the Western World to have shown us that a struggle (for justice) can be waged without violence.” That struggle smashed apartheid in the South. King was the greatest moral leader in America since John Brown, who was so fanatic and so insane he urged freedom for four million slaves.

• Chemist Linus Pauling (1962), cited for his campaign against nuclear testing, opposition to the spread of nuclear weapons and antagonism to “warfare as a means of solving international conflicts.”

• George Marshall (1953), defense secretary and secretary of state, for the Marshall Plan aiding a Europe shattered by World War II.

• Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1945), cited for his role in establishing the United Nations.

• Jane Addams (1931), cited for setting up settlement houses, including Hull House in Chicago, to improve social conditions for the Have Nots: night school for continuing education, kindergarten, kitchen and bathhouse, coffeehouse, art gallery, gym, music school, a library and classes to combat the ugly tentacles of capitalism.

• Secretary of State Frank Kellogg (1929), cited for the Kellogg-Briand Treaty to renounce war as an instrument of national policy.

In short, the Nobel Peace Prize has ranged from the ridiculous--Obama, Roosevelt, Wilson and Kissinger--to the sublime, King, Pauling, Marshall and Addams.

Wall Street and money rule

2009-10-13T20:01:00.000-07:00

We are capable of shutting off the sun and the stars because they do not pay a dividend.
-- Economist John Maynard Keynes

Michael Moore has capitalism dead-on: it is immoral. Profits are all that matter to the immoralists.
The nation is governed by Wall Street, corporations, lobbyists and campaign bribes to members of Congress. Money and politics rule, not the pretense that the people rule.
For politicians it is mandatory to proclaim that America is a great country. Moore makes it plain it is not.
He ridicules the preamble to the Constitution which makes the false promise to “establish justice…(and) promote the general welfare.”
Moore’s answer to capitalism is socialism. Capitalism is taking. Socialism is sharing. Socialism is humane, caring, sensitive, everything capitalism is not.
Capitalism is a plutonomy. It means wealth for the few, skimping for the many. Capitalism is mean, oblivious to everything but big profits. It is evil. It is unfit for human beings.
Moore establishes these truths in his latest film, “Capitalism: a Love Story.”
He notes that the Treasury department and Wall Street run the country. Capitalism busts unions. It slashes pay and eliminates pensions. It exploits people. It pays low wages while overworking its employees.
Moore points out that capitalism has even hijacked Jesus, whose teaching argues for everything that capitalism opposes.
Capitalism is ghoulish. An insured employee is worth more dead than alive.
Some corporations are candid about it, referring to “dead peasants.” Yes, peasants, serfs, mere soil-tillers, uneducated, low class.
A grim joke in the airline industry: “Just don’t apply for welfare in uniform.” Many students leave college owing $100,000 and taking 20 years to pay it off. Civilized nations provide free college education.
Moore opens the film in ancient Rome, the rulers gathering all the money, the masses appeased by bread and circuses. He closes with a jazzy version of the leftist fight song, “The Internationale,” with its stirring phrase “a better world’s in birth.”
Moore shows that the federal tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was once a well deserved 90 percent. Reagan and Bush II changed that, completing the reaction with tax cuts for the wealthy and abetting the capitalistic beast with deregulation.
Reagan once exulted in a speech to Wall Streeters: “You can now turn the bull loose!”
“Capitalism is the legalization of greed,” Moore said in an interview with Naomi Klein of The Nation. "We have a totalitarian situation allowing the richest 1 percent to have more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.”
America has socialism for the wealthy, privatization for nearly everyone else.
Moore plays himself: wearing jeans in sharp contrast to the “suits” with their white shirts, neckties and jackets. As always, he wears his baseball cap,
He speaks slowly, solemnly, despairingly, mournfully. But he has the happy faculty of soothing his anger with humor.
He cordons off Wall Street with crime-scene yellow tape. He speaks of the “condo vultures” who get rich in Florida’s housing bust.
The one problem is Moore’s incurable optimism. He talks movingly of people rebelling. He speaks glowing of the few workers that win fights against capitalism. He brings tears to the eyes with accounts of struggling people.
But the incidents are so few. Moore forgets that so many people vote against their best economic interests. He forgets that the bulk of American people will reject socialism despite the far fairer life it offers.
He forgets that Americans are conditioned by schools, the media, churches and society. They drum in the message that capitalism is good, socialism is bad.
Moreover, the propaganda of the system is effective, the wonders of free enterprise and the idea that everyone can get rich.
No wonder America is a frightfully conservative country.
Nevertheless, Moore convincingly proves the point made by Chris Hedges earlier this year in a Truthout online article, “America is in need if a moral bailout”:
“We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding.
“The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered.”
Moore is always on the side of the angels. His films have included “Roger & Me,” an indictment of the auto industry; “Sicko,” a plea for universal health insurance; and “Bowling for Columbine,” a scathing look at America’s lust for guns.
He is the most important documentary filmmaker in America today. He speaks for the disenfranchised. He is one of America’s few heroes.

Tracy Moore: reggae DJ

2009-10-04T13:35:00.001-07:00

Tracy Moore is an ebullient, passionate, personable, aimable, smiling, upbeat, joyous and happy apostle of reggae in the Truckee Meadows.
Yet on his radio show he is cool, calm, soft-spoken and low key. The contrast is deliberate. He wants people who tune in to relax.
“I know one guy who listens every Sunday in his bathroom, draws water in the tub, lights a candle and lies back contentedly for two hours,” Moore says. (The show is on KTHX, 100.1 FM, from 8 p.m. to 10 Sundays.)
“Reggae moves me,” Tracy says. “It touches my heart. I enjoy reggae so much I want to share it with other people. When I hear a new song I can’t wait to play it on the air.”
Moore, in a recent interview, said he got his love of music from his jazz musician father who played tenor sax in Reno casinos. His dad, Babe Moore, is 94--and still noodles on the sax.
“I recall as a boy he’d call me in from playing outside and have me listen to a record,” Tracy says. “When it was over, he’d pick up the needle and say: ‘That’s Count Basie.’ ”
Another thing Tracy likes about reggae: it is message music. Its constant themes are liberation, freedom, justice, brotherhood and anti-racism.
Slavery is deeply embedded in the memory of Jamaicans. Even the ordinary guy on the beach knows that history with its “voice of the slave descendent and the darkness and pain of suppression.”
(Jamaica was seized by the British in 1655 and became a distribution point for slave ships arriving from Africa.)
Moore enthuses about Marcus Garvey, Jamaican-born exponent of black empowerment and the return of blacks to Africa. Like Malcolm X after him, Garvey proclaimed his blackness and his pride in it.
Another of Tracy’s musical heroes is the late Bob Marley, who he calls the greatest reggae singer ever.
“Marley was not only a profound lyricist who became an icon for people of the Third World, he was immensely influential in defining reggae’s musical approach,” he says. “Today’s artists are largely standing on the foundation he helped to lay.”
Moore agrees with Webster’s definition of reggae: “Popular music of Jamaican origin that combines native styles with elements of rock ‘n’ roll soul music and performed at moderate tempos with the accent on the off beat.”
Tracy, 47, graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 1988 with a degree in psychology and a minor in journalism.
He wears his environmenal concerns “on his sleeve.” At the interview he wore a green T-shirt adorned with those graceful power-generating wind propellers.
He is blondish with long, stringy hair. Wire glasses rest on his nose between a small goatee and an ever receding hairline.
Tracy hosted Reno’s first reggae radio show, “The Kingston Jam,” on KUNR from 1988 to 1998. In 2003 he started the Reggae Shack program on KTHX, broadcasting under his DJ name, Too Dread.
Too dread is patois for someone who deeply understands reggae and feels its vibes. “You have a sense of kinship, a deep-in-your-heart feeling.” Or, as the communists say: comrade.
Tracy has been to the Land of Reggae seven times, loving the laid- back people, the mountains and the beaches splashed by the Caribbean Sea.
For a living, Tracy drives for the Northern Nevada International Center. He plays host and guides visitors who come to Reno for conferences and special events.
But his heart is in reggae. He started as a keyboardist and vocalist in 1989 for Reno-based reggae bands.
Tracy writes songs and performs at breast cancer fund-raisers with his band Jahzilla. It’s out of compassion, yes, but pays tribute to his mother who died of lung cancer.
One of his songs reflects joy over his infant daughter, lyla (correct) Sage Lore, 11 months old. (Her mother is Rubio.)
One stanza of the song, “Because This Baby,” goes: “In her smiling eyes / Even when she cries / How her spirit flies / Like a flower essence sweetly unfurled.”
I knew nothing about reggae and couldn’t have cared less--until I talked with Tracy.
I am a classical music old fogy. Beethoven and Bach, Mozart and Haydn, Schubert and Tchaikovsky, Dvorák and Mahler, Rossini and Berlioz, Verdi and Puccini, Franck and Offenbach, Ponchielli and Wagner.
To my ears, reggae is caterwauling, cacophony. Harsh sounds, shrieks, groans, shouting, chanting, whistling, raving, pounding, drum beat and futuristic sounds.
Yes, there are some toe-tapping rhythms. And I heartily approve of the message lyrics. But it’s not my kind of music. Nevertheless, as the French say, Chacun à son goût.
When it comes to reggae, Tracy’s taste matters, not mine.

Thunder from the Left

2009-09-28T11:54:00.000-07:00

G.W. Bush did get a third term after all. The sellouts of President Obama have been monumental.
His presidency was supposed to be transformational, a “breath of fresh air.” That air is now fetid. The rancid Bush policies continue.
Consider:
• Terrorist suspects at Guantánamo (Cuba) and Bagram (Afghanistan) are still being imprisoned indefinitely: no trials, no charges and no chance to prove their innocence.
• The Bush policy of “extraordinary rendition” is still in place.
• Obama continues to swell the largest military budget in the world. Capitalistic militarism still reigns supreme.
• Obama is still fighting 2 1/2 wars, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan and one-half of one in Pakistan.
• “Enhanced interrogation techniques” still is policy. (The moon-baying Dick Cheney can be heard nightly on Fox boasting of torture.) Obama’s CIA director says it would “gravely damage national security” to release torture documents. (National security is the lame excuse for “covering your ass.”)
• Blackwater goes by a new name but it still gets fat government contracts for its dirty work.
• Promised transparency? A CIA report is heavily censored and four pages of its recommendations blacked out. (Defense Secretary Gates, odious Bush holdover, is furious that the AP filed a photo of a Marine killed in Afghanistan. Nearly all newspapers did not publish it, including the gutless New York Times. The sooner Establishment newspapers begin to show war’s grim realities the sooner the war will end.
• Immigration reform? Embarrassing Obama silence.
• Campaigning, Obama opposed don’t ask, don’t tell. Today the military fires a winner of nine air medals for valor because he is gay. The Obama silence is deafening.
• Obama, the apostle of gay marriage, has grown chary, murky and cowardly on the issue.
• Obama, the proponent of medical pot, is silent on the issue.
• He is silent on union card-signing except when uttering applause lines at labor gatherings.
• The House passes a vastly watered down bill on climate change. Not a peep from him.
• Obama issues signing statements, ignoring Congress just as Bush did.
• The president’s pay czar won’t reveal details of corporation compensation because it might make the Fat Cats “targets of populist anger.” Obama should study FDR. Roosevelt would have said to hell with what the rich bastards think. He would welcome their hatred instead of cowering like Obama.
Universal health? Every industrial nation has it except America. Obama says the public option is only a sliver of the solution. No, it’s the whole solution. No public option, no solution. His bipartisan approach is wasted on such cretins as Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley and the Blue Dog Democrats.

America may have the world’s best medical system but it is two and one-half times more costly than elsewhere.
Some things Obama can do nothing about. Universal health care is a lost cause in reactionary America. Vested interests are spending $1.4 million daily to bribe Congress to halt any meaningful legislation. Congress always follows the money. Re-election depends on it.
Government can’t negotiate the horrendous prices of drugs. That was Obama’s gift to Big Pharma for its support.
We have also seen the recrudescence of what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”: “heated exaggerations,” “distorted judgment” and “leaps into fantasy.”
Obama is falsely labeled a socialist, an antichrist. He is called downright evil. His health plan means death panels that designate grandma to die.
John White, professor of political science at Catholic University, offers a reason for such madness: the old order has changed. The country that older people grew up with no longer exists. Where America was 87 percent white in 1970, today it is 70 percent. It now has 50 million Latinos and 40 million blacks.
The “apostles of the absurd,” as columnist Bob Herbert calls them, are angry that America has a black president, an alien with no right to be president.
The racist South will never acknowledge the legitimacy of a black president. It persists in fighting the Civil War.
Nevertheless, Obama has failed to use the White House as the bully pulpit it is. He should forcefully promote his agenda instead of deferring to the negative GOP.
He should denounce the 60-vote filibuster in the Senate and call for its abolition. The filibuster is what The Nation calls it: “that undemocratic holdover from the days of slavery and segregation.”
The darkness at noon that fell under Bush has barely been lifted by Obama.

Chappaquiddick stains Kennedy legacy

2009-09-21T09:26:00.001-07:00

President Obama called Sen. Ted Kennedy “the soul of the Democratic Party.” But the Democratic Party hasn’t had a soul since the halcyon days of President Johnson’s domestic policies.

Kennedy himself sometimes lacked Democratic soul. He sided with corporate America in its passion for deregulation, acquiesced in tax cuts for the rich, urged globalization and pushed so-called “fair trade” accords that killed union jobs.

Kennedy even yielded on the self-proclaimed cause of his life: government-run universal national health. In 1971 he introduced a bill to do just that. Later he abandoned it. Up to his recent death he was willing to accept just some private role in health insurance rather than the all-public role it should be.

But it was more than policy differences that left this political observer with queasy feelings about Kennedy. It is Chappaquiddick.

His legacy will forever be tarnished by his irresponsibility and cowardice in that 1969 tragedy. A drunken Kennedy drove into the pond and swam to safety. He left a young woman in the car to drown.

Then, for nearly 10 hours he failed to report the accident to police. And: he dispatched a family lawyer to the woman’s family before the press got word. A “small shot” might have spent time in jail for doing less.

The womanizing by President John Kennedy can be overlooked. But what is unforgivable is that he was a scurvy politician, not a leader. He said he would consider pulling troops out of Vietnam--but not until he was reelected in 1964.

The vaulting opportunism of Bobby Kennedy can be forgiven. Yet he did not seek the presidency in 1968 until Gene McCarthy showed that President Johnson was vulnerable on Vietnam. Bobby realized that his antiwar message would play even in Peoria.

But it is difficult to forgive Ted Kennedy for leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die. Indeed, he felt so guilty he never forgave himself. His conscience haunted him the rest of his life.

The tragedy also left unanswered questions. The New York Times obituary writer asked: “Why was the car on an isolated road? What sort of relationship did he and Kopechne have? Could she have been saved if he had sought help immediately? Why did he tell his political advisers about the accident before reporting it to police?”

Questions aside, Kennedy made a horrendous political error out of hubris: challenging President Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. He mistakenly thought that all he needed was the Kennedy mystique.

Nevertheless, Ted Kennedy had some laudable traits.

Dennis Myers, a Reno columnist, notes the incredible thoughtfulness of Ted Kennedy. He contacted all 177 families from Massachusetts connected with 9/11.

“Kennedy kept calling family members year after year,” Myers writes. “One woman told a reporter last year, ‘I can’t imagine getting through the last seven years without him.’ ”

After he abandoned playboyism. boozing and rakism, the Kennedy political record was mostly good. As Jack Newfield, no bleeding-heart liberal, wrote in The Nation in 2002:

“Kennedy has drafted and shaped more landmark legislation than liberal giants like Robert Wagner, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver and Herbert Lehmann. He looks like the best and most effective senator of the past hundred years.”

Kennedy was a proud liberal even after the right-wing made liberal a dirty word.

He voted against authorizing the Iraq War, calling it the best vote he ever cast. It was. He championed civil rights and women’s sports rights under Title IX. He supported the Immigration Act of 1965 which did away with the favoritism to those of northern European decent.

He backed sanctions against South Africa for trying to maintain its abominable apartheid. He sponsored the disabilities act banning discrimination against the handicapped. He fought to ban the reprehensible poll tax.

He supported federal funding to combat AIDS. He backed an increase in the minimum wage. He fought for a program of low-cost health insurance for kids of working class parents. He won a $50 million appropriation for 30 community health centers, since expanded to 1,200.

Kennedy led the fight to save Social Security from the rapacious and retrograde privatization of President Bush. He led the successful fight to thwart the effort by President Reagan to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

Fair Housing law. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Meals on wheels. Insurance that can be carried from job to job. Medicare drug benefits. All Kennedy platforms.

Of his more than 15,000 votes in the Senate, many were in favor of racial minorities, gays and lesbians, the elderly and the poor.

America’s debt to Kennedy is large. As Matthew 25:21 says: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

Obama’s march of folly

2009-09-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

Woodenheadness is the refusal to benefit from experience.
--Barbara Tuchman

Empires are blind and cannot see the follies that they themselves commit, to paraphrase Shakespeare. America is one of the blindest empires in history.

That’s why President Obama should read an important book written by Barbara Tuchman 25 years ago, “The March of Folly.” She characterized folly as “a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable.”

Her specific target of folly was Vietnam, an unspeakable disaster. Death toll: 58,000 U.S. soldiers and 3 million Vietnamese. Moral toll: terrible erosion of America’s prestige and supposed superior values.

The Vietnam folly, directed by “the best and the brightest,” lasted 13 years.

Yet Obama has learned nothing from that sordid history. America is still bogged down in Iraq after seven years. It has cost the lives of 4,200 U.S. soldiers and untold thousands of Iraqis. It has cost taxpayers $750 billion, a frightful waste of money.

Obama promises an Iraqi pullout but with an ever vaguer deadline. The war is unwinnable. Bombings rock Iraq daily, killing people and demolishing businesses. Still America persists in its woodenheadedness.

America is also mired in Afghanistan, where empires go to die. Yet Obama launches a Bushian surge, pouring 20,000 more troops into the folly. Still unsatisfied, the Pentagon is urging a surge on a surge.

The history of Afghanistan and how it has dealt with invaders for centuries makes it clear that U.S. intervention is still another folly, another lost cause.

Obama argues that the war in Afghanistan is a necessity, that “those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again…This is not only a war worth fighting, this is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

This sounds like the hysterical rantings of Dick Cheney and George Bush.

Death toll of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan: 800. War duration: eight years and a folly that could last another 42.
Now America is unleashing drones over Pakistan, bombing and killing innocent citizens. The march of folly never stops.
No wonder Ansar Abbasi, a Pakistani journalist, told Judith McHale, U.S. undersecretary of state: “You should know that we hate all Americans. From the bottom of our souls we hate you.”

I too would hate all Americans if were an Iraqi, Afghan or Pakistani. Even as an American, I am infuriated by the mere sight of newspaper pictures showing U.S. soldiers in those countries where they don’t belong.

Obama has proved himself to be just another shabby politician, dissipating the hope he generated during the presidential campaign. He has endorsed a warfare state: perpetual war, permanent war.

America has an empire of 800 bases throughout the globe. Is is now negotiating with Colombia to give it a 10-year lease on bases there.

Why, for God’s sake? It is hardly cynical to suggest an answer: a springboard to overthrow Venezuela’s Chávez, an “extremely dangerous leftist,” as was the U.S-engineered overthrow of socialist Allende in Chile.

The problem in Latin America is not Chavez and other leftist leaders. The problem is poverty, hunger and huge disparities between the Haves and Have Nots, something capitalistic America cannot understand.
But that capitalistic empire is a hungry maw. It is fostered by the irresistible military-industrial-political complex.

Suing book blurbers
“Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization,” by Nicholson Baker, Simon & Schuster, 2008, 474 pp.

Book-blurbing makes used-car salesmen look credible.

Here are some blurbs for the Baker book: “riveting and fascinating”… “impossible to put down”…“an extraordinary new book”… “a bombshell”… “engrossing”… “it may be one of the most important books you will ever read.”

All lies. The book is dull and full of longueurs. It is three times longer than necessary and overflows with trivia.

We get some good quotations and anecdotes by and about Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler and Stalin, Oswald Mosley and Chamberlain, Gandhi and Nehru. But even those are seldom illuminating.

The book starts well with the effective refrain line about each incident: “It was Sept. 24, 1933”… “It was May 24, 1934.” But after a while the device gets wearisome. We learn more about World War II nonentities than we care to know.

Yes, there are a few gems like propaganda minister Goebbels admitting that he admired "Crystalizing Public Opinion,” a book by Edward Bernays, the P.T. Barnum of American PR. Or, the reactionary Churchill calling the great revolutionary Trotsky “a mere Jew.”

But the Baker opus overall is so tedious that the book blurbers should be sued for misrepresentation.

Serious fare for serious readers

2009-09-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

--Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People”

Summer reading is a euphemistic phrase meaning trash.
The New Statesman, a British weekly magazine, sought to combat this problem recently by offering a list of 50 books that would enlighten readers instead of lulling them.
Among them: Ibsen’s 1882 classic of the man who declares that “the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.” He knows “the minority is always right.”
Also: “The Second Sex” (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir, an educational feminist work before the word was in widespread usage.
Others: “The Communist Manifesto” (1848) by Marx and Engels depicting the economic injustice suffered by 95 percent of the people of the world at the expense of 5 percent of the owners of wealth;
“The Wretched of the Earth” (1961) by Frantz Fanon, a savage indictment of colonialism; “Germinal” (1885) by Zola, a compassionate view of French coal miners suffering the exploitation of capitalism;
“The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) by Steinbeck portraying the injustices suffered by migrant workers; “The Other America” (1962), Michael Harrington’s depiction of poverty in America;
“Catch-22” (1961) by Joseph Heller, wonderful satire of the stupidity and butchery of war; and a 1949 essay by Einstein, “Why Socialism?” He urged us not to be so enamoured of science that we forget human problems.

Adelle Davis, nutritionist, organic foodist and food fadist, popularized the saying “You are what you eat.” I disagree. You are what you read, as Deidre Pike, dear teaching friend once noted in a column.

Here are more literary thoughts:

Hamlet is the greatest play ever written. It’s so cerebral with more great lines than any other play.

Next greatest is Lear. It is more powerful, more emotional than Hamlet. It contains one of the gloomiest lines in all literature: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

Sensitive souls are moved to tears by the absolute integrity of Cordelia. Her foolish father divides his kingdom among his three daughters on the basis of their professions of love for him.

Cordelia’s sisters, Goneril and Regan, lather the king with insincerities. When Lear asks Cordelia how much she loves him, she replies: “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.”

Lear recoils, declaring, “So young and so untender.” Cordelia counters: “So young, my lord, and true.”

I took “The Golden Bowl” by Henry James on a three-week vacation to England. It was a terrible mistake as I had learned long ago but had forgotten.

James, considered by some critics the greatest American novelist, is unreadable. His novels are discursive, overwritten, wordy, repetitive and dense.

My opinion was corroborated by Alec Guinness in his book, “A Positively Final Appearance.” A few pages of “The Wings of the Dove” left him “dizzy and breathless with the length of his sentences.”

Elsewhere Guinness remarks that noise distresses him more and more. D’accord! In this Noise Age you can’t escape noise pollution in even the better bars and restaurants playing the caterwauling of rap, reggae and rock.

And how about the guy in the SUV idling next to you at a red light with the raucous notes from his boombox pounding in your ear? It makes you close the window even on the hottest summer days.

Even after decades of admiration for Oscar Wilde, I am still surprised to discover new facets of his genius. Namely, his little known “The Happy Prince and Other Stories.”

These fanciful tales are about love, wisdom and worldwide justice. It requires a stone heart to avoid shedding tears at the end of “The Happy Prince.”

Otherwise, the Wilde story is well known. He reached the heights with his play, “The Importance of Being Earnest.” He plunged to the depths in Reading jail. But that horrible experience produced two masterpieces, the poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and his prison letters, “De Profundis.”

Another work that declares Wilde’s genius is “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” In it he writes:

“The true perfection of man lies, not in what he has, but in what man is”…
“democracy means bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”…
“One is sickened, not by the crimes the wicked have commited, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted”…
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at…
“that monstrous and ignorant thing called public opinion”…
“the public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing.”

Worshipping amid Gothic splendor

2009-08-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

YORK, England--Your peripatetic columnist went to church here on a recent Sunday. What’s so unusual about that? Some readers will say they usually go to church on Sundays.

But this was not just any church. No, it was the architectural marvel of the York Minster, the largest medieval Gothic cathedral in northern Europe.

It was built between 1220 and 1472 with two towers and chaste lines.

The ceiling of the nave is 200 feet from the floor. Stained class windows glow from five panels on the walls of the nave. The Great West Window completes this glorious setting for worship.

The voices of the chorus at the Anglican service were powerful, soaring. The Bible reading was from Ephesians 4:1-16. The theme: unity, unity of spirit and unity of faith.

Canon Jonathan Draper in his sermon spoke eloquently about gay marriage. He cited love, compassion, understanding and being faithful to Christ.

“Paul says, ‘one hope…one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and the Father of all,’ ” Draper said.

But I was disappointed that he did not flat-out urge his listeners to accept gay marriage. My wife said it was not Anglican custom to do so, that it would divide rather than unite the church.

I vehemently disagreed. Churches should lead their congregations, not follow them. A church without moral leadership is a weak church.

As President Kennedy often said: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” (The quotation comes from Dante only by the most imaginative translation.)

Disagreement aside, it was a throat-tightening moment to see my wife take communion in such a magnificent setting.

York wall

One of the highlights of a visit to York is a walk on the Middle Ages wall surrounding the city. Short walks from two bars (gateways), Bootham and Monk, provide fine views of the Minster.

Being atop the wall also gave this ham actor a chance to emote those wonderful opening lines of Richard III: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” (Shakespeare lieth. Constant rains pelted us in York.)

York, after the hurly-burly of London, provided rustic delights. Near our hotel just outside the wall was a bowling lawn with studious bowlers. On an adjoining greensward, croquet players enjoyed whacking away the opponent’s ball.

We were staying so far out in the country that I saw a middle-aged couple walking up a muddy country lane wearing Wellies, those high rubber boots so essential for country folk.

‘Tam O’Shanter’

One of the drawbacks of frequent visitors to Britain and France is that they seldom mingle with the locals. Someone interesting like the Scots miner, vacationing in York, who reeled off from memory lines of “Tam O’Shanter” by Robert Burns.

“But pleasures are like poppies spread,” he quoted in the original Scots dialect. “You seize the flower, its bloom is shed…No man can tether time or tide.”

Then with a smile he continued: “Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn! What dangers you can make us scorn! With ale, we fear no evil. With whisky, we’ll face the devil!”

His reading made me realize that Burns was more than a mere poet who gave us wise sayings about mice and lice and the melancholic “Auld Lang Syne.”

In the same hotel, coming home after dinner, we stopped at the piano bar to listen to a young woman playing Beethoven. God, how I love Beethoven! The sounds of Beethoven in what seemed like the most unlikely place, as if they emanated from the moors just north of York.

The pianist was playing “Für Elise.” I could hardly believe it. Here I had been starved for classical music for three weeks so I reveled in the memorable notes. “Für Elise” may be the most wonderful bagatelle ever composed.

But I still wanted more so I asked her to play it again. She did. I gave her a five-pound tip ($8), the happiest gratuity I ever have ever given.

The incident reminded me of a play I saw on returning to the Lower 48 after having been exiled to Alaska for a year. It was a performance of Shaw’s “Saint Joan.”

Not a great play but a good play about putting conscience before Roman Catholic dogma. Above all, I was moved to tears to be in civilization again.

British press shames U.S.

2009-08-31T09:26:00.000-07:00

LONDON--British newspapers are far superior to those in America. American papers are dreadfully dull and getting duller because of harsh elimination of columns and other features.

British papers are livelier and saucier. They are more cultural and intellectual.

British editors know the value of large art. Portrait photographs of grieving women, mourning for their husbands killed in Afghanistan, run three inches wide and five and one-half inches deep on front pages.

The Guardian runs a huge picture daily covering two full pages. Maybe a forest fire. Perhaps a photo of a volcano spewing molten lava. The impact is great.

American newspapers get smaller in size, thinner in girth and scanter in content. My hometown paper, the Reno Gazette-Journal, is disgraceful. It takes less than five minutes to read, three of them on sports.

The Guardian remains large, stout and packed with news, features and opinion. Its layouts are uncluttered as so many U.S. papers are. Some Guardian pages might have just two stories with photos, graphics, quote boxes and tint blocks.

British editorial cartoons are in color and run twice the size of the black-and-white American ones. The Guardian runs the comic strip Doonesbury in color, more than twice the size of the black-and-white strip in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Guardian is the best English language newspaper.

One fault in the British press: the sports pages always refer to the football (soccer) coach of Manchester United as Sir Alex Ferguson. It is as absurd as retaining the monarchy, which has outlived its time by two centuries.

The class system is still deeply embedded in England. Stories are told of writer Evelyn Waugh walking miles from his lower class London home to mail letters from a tonier postal zone.
Courtauld great
The Courtauld Gallery is, to use boxing parlance, pound for pound the best art museum in the world. Its first three rooms have 30 paintings, 10 of them masterpieces. Among them: Monet’s “Antibes,” Renoir’s “Le Loge,” Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” Cezanne’s “The Card Players” and Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear.

The Courtauld pièce de résistance is Manet’s “Bar at the Folies Bergère.” The woman tending bar has a look of incredible sadness.

Another art treasure in London is the National Gallery. It houses such chef-d’oeuvres as Velázquezes’ Rokeby Venus, Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars,” Rubens’ beautiful portrait of Susanna and a Goya beauty, “Doña Isabel de Porcel.”

Impressionism is epitomized at the National Gallery by a Monet painting, “The Thames below Westminster.” Gauzy. Fog shrouding the Houses of Parliament. Barges on the Thames.

The third London art powerhouse is the National Portrait Gallery, although admittedly of more interest to devotees of British literature and politics.

Shakespeare is here wearing a rakish earring but Marlowe, he of the mighty line, is not. Gladstone is here, looking stern and puritanical, next to Disraeli with jutting jaw, goatee and a fierce intellectual look. So too are Addison and Steele, founders of The Spectator and sterling members of Kit-cat Club for London artistic and literary types.
Homage to Shakepeare

One of my favorite walks in London is crossing the Millennium Bridge from St. Paul’s to Southwark to visit the reconstructed Globe Theater. It brings to mind the prologue of “Henry the Fifth”: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”

Supression of women

Streets teem with people today in this old Roman town founded in 43 A.D. Roads are now clogged with cars, buses and lorries.

Among the street crowds are women shrouded in black from head to toe. The only “sinful” flesh showing through the burqua are eyes. Bias flares. Not against Muslims per se but against a religion that shackles 21st century women with garb that denotes submission. Inequality too. Muslim women wear “ovens” and men wear shorts.

SNIPPETS: Trafalgar Square is one of the great plazas in Europe.The towering, rotund Nelson column. Fountains. Huge stone lions. Hordes of people. Square “guarded” on the north by the National Gallery and St. Martin-in-the-Field…The Brits seem to love their dogs even more than their gardens…Only in Britain: the nation has police associations for blacks, for gays, for Muslims--and now pagans!

MORE SNIPPETS: The British Rolls-Royce has long been a symbol of quality. Today it advertises what it calls its “waftability,” “quiet perfection and fast acceleration.” A great Rolls ad created by the American David Ogilvy decades ago: “At 75 miles an hour all you can hear is the clock ticking.”

Oxford don and cyberspace

2009-08-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

OXFORD, England--Anyone with a reverence for education attends Oxford Round Table discussions with a sense of awe. Oxford University has been a center of learning since the 13th century.
And speaking of learning, it is apparent that British professors know more about everything than their U.S. counterparts here to attend a conference on “Education and Cyberspace Law.”
Richard Tur, an Oxford don who gave the welcoming speech, regaled conferees at a reception before dinner. He quoted yards of Bobbie Burns, complete with Scots burr and dialect, spoke easily of British history (Cromwell), British writers (Orwell) and the U.S. Supreme Court (Justices Blackmun and Kennedy).
The sessions themselves were uneven, some as dull as faculty meetings. Many revealed the mustiness of the academy with talk titles such as “Stratospheric Transparency,” “Collaborative Enforcement Model” and “Disaggregated Informational Ownership.”
One professor’s talk was disjointed. Other speakers, while quite scholarly, were long-winded. One speaker offered a 37-page tome. One paper had 142 footnotes.
Another speaker declared that digital technology had “enriched lives in countless ways.” It’s a dubious proposition. Maybe that’s why the speaker gave no examples of alleged enrichment.
The conferees seemed to forget the purpose of higher education: knowledge, understanding and wisdom. As Francis Bacon said: “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Studying and using the essential tools of digitology is not higher education.
The conferees did made it clear that the Internet means all privacy is gone, that Web censorship is almost impossible and that the law is slow to catch up with ever-changing technology.
On the third day of the Round Table sparks began to fly. Why? Speakers talked about issues and ideas that had nothing to do with cyberspace.
Nancy Heitzeg, sociology professor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minn., urged the end of mandatory prison sentences, pleaded for abolition of the death penalty and espoused the legalization of drugs.
Sammy van Hoose of Wayland Baptist University in Texas, leading a discussion on the place of religion in schools, expressed a strong belief in God while holding to the rigid separation of church and state.
But I felt compelled to issue an apologia for atheism, noting that atheists like Emma Goldman and Eugene “Little Jesus” Debs were more Christian than most Christians. (Shelley was kicked out of Oxford in 1811 for writing an essay called “The Necessity of Atheism.”)
In my talk I lamented the decline of newspapers. But I pointed out that the falloff will hardly be arrested when papers like the San Francisco Chronicle dump outstanding liberal columnists E.J. Dionne and Robert Scheer and mordant essayist Mark Morford.
While the demise of newspapers would be unfortunate, it would hardly be the tragedy many media observers call it. Those sky-is-falling commentariats see a diminished democracy, darkened “sectors of our life” and a terrible “threat to self-government and the rule of law.”
Utter nonsense. Alexander Cockburn, Nation columnist, calls it hardly tragic if the corporate press perishes. “By and large the mainstream newspapers have obstructed efforts to improve our social and political condition.”
I ask my journalism students at the University of Nevada, Reno, whether the media are liberal or conservative. Most of them answer liberal.
Why? Well, they complain that the media are always harping on abortion, urging gay marriage or demanding the end of the military policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. My answer: it depends on where you stand politically. To me, a Man of the Left, the media are conservative.
The litany is old and long. I.F. Stone, the great American radical journalist, was blacklisted by the media after he had the temerity to urge national health insurance on “Meet the Press” as long ago as 1949.
Noam Chomsky, leftist and media critic, is persona non grata in mainstream newspapers today. No Establishment newspaper carries a socialist columnist. The Holmesian marketplace of ideas in the media extends no farther left than liberalism.
Totalitarian nations have overt censorship. America has subtle censorship, a self-censorship that bows to power and protects the conservative status quo. Newspapers have so often betrayed the First Amendment, the most glorious thing about America.
As Amy and David Goodman write in their book, “The Exception to the Rulers”: “This is not a media that is serving a democratic society. This is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government spin and passing it off as journalism.”
Michael Parenti in his book, “Inventing Reality,” indicts the media as handmaidens of capitalism with its all-pervasive Establishment view: socialism is evil, capitalism sacred. Most Americans consider America a great country, not the terrible, uncivilized nation I deem it.
Whatever verdict history renders about newspapers, the Internet will never turn conservative America into the progressive nation it should be.

Scholar sucks juice from Twain

2009-07-15T21:28:00.001-07:00

“Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter.” By James Caron (University of Missouri Press, 412 pp., 2008).

This is a book for Mark Twain scholars and specialists, not for Twain lovers. It is thoroughly researched and footnoted. Caron’s knowledge of Twain is vast and intimate. But the comic genius of Samuel Clemens must be enjoyed on the pages of Twain’s works, not written about.

We get a long discussion of the differences between Mark Twain as “narrator of comic character” and Sam Clemens the man. In just one paragraph on “the ethical purpose of comic laughter” we find that Plato says, Aristotle faults and Cicero notes.

On the next page we find how humor is defined by “English men of letters, including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison and Henry Fielding.” Ben Jonson resides in the same sentence and Thackeray dwells one sentence later. It is all too much.

Then we get long discourses on comic laughter. Caron cites Plato and Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais. One footnote runs to nine lines, the author unnecessarily showing his homework. When Caron writes of Twain’s “anthropological approach” the reader stiffens. Twain and anthropology do not jibe. Moreover, Caron’s prose is often murky, academic.

Section and chapter headings talk of “The Communal Function of Comic Violence.” “Comic Violence and Cultural Barbarism” and “Playing with Comic Dynamite.” Scholarly to be sure but dull stuff.

The best section deals with the glory days on the Comstock. Only San Francisco could rival Virginia City as the pre-eminent metropolis in the Far West. At times the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise had a larger circulation than any paper in San Francisco.

The Enterprise epitomized Washoe journalism. “It was…the brainiest sheet on the Coast. It was privy to all of the mountain’s secrets (Mount Davidson) both above and below the earth’s crust. It had acquired enormous prestige. It could make or break any man in the Nevada Territory. It was honest and fearless…It was Comstock to the core, the mirror of her astounding personality, the sounding board of her buoyant, virile life.”

As for Twain on the Comstock, his local columns exhibit “capable reporting and sly yarn spinning.” But the “yarn spinner overshadowed...the reporter,” mixing fact and fiction. Indeed, Twain had been hired in 1866 by the San Francisco Morning Call as a reporter, not a comic writer. He was soon fired, admitting his “reportorial shortcomings.”

Caron is occasionally afflicted with the Biographer’s Syndrome. He hypothesizes: “Writing his local columns, Clemens must have”…“Clemens apparently would not sign”… “Clemens probably would have made the decision”…“Clemens most likely employed.”

But Twain himself was always a compelling figure. He launched his literary career on the Enterprise, working for the paper from September 1862 to May 1864. Twain called himself unsanctified because he used his comic vision to play hell, “embodying what proper society might call social ‘sins.’ ”

He symbolized “the Nevada territory in its madcap moods, its carnivalesque frontier democracy.” His comic flair was perfect for Comstock miners, stamp mill operators and teamsters.

Comstock writers like Dan De Quille (William Wright) influenced the comic sketches and fantasies of Mark Twain. Caron notes the striking similarities between De Quille and Twain.

Caron, an English professor at the University of Hawaii, deals with Twain’s writing in the 1860s. Twain was a brilliant Western writer, using the traditional tactic of the tall tale and deadpan exaggeration.

But under the surface fun, the Twain had a deep sense of justice. He muckraked in San Francisco in 1864 for the Morning Call. Much later he excoriated the American military intervention and slaughter in the Philippines.

The San Francisco Bulletin noted this characteristic “Beneath the surface of his pleasantry lies a rich vein of serious thought. He instructs as well as amuses and even his broadest jokes have a moral.”

Caron, writing about Twain’s 1866 travel letters from Hawaii (which the author spells as the affected “Hawai’i), notes Twain’s prudishness about the hula-hula. Twain said the dance was lascivious, demoralizing, barbaric. He associated the hula with sex.

Nevertheless, lovers of the spirit, humor and sardonic laughter of Twain would do better to reread his early works than struggle with the Caron tome. Such works as: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), “Journalism in Tennessee” (1869), “The Innocents Abroad” (1869) and “Roughing It” (1872).

I recall reading parts of “Roughing It” and being unable to resist laughing out loud. A tribute to a great humorist. Twain was a comic giant who gained such worldwide renown that even the dour Soviets applauded him.

Populists, writing and atheism

2009-07-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

America has never had a more radical political party with mass appeal than the People’s Party (Populists).
At its 1892 founding convention in Omaha, Neb., these were some of its planks:
• Women’s suffrage. (Women got the right to vote in 1920 with ratification of the 19th Amendment.)
• An eight-hour day. (Then considered utopian--if not absurd.)
• Abolition of the Pinkerton system of violently suppressing union organizers. (Business still today violates the fervent plea of William Jennings Bryan: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.”)
• A graduated income tax. (The 16th Amendment ratified in 1913 allowed an income tax.)
• Public ownership of corporations, telephones and the telegraph. (Alas, it never happened. Nor will corporations and America’s reactionary politics allow it.)
• No subsidy of corporations. (Never happened. See preceeding paragraph.)
• Breakup of corporate lobbying power. (Never happened. See two paragraph above.)
Henry Demarest Lloyd declared in 1894: “The People’s Party is more than the organized discontent of the people. It is the organized aspiration of the people for a fuller, nobler, richer, kinder life for every man, woman and child in the ranks of humanity.”
That dream was shattered by raw, rapacious capitalism.

Why Johnny can’t write
“Txting away ur education.” That title appeared over an essay in USA Today. It was written by a Virginia high school English teacher rightly lamenting the decline of writing skills.
The cause: the Digital Age with its iPods, cellphones, Blackberries, texting and Tweeting. Such abbreviated communication forms defy good writing.
Garry Trudeau, brilliant creator of the “Doonesbury” comic strip and marvelous social critic, satirizes Tweeting. His character Sam texts: “@Roland Hedley: yr reports r awesome. Ru really Tweeting from Iran?” Hedley replies: “@ Sam: Retweeting. Similar.”
Every K-12 school and every college should ban electronic devices from classrooms.

‘The Atheist’s Bible’
Joan Konner’s “The Atheist’s Bible,” published in 2007, is a wonderful compilation of wit and wisdom. Here are my original contributions for a second edition:
• Belief in God is a failure of intellect and/or nerve.
• All clergywomen and clergymen are living a lie.
• Critical thinking would make everyone an atheist and 99 out of 100 people socialists.
Mouths of babes
Out of the mouths of babes” (Psalms 8:2) comes wisdom. Rachael Howard, fifth grader in St. Lucie, Fla., asked President Obama to remove the words under God from the Pledge of Allegiance.
“My family and I are atheists,” she wrote. “You know there are unbelievers and other religions in this country.”

Obama couldn’t drop the words if he wanted to. Congress put them there in 1954 during one of the nation’s frequent Red Scares.
Moreover, no politician seeking re-election would ever publicly admit he doesn’t
Opiate progression
Progression of the opiate of the masses. First: religion. Next: TV. Now: sports.

Independence Day thought
Thomas Paine was the greatest of the Founders—and he was born in England.

Bastille Day thought
The French and the Americans had the great good sense to get rid of their kings. The British, on the other hand, cling to the medieval relic and mummery of the monarchy.

San Francisco forever
America would be a much better nation if the people of San Francisco alone were allowed to vote.

Cigarette ad disgusts
I wrote a letter recently to the Nation, the best leftist magazine in America. Here it is:
“I was highly incensed to see my beloved Nation stoop to running a cigarette ad. You explained that you do not ban ads just because you disagree with the message. Noble sentiment. But ethically and morally you are bankrupt. Cigarettes are linked to 450,000 deaths annually in America.”
I received an oily PR reply but my letter was not printed. Magazines and newspapers seldom print critical comments. It’s as novelist Joseph Conrad said to his wife: “I want praise, not criticism.”

6 cheers for power steering
Love my new car, a 2008 model with power steering. It turns on a dime. With my 1997 car I had to tug and tug to turn.
On the road with a new car it seems as if everyone is driving a newish car. And that makes you think that this is indeed a rich country.

Supreme Court denies justice

2009-07-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

The façade of the Supreme Court building proclaims: “Equal Justice for All.” But the Roberts Court metes out justice for just some.

Lady Justice is blind but she shouldn’t be deaf and dumb too. The most egregious decision in the 2008-2009 court term: rejection of the right of prisoners to DNA testing to prove their innocence.

Chief Justice Roberts admitted as much in his opinion for the court, noting the unparalleled ability of DNA evidence to prove innocence.

But in one of the most bizarre rationales in the history of the court, Roberts said that this does not mean that “every criminal conviction involving biological evidence is in doubt.”

The five reactionaries interpret the Constitution as they want: let defendants be electrocuted. As Justice Stevens said in dissent: “There is no reason to deny access to the evidence and there are many reasons to provide it.”

Another lamentable decision by the Backward Five eroded the exclusionary rule prohibiting prosecutors from using evidence obtained in an improper police search.

It was an un-American decision. Justice Holmes in a dissent in Olmstead (1928) knew what it meant to be an American. He wrote: it is a lesser evil “that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”

The Baleful Five also undermined the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, declaring it wasn’t always essential. Stevens bitterly dissented, rightly declaring that defendants must have counsel at every stage of prosecution.

In all three cases the vote was 5-4. In each case Justice Kennedy was the fifth man. Kennedy is the most powerful jurist in America, so often determining the law of the land. But being powerful doesn’t mean dispensing justice.

The Supreme Court constantly overrules decisions by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 9^th Circuit, the most liberal court in America, Unfortunately, the reactionary Supreme Court has the last word.

And that means environmentalists lost all five cases, including undercutting the Clean Water Act to allow a company to fill an Alaskan lake with mine waste. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said deference must be accorded the company. Justice Ginsburg shot back in dissent: what about paying deference to the Clean Water Act?

In another dreadful ruling, the Five Horsemen of Reaction weakened legal protection against age discrimination. An anguished Stevens acidly dissented: “I disagree not only with the court’s interpretation of the statute but also with its decision to engage in lawmaking.”

In another despicable opinion, the Puritanical Five backed the FCC ban on airwaves expletives. Justice Scalia in his opinion for the court denounced the words fuck and shit uttered by Cher in a televised awards ceremony. (The priggish Scalia played the silly newspaper game of referring to the f-word and s-word.)

Scalia should read the dissent by Justice Brennan in FCC v. Pacifica (1978): “There are many who think, act and talk differently from the members of this court and who do not share their fragile sensibilities. It is only an acute ethnocentric myopia that enables the court to approve the censorship of communications solely because of the words they contain.”

Expletives deserve First Amendment protection. Stevens in dissent noted the irony of curbing harmless four-letter works while allowing commercials for Viagra, Cialis and Levitra.

On the positive side, the strip search of an Arizona middle school girl was ruled unconstitutional. Justice Souter, writing for an 8-1 court, called it “embarrassing, frightening and humiliating.”

Dissenting Justice Thomas, clinging to the law of the past, said public schools must preserve “order, discipline and safety.” Troglodyte Thomas is probably the worst justice in history. He certainly is the most archreactionary.

Also applaud the court for upholding a grievance of white firefighters in New Haven, Conn. They sued when they passed a test but were denied promotion because black and Latino candidates did poorly. Kennedy, speaking for the court, labeled what it was: reverse discrimination.

Learned Hand, one of the best judges who never reached the Supreme Court, said he would open every session of court with the words of Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, to think it possible you may be mistaken.”

Justice Brandeis made the same point. Dissenting in the obscure 1932 New State Ice case, Brandeis warned the court about its enormous power of judicial review: “In the exercise of this high power we must be ever on our guard lest we erect our prejudices into legal principles.”

But that is precisely what the Supreme Court has been doing for decades, making its biases legal principles.

Plundered Latins fighting back

2009-07-09T13:54:00.001-07:00

After 150 years of being subjected to American imperialism, gunboat diplomacy and exploitation, Latin American countries are rearing up to tell Yanqui to stay home.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spearheads that drive for independence, emboldening Latins to surge to the Left. He set the example by pronouncing Venezuela socialist.

Chavismo and populism forever! He called Bush 43 the devil (he was) and urged Americans to read social critic Noam Chomsky (they should).

Examples of the new Latin America defiance of Uncle Sam:

• President Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, nationalized the tin, gas and oil industries. He is trying to stem capitalist greed. He vows to close the “open veins of Latin America,” a reference to the title of a book by Eduardo Galeano.

• In Chile, President Bacheter waves the banner of socialism. She often reminds Chileans of the right-wing coup in 1973 that toppled Allende, a golpe engineered by the United States.

• In Paraguay, Lugo won the presidency, exorcising the ghost of Stroessner and his 35-year dictatorship. A former Catholic bishop, Lugo is now the bishop of the poor and the downtrodden.

• In Brazil, President da Silva is a former metalworker who battles for the working class.

• In Ecuador, President Correa has kicked the Yanks off their air base at Manta.

• In Salvador, Funes is the country’s first leftist president.

• In Nicaragua, the president is Ortega of Sandinista fame.

• In Honduras, the army overthrew leftist President Zelaya, particularly angering Argentinians, Brazilians and Chileans with their bitter memories of human rights abuses by the military in 1960 and 1970.

• In Cuba, de facto president Fidel Castro got an abrazo from the Organization of American States. The OAS voted to lift the ban on Cuban membership. (Cuba was expelled in 1962 because its Marx-Leninism was deemed incompatible.)

The U.N. General Assembly passed resolution after resolution for 17 years condemning the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell, rightly called the embargo “the dumbest policy on the face of the earth.”

Despite the lingering dumb policy, most Latin American nations are now declaring for people over profits, for equality over gross injustice.

But the United States strenuously objects. It hates socialism and deplores the unhinging of its hegemony. As Daphne Eviatar writes in The Nation: it is “as if representing the interests of the majority were inherently deserving of scorn.”

America historically has supported right-wing Latin dictators. It gave the despicable Pinochet regime in Chile $290 million in 1976. It endorsed Cuban dictator Batista who got enormously rich from the Mafioso in Havana.

Washington has railed at Cuba for 60 years, always “winning” the argument by uttering the dread word communism. No democrat defends dictatorship. But democratic socialism is a worthy goal.

President Teddy Roosevelt boasted that he had seized the canal from Panama. President Taft proclaimed: “The whole hemisphere will be ours soon…by virtue of our superiority of race and morality.”

Does history record a more arrogant statement to support colonialism and imperialism?

In 1935 after a 33-year career in the Marines, Gen. Smedley Butler admitted the plunder of Latin America:

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscleman for Big Business and Wall Street…I was a racketeer for capitalism…I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba profitable for National City Bank…I helped save the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras safe for American fruit companies.”

Or, as Galeano puts it: “the Imperium sends forth its Marines to save its monopolists’ dollars.” No wonder the United States has been the biggest enemy of Latin America.

It stole half of Mexico under the banner of manifest destiny. It seized Cuba, Puerto Rico Rico and the Philippines, making them colonies while building an empire. President McKinley hailed the seizure as ushering in “civilization and humanity.”

The United States role in Cuba is shameless. The Platt Amendment permitted U.S. intervention. It sealed the theft of Guantánmo.

Galeano writes passionately in “Veins” of how the great wealth of Latin nations has been appropriated by capitalist imperialists: gold, silver, sugar, coffee, rubber, cocoa, cotton and bananas.

United Fruit, an American corporation now called Chiquita, ravaged Central and South America. Emily Biuso in The Nation recently tells how: strong arming, destroying natural habitat to build banana plantations, enslaving the local people in low-wage and suppressing labor movements.

“Any attempt by the workers to assert their rights was met with harsh consequences,” Galeano writes.

But Latin America, now blessedly under new management, will no longer tolerate gringo dominance.

Gays still face blatant bias

2009-06-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

It is both stunning and enraging that the last two Democratic presidents have promised great changes but delivered the same centrist pablum on many important issues. The villains: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Obama, like Clinton, promised while campaigning to abolish the ignominious anti-gay military policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. In office Clinton and Obama reneged. Now Obama defends indefensible bigotry and discrimination.

He calls the policy “rationally related to the government’s legitimate interest in military discipline and cohesion.” He buys the military argument that gays undermine morale and esprit de corps.

Under the anti-gay policy the Pentagon has discharged 12,000 soldiers. About 800 of those let go were especially valuable as specialists in Arabic.

The policy wastes talent. It also wastes money training people to be fired.

The Supreme Court is also obtuse, refusing to review a case of discrimination against Army Capt. Jim Pietrangelo. Pietrangelo, fired under the policy, served six years in the Army and fought in Iraq.

“This decision is an absolute travesty of justice,” Pietrangelo pointed out. “The justices should be ashamed of themselves. It is nothing short of rubber-stamping legalized discrimination.”

If the military is so worried about sexuality it should focus on the shocking number of rapes women soldiers suffer from men soldiers.

Boobus Americanus

We hear much blather from politicians about the “wisdom” of the people. The truth is otherwise. The people are so often wooden-headed.

Case in point: the voters of California enacted an absurd law that someone goes to jail for life after committing a third felony, even if that “third strike” is as harmless as stealing a few videos. Murderers, on the other hand, are often paroled after 10 to 15 years in jail.

Or take gay marriage. The people of California voted it down. The votes was un-Christian, opposing love and happiness.

The California Supreme Court, after first ruling that gay marriage was constitutional, reversed itself. It ruled 6-1 to sustain the “wisdom” of the people.

Judge Carlos Moreno had it right in dissent. He wrote that the majority “places at risk the state constitutional rights of all disfavored minorities. It weakens our state Constitution as a bulwark of fundamental rights for minorities protected from the will of the majority.”

There you have it: that dread tyranny of the majority. In a democracy the people rule. The people, however, are often asses.

As Moreno noted in his dissent: Proposition 8 requiring “discrimination against a minority group…strikes at the core of the promise of equality” in the state Constitution.

Or look at referendums in Colorado and Maine where the voters approved anti-gay and lesbian laws.

Nevertheless, the worldwide trend is to approve gay marriage. Norway is the most recent nation to become enlightened on the issue. But tradition-bound America, arguing against a fundamental right, might take 50 years to come to its senses.

A recent poll by the New York Times and CBS shows just 42 percent of Americans approving same-sex marriage. But it is never a question of what polls show. The point is what is right. Gay marriage is right.

Katha Pollitt in a Nation article wrote: “All this fussing about stabilty and children are smokescreens for deep emotional, irrational aversion to homosexuality.” She is so right.

Julian Bond, distinguished battler for black rights for decades, was angered by the California vote. He wrote:
“The state that proudly declares ‘the future starts here’ took a backward step while reinforcing the truism that minority rights should never be subject to a popular right…What is at issue is the arbitrary denial of a civil right to some people.”

Obama turncoatism

On this issue too Obama is crushingly disappointing. He strongly favored gay marriage while campaigning. Yet now his administration files a brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act. The brief falls back on the hoary argument that hetrosexual marriage is the “traditional and universally recognized form of marriage.”

Gays are understandably outraged at Obama turncoatism. As Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, puts it: “I cannot overstate the pain that we feel as human beings…when we read an argument…implying that our own marriages have no more constitutional standing than incestuous ones.”

Obama threw a tiny bone to gays, extending benefits to same-sex partners in federal jobs. But: he left out the more important health and retirement benefits. Obama, the Man of Hope, is as retrograde on gayism as G.W. Bush.

Lotteries, torture and partisan press

2009-06-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

States once thought it sinful to gamble even in such innocuous ways as playing the numbers. But they overcame such scruples when they realized that gambling was a painless way to fill state coffers.

Here in the Silver State many Nevadans who crave the numbers game have to cross the California border to satisfy their urges. Lotteries are forbidden in Nevada. The casino lobby won’t allow them.

Oh, we hear in the Legislature that lotteries are regressive, preying on the poor. Or, opponents argue that owners of small gambling halls would face ruinous competition. Or, we hear wails that lotteries would have an unfair advantage over casinos because they can operate with fewer employees.

But those are all smokescreens. The truth is that not one Nevada lawmaker has the guts to take on Big Gambling. It, like mining, corporations and businesses, get away with tax murder. They are the third rail of Nevada politics: untouchable.

Torture-loving judge
Don Gladstone was the last “hanging judge” in Nevada, disgracing the Sparks Municipal Court until ousted by voters in 1995.

Today another judge with roots in Nevada disgraces the judiciary: Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (The 9th, with headquarters in San Francisco, hears appeals of federal cases originating in Nevada.)

Unfortunately, voters cannot remove Bybee. He has a lifetime appointment. He can be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate but that is quite unlikely.

Bybee, chief White House legal counsel in 2002, signed memoranda approving waterboarding, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and box-confinement amid bugs.

Steve Sebelius, editor of CityLife in Las Vegas, rightly castigates Bybee for abandoning the rule of law, disregarding international treaties and disavowing his own humanity.

Bybee’s memo said: “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious personal injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily functions or even death.”

Hardly a glowing recommendation for the Boyd law school in Las Vegas where Bybee taught before consorting with the Bush criminals.

Partisan media
We have a partisan media in America today. The shouters and ranters of the hard-right flood the airways with their bilge, drowning out the softer and saner voices of liberalism.

But a partisan press is hardly a new thing in America. Almost from the beginning of the republic political discourse was full of lies, hyperbole and absurdities. The Partisan Press era was woefully irresponsible.

The Jeffersonian republican press (pro-French and antimonarchial) declared that the honorable George Washington had debauched the nation, that he was evil, a great deceiver, the source of all the nation’s woes.

When Jefferson ran for president in 1800 the anti-republican Federalists said he would close all the churches, burn all the Bibles, abolish marriage, toss women into brothels and encourage murder, rape, adultery and incest.

Obviously gross falsities. Yet we find similar absurdities being mouthed today by right-wing madmen. They denounce President Obama as a socialist, a communist who will fly the hammer and sickle over the White House.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Yahoo from Kentucky, calls Obama “a threat to this country.” And the Rabid Right declares that Obama should rename the Democratic Party the “Democrat Socialist Party.”(Note the sneer. The proper adjective is Democratic.)

Great ignorant hope
The Republican Party has been reduced to irrelevancy. Sarah Palin, the Great Ignorant Hope from Alaska, flamed out. Now the GOP mantle has fallen on Rush Limbaugh. God save the mark!

Limbaugh enthralls right-wingers with his medieval mind, shouting hoary shibboleths. Even Michael Steele, reactionary chairman of the GOP national committee, calls Limbaugh’s broadcasts incendiary and ugly.

Still, torturemeister Dick Cheney embraces Limbaugh and repudiates Colin Powell, the one class guy in the Bush administration.

Cheney, like the rest of the GOP, opposes everything good for Americans like universal national health and card-signing unionism. He favors everything bad for Americans like deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

Editor Sebelius rightly deplores the GOP hatred of unions: “Republicans hate anything that puts power in the hands of individuals over the corporation, the poor over the wealthy.”

Lapsed Unitarian

After Phil Altick, University of Nevada, Reno, physics professor, died several months ago, Professor Frank Tobin of the foreign language department, remarked at the memorial service that Altick was a lapsed Unitarian.

Funny line. But the best thing Altick said was expressed after he came back from a semester teaching abroad. He was asked what he thought about teaching in London.

“They know more than we do,” Altick replied.

“About physics?”

“No, about everything.”

Sotomayor’s ‘crime’: mild liberalism

2009-06-14T05:35:00.001-07:00

Benighted Republican senators, angry because President Obama did not pick a Genghis Khan or an Attila the Hun for the Supreme Court, have trained their ire on poor Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

Her crime? A smattering of liberalism in her decisions on the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Never mind that the Supreme Court is already packed with reactionaries, constantly voting 5-4, 5-4, 5-4, to strike down anything decent and humane and to uphold anything indecent and inhumane.

Jeffrey Toobin, in a recent New Yorker article, limned the Five Horsemen of Reaction led by Chief Justice Roberts. It sides “with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislature and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.” It defers “to the existing power relationships in society.”

Justice Souter nailed Roberts when dissenting from an opinion the chief justice wrote. Souter said Roberts’ opinion reminded him of Anatole France’s observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.”

Obama as an Illinois senator voted against confirmation of Roberts, correctly declaring that Roberts uses “his formidible skills on behalf of the strong in opposition to the weak.”

“I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about some abstract legal theory or footnote in a casebook,” Obama said. “It is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.”

Which is where Judge Sotomayor is perfect. She understands the struggles of so many Americans. Roberts in his ivory tower and smug comfort will never understand that reality.

Sotomayor was born in the Bronx, New York, to Puerto Rican parents. She was brought up in a housing project, providing the empathy that Obama seeks.

However, her understanding of the Little People gets her into trouble with GOP troglodytes. In a 2001 speech, Sotomayor said: “a wise Latina with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

She is being reviled as racist for speaking the truth. Roberts, in contrast, epitomizes nearly all lawyers and judges: howling conservatives.

Supreme Court history is full of reactionary decisions favoring business and property against the needs of people and the humanism of civilized nations. It has so often blinked at reality and found its retrograde politics in the Constitution.

Just a few examples among so many: 1) Dred Scott [1857] held that slaves were property, inferior beings and “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” 2) In Adkins [1923] the court struck down a Washington, D.C., minimum wage.

3) In Coppage v. Kansas [1915] the court called yellow-dog contracts--forced vows not to join a union--constitutional. The court gleefully noted that “some people have more property than others,” “the right of private property” was paramount and that “inequalities of fortune” are just.

4) In Hammer v. Dagenhart [1918] the court declared child labor constitutional. 5) In two years it struck down 10 major New Deal laws--judicial nullification without parallel in U.S. history. 6) In Bush v. Gore [2000] the court, in a partisan political decision that had nothing to do with the law. stopped the Florida recount to hand the presidency to G.W. Bush.

Sotomayor would bring much more to the court then mere knowledge of the underside of life. She is smart, compassionate and thoughtful.

Roberts, at 54 a young man as Supreme Court justices go, could plague the country for decades. But at least Sotomayor would inject the same compassion shown by Justices Stevens, Ginsburg and Souter in their heated dissents.

On the appeals bench, Sotomayor ruled for baseball players, not the owners. She ruled that homeless people must be paid the minimum wage. She held that an inmate could sue a corporation operating a halfway house for federal prisoners.

She ruled that a broker who held stocks because of misleading information could sue. She wrote that the Environmental Protection Agency cannot use cost-benefit calculations to preserve aquatic species.

She dissented when her appeals court upheld the legality of strip searches for girls at a juvenile detention center in Connecticut. She called it what it was: embarrassing and humilating.

Nevertheless, Sotomayor is hardly a flaming liberal. She was wrong to side with New Haven, Conn., when it rejected results of a firefighter promotion test because blacks and Latinos performed poorly. Her abortion position is unclear, having decided few pro-choice cases and all those on the fringes of Roe.

But no justice ever scores 100 percent. Sotomayor is a good choice to replace the retiring Souter.

Obama: fresh air but, but…

2009-05-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

The change is wonderful: from the reactionaryism of G.W. Bush on everything to the progressivism of President Obama on many things.

He reversed Bush policies favoring corporations over people. He eliminated funding for the absurd Bush abstinence-only sex education. His Food and Drug Administration has overturned the right-wing stance under Bush, letting 17-year-olds use a contraceptive pill without a doctor’s prescription.

Obama’s White House released graphic torture memos written by Bush’s so-called Justice Department. His Labor Department will enforce regulations on worker safety, grossly neglected in the Bush administration. His Justice Department will enforce antimonopoly laws. Bushites never did.

Obama seeks to end the racial disparity in sentencing for crack (blacks) and cocaine (whites). His drug czar will ease the bogus war by stressing treatment rather than prison. Obama scrapped Bush plans to open the coasts to oil and gas drilling. He is halting the Bush rules easing power plant pollution.

He urges better car mileage and higher emissions standards, blocked by Bush pooh-poohing of global warming. He has overturned the Bush policy of more timber-cutting and ever more roads in national forests.

The Obama adminstration will no longer prosecute dispensers of medical marijuana, ending Bushite raids. Obama wants science to rule in medical matters, not ideology.

All of these Obama actions and plans are commendable. But Obama is a half-a-loaf specialist, a tergiversator. Instead of giant strides, he take baby steps.

Obama is not the “radical communist,” as the frenzied Right bleats. Nor is he the “blatant socialist” as the less frenzied call him. Obama is a liberal-leaning centrist.

Obama wanted to shut the Guantânamo prison but discovered an old truism: presidents propose but Congress disposes. Nevertheless, Obama wants to keep the secret military jail at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. And, to the outrage of civil libertarians, his administration will try alleged terrorists by a kangaroo court (military commission).

Obama proposed funding for stem cell research from embryos at fertility clinics only, gutlessly ruling out lab research. Obama lifts travel restrictions to Cuba. Good. But he does nothing about the shameful policies of embargo and nonrecognition.

He promised Planned Parenthood to sign an abortion rights bill but now puts such legislation on the back burner. He seeks to block a lawsuit on behalf of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, who was outed by Bushies because her ambassador husband exposed a spurious reason for war in Iraq.

But the biggest disappointment is Obama’s foolish pursuit of losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush wars have become the Obama wars. A hundred surges in Afghanistan won’t subdue the Taliban, the warlords, al-Qaida and the poppy growers.

Pete Seeger sang: “We were neck deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on.” Obama is no fool. But he forgets the folly of Vietnam and the wisdom of Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Obama’s Pentagon lifted the ban on coverage of the war dead--but half-bakedly. He is letting families decide. As DeWayne Wickham, USA Today columnist, writes: “Our free press is still being stage-managed by those who run the wars...News organizations shouldn’t let family wishes dictate how they cover war news.”

Obama listens to the military too much. He is back-pedaling on gays in the military. He resists court orders to release photos documenting the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama circles himself with permanent war party advisers.

CIA drones pound Pakistan, Obama’s third war. To pursue that war he wants to build a superembassy in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, garanteeing a long-term commitment.

Obama insists in “moving forward” rather than having a Truth Commission investigate the abuses of the Bush-Cheney criminals. But revealing crimes of the past are essential cleansing.

Obama surrounds himself with Jewish lobbyists who will defend Israel à outrance. He runs scared of the gun lobby, refusing even to fight for a ban on assault weapons. He vowed to usher in a “new era of openness in our country.” But in office Obama continues the discredited state secrets policy of Bush.

Obama will keep polar bears off the endangered species list as Bush did despite the rapid melting of the Arctic Sea. He promised to reverse of the heinous Bush policy allowing mountain-top mining that dumps rock and dirt into streams. But now his Environmental Protection Agency says it’s OK.

On the hustings Obama offered withering criticism of signing statements by President Bush. In office Obama issues signing statements. He opposes gay marriage so he refuses to exert moral leadership against prejudice.

Obama, the Great Compromiser, tarnishes a promising presidency.

Progressives delude themselves

2009-05-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

MADISON, Wis.--Panelists here at the recent conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of Progressive magazine were overwheliming optimistic. They are doomed to overwhelming disillusionment.
These wonderful optimists talk about organizing, solidifying and exhorting. They extol the power of labor. They urge pressure on politicians. They demand speaking truth to power. They talk about the wave of the future.
Their hearts are in the right place but they refuse to face reality.

That reality was exemplified by the Wisconsin State Journal, Madison’s only daily newspaper. It did not print a line about the two-day convention attended by 500 delegates nationwide and celebrities like Robert Redford, Jesse Jackson and Cindy Sheehan.
Reality. Progressives and leftists make up a miniscule part of the population, maybe 100,000 out of 310 million. Their agenda has so few adherents. Progressive magazine has a paltry 55,000 circulation.
Reality. The system will not allow profound changes. Corporations and lobbyists, with their money, rule America. They get what they want. The bulk of the people suck hind tit.
Reality. America does not have a democracy. Four Republican senators from Wyoming and Alaska have power far beyond the number of their constituency of 1 million.
Wyoming, with 500,000 people, has two senators. The District of Columbia, with a population 100,000 greater, has none. California has 36 million people but just two senators.

The Senate with its archiac rules is woefully undemocratic, requiring 60 votes to halt a filibuster. This means it can override the will of the majority on such progressive measures as universal health and card-signing unionism.
One mossback senator, the rebarbative Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, can singlehandedly hold up funding for national parks for one year. And: that same one man amends a credit card reform bill to allow loaded weapons in national parks, a totally unrelated measure.
The antiquated Electoral College has given the presidency four times to the loser in the popular vote.
Reality. Americans are innoculated with capitalistic abundance. They love it. The schools, the media and society inculate the American Way.
Nevertheless, the conference was enlived by panelists like Joan Claybrook and Ron Hayes with stiff doses of radicalism.
Claybrook, Public Citizen head for 25 years, offered 12 sensible reforms for corporations, among them: chartering of corporations, ability to revoke those charters, overturning the egregious Supreme Court ruling in 1886 giving citizen rights to corporations, closing corporate tax loopholes, eliminating tax-free outsourcing, setting up a corporate investigating commission and establishing a corporate criminal court.
Hayes, advocate for worker construction safety, declared: “We must make corporate misdemeanors the felonies they should be when workers are killed on the job.”

Sheehan impressed. She denounced President Obama for his warmongering in office after sounding anti-war notes on the hustings.
One panel noted that the civilized countries of Europe have measures uncivilized America does not: universal health, family allowances, maternity leaves, sick pay, longer vacations and strong unions.
Naomi Klein, author of the leftist bestseller, “The Shock Doctrine,” called the two-party system the fraud it is.
She demanded a much-needed Truth Commission to investigate the abuses of the Bush thugs. She correctly denounced Obama for wanting to bury the past, to look forward instead of cementing the past in America’s “historic memory.” She rightly denounced capitalism but never said socialism is the solution.
A sports panel endorsed the “Beer and Circus” of college sports. The panelists embroidered that view by telling amusing stories. But never once did they point out that sports don’t belong in universities. Never once did they observe that sports has become the opiate of the masses.

The conference had its frustrations: microphone-hogging questioners who delivered five-minute speeches, panel moderators who yaked and yaked when the delegates wanted to hear the panelists, standing ovations, self-adulation, preaching to the choir and cheers for commonplace statements.
And, oy vey, the many panelists who simply could not utter simple sentences without that terrible speech mannerism “you know.”
Nevertheless, Progressive deserves accolades. For 100 years it has fought the power of greedy corporations and predatory banks, exposed the plight of workers, battled for the environment, opposed war and decried empire-building. The magazine has denounced racism, sexism and homophobia.
As the weekly Madison Cap Times put it: “It has cherished our civil liberties and defended them against the Joe McCarthys, the Richard Nixons and the Dick Cheneys who would eliminate them.”
But overall the conference lacked the radicalism of Marx. He wrote in the “Theses on Feuerbach” in 1888: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point…is to change it.”
Marx’s vision of change for justice will never be fulfilled in conservative America.

Souter: star amid dim constellation

2009-05-15T12:20:00.001-07:00

Justice David Souter could probably walk into a popular Washington, D.C., restaurant and not be recognized by 49 out of 50 diners.

In this celebrity-conscious land, the Supreme Court justices rank well below Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and The Simpsons in public recognition. The Supreme Court itself is a virtually unknown body unless it hands down decisions stirring outrage on issues like abortion and flag-burning.

Souter will happily retire this summer, going counter to the dictum of Jefferson that few in power die and none resign.

Souter had no flash, no dash, no flamboyance. He was quiet and unassuming, But he was a sterling man and a fine justice. He was decent and humane, so unlike the Five Horsemen of Reaction who control the court today.

Souter refused to join the court politicians who turn their prejudices into legal principles. He refused to join them in ruling for corporations, property and business. He chose the side of the angels: people, consumers and justice.

Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, has written supercilious stories declaring that Souter was a careful, “a low-impact justice.” Liptak compounded the insults by writing that Justice Scalia has a judicial philosophy while Souter has none, that Scalia is highly quotable while Souter is not.

Memo to Establishment journalist Liptak: 50 Scalias are not worth one Souter.

The Supreme Court has had 110 justices. None wrote as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes whose opinions are studded with aphorisms and wonderful philosophical asides. But most of the justices have been poor writers, including the outstanding Justice Brennan.

What counts is decisions, not how well justices write or how much they are quoted.

Perhaps Souter’s most memorable decision was Casey, reaffirming the constitutional right to abortion. He led the court in reversal of a black man’s conviction of killing a white woman because the jury was nearly all white. He cast the pivotal fifth vote to uphold affirmative action.

But it was in dissent that Souter stood out. When the court upheld the notorious three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, Souter dissented. He noted the absurdity of sending a man to jail for life for a third felony like stealing a golf bag.

He dissented when the court struck down the Violence Against Women Act, calling the ruling a woeful misreading of the Constitution. When the economic royalists killed the overtime pay provision of the Labor Standards Act, Souter dissented. He denounced the violation of civil liberties and equal protection.

When the court killed a provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Souter complained in dissent about the court’s “crabbed version” of the law. When the court upheld a law requiring the National Endowment of the Arts to take into account so-called decency, he rightly dissented.

He was dismayed when the court overturned an effort by schools in Louisville, Ky., to prevent resegregation. His dissent called the ruling profoundly unhistorical.

When the court ruled that public schools must be open to Bible study groups, Souter dissented because of the clear violation of the wall between church and state. When the Unholy Five smashed that wall by saying that the University of Virginia must subsidize an evangelical magazine, Souter dissented. He decried the violation of the First Amendment in approval of state funding for religion.

However, Souter was clearly wrong about one thing: cameras in the Supreme Court. He insisted that “the day you see a camera coming into our courtroom it’s going to roll over my dead body.”

The courtroom is a sacred place. But the “nine old men” adamantly refuse to enter the Digital Age. The Supreme Court is an appellate court. It studies the facts and decisions of lower courts.

Unlike jurors, the justices are not persuaded by emotions, by the tricks and pyrotechnics of trial lawyers. The Supreme Court deals with substantive constitutional issues. It would enlighten citizens to see and hear the oral arguments presenting the pros and cons of an issue, the fierce questioning by the justices.

Skelly Wright, the late, great appeals court judge, rightly argued that televising oral arguments would “be a matchless lesson in the meaning of our constitutional rights and principles.”

Justice is supposed to be blind--but not invisible.

Finally, a confession. I wrote after Souter’s appointment that nothing in his background indicated he would rise above mediocrity. So much for the omniscience of columnists!

Souter had a marvelous capacity for growth, a quality alien to the “brilliant” Scalia. Souter became a bright star among a dim constellation of reactionaries.

Cheers and jeers for Glick

2009-05-15T12:12:00.001-07:00

Milton Glick has had an easy path to approval as president of the University of Nevada, Reno. His odious predecessor, John Lilley, may have been the worst president UNR ever had.

But Glick looks fine in his own right. Assessments of his nearly three-year stewardship are good. Typical comments:

“A decent, personable guy. A straight shooter. He has greatly improved faculty morale which sagged badly in the Lilley era”…“Self-deprecating. Hides little. Quick study who does not miss much.”

Joe Crowley, former UNR president, said Glick is doing an excellent job.

He has “deftly established himself as the most influential president in the system,” Crowley said. “Regents like him personally and admire him professionally…He is methodical, willing to listen, intent on staying open and in touch.”

Crowley said Glick is good in the Carson City corridors of power. “He understands the demands of politics and participates effectively in the political game,” Crowley concluded. “He represents the university so well in the political arena, meeting with key legislators regularly, knowing how to twist elbows and mold minds.”

But some are not so impressed.

One knowledgeable source says Glick is a politician who will not rock the boat. “He’s a straight talker when it comes to insignificant matters. But when it comes to important things, Glick is just another CEO.”

Or, to put it in the vernacular: he protects UNR’s ass.

Glick is too defensive about legitimate complaints. Whistleblowers should be praised, not fired. His dismissal of Professor Hussein Hussein, a celebrated animal nutritionist, was autocratic. It still rankles.

Glick insists that Hussein was a plagiarist and should have been fired. But Judge Peter Breen, retired from the Washoe District Court, ruled that he saw no evidence of plagiarism. Just one of four members of the investigating faculty panel recommended dismissal.

Another complaint is that Glick keeps people in key posts who should be gotten rid of. In other words, politics as usual in the supposedly hallowed halls of a university.

More politics: a dean of the College of Science was hired even though that person wasn’t a finalist. Bypassed were highly qualified candidates from the Desert Research Institute and a scientist from the University of California.

Nevertheless, most sentiment about Glick on “university hill” is upbeat. During a recent conversation in his office, Glick repeatedly called me Jake, often smiled and was the soul of amiability.

Doubtless the Glick charm offensive. But it is typical of how he wins over people. He considers himself, as he should, the first among equals, quite the opposite of the autocratic, imperious and grandiose Lilley.

Glick got off to a terrible start at UNR in 2006, engineering a raise for the basketball coach. But now, facing a budget calamity, he realistically envisions a need to slash the athletic department by up to $700,000. He called the $53,000 sports budget cut proposed by Gov. Jim Gibbons ridiculously low.

Glick is also rejects the winning-is-everything attitude about sports in higher ed. “We will not tolerate criminal behavior,” he says emphatically.

He is convinced that the governor’s draconian higher ed budget will not be enacted, a prophecy likely to prove true. He calls the proposal to cut faculty pay illegal, a violation of the contract that professors sign with the university.

He is agreeable to restructuring the UNR Faculty Senate, which is badly malapportioned to favor of administrators over professors. “The very heart of a university is the teaching faculty,” Glick insists.

He doesn’t miss teaching (he taught chemistry for 17 years at Wayne State University in Detroit). Besides: “As president I can teach the whole university.”

He admits he was not a great researcher. (His research area was X-ray crystallography, an abstruse field having something to do with crystal structure.)

Incredibly for a Ph.D., he extols the value of writing while admitting that Ph.D.s can’t write. “Writing is essential whatever the discipline,” he notes. “Writing is so important.”

He opposes beer drinking at Wolf Pack football games. “I don’t like it but a survey showed that people want it.” (The people are right for a change. Prohibition was the worse social experiment the nation ever undertook.)

Glick is also wrong when he urges students to graduate in four years. UNR has a working student body. Students sometimes put in 40-hour weeks, ruling out graduation in four years.

Glick, a dapper man, lightly bearded, is charming guy, a good guy. He is the best college president in Nevada.

Despite the horrendous budget woes facing higher education in Nevada, Glick feels “very fortunate to be president. I love being here.”

Most UNR faculty, administrators and alums love having him here.

Pandering to Reno Aces

2009-04-29T15:43:00.001-07:00

A newspaper should have no friends.

--Joseph Pulitzer

The Reno Gazette-Journal coverage of the recent home debut of the Reno Aces was shameless boosterism.

When the Aces, the new Triple-A professional baseball team in the Truckee Meadows, opened their season recently in downtown Reno, the Gazette-Journal treated it as if it were the second-coming of Christ.

Its page one headlines: “A new downtown ballpark captures our hopes and imagination…Triple-A experience is so much more than baseball at today’s opening game.”

That day’s page one index had seven items, including “GAME DAY BLOG” and “ARE YOU ON TWITTER?” On page one the day after the opener the G-J carried an index of seven breathless items, including “MEET THE FIRST FANS THROUGH THE GATE” and “THE HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN.”

The only thing missing after each blurb was an exclamation point.

Alongside those embarrassing second-day gushes appeared a column headlined: “How are we going to top this?”

Dennis Myers, news editor of the Reno News & Review and media watchdog, was appalled by this complete disregard of any pretense of objectivism.

The G-J and TV stations gave the impression that they owned the Aces with their “reverential and admiring coverage,” Myers wrote.

He decried failure to do a probing report on how the ballpark was financed and “the implications of that financing for the city’s taxpayers.” Myers asked: “Where was the scrutiny of the Reno Aces corporation along with the bubbly, adoring ‘news coverage’? ”

Local news departments have become PR firms, totally ignoring the Pulitzer dictum that a newspaper should have no friends.

The G-J, rapidly decending from a subpar newspaper to a bad one, is now carrying a special section called “Good News.” The very nature of so much news is bad.

The media do regularly run good news. It was good news that the Las Vegas Sun won a Pulitzer Prize last month for public service. The Sun was honored for articles describing lack of construction safety regulations leading to high death tolls. The jurors saluted the courageous reporting of Alexandra Berzon.
It was precisely what newspapers should be doing, not boosting the home town.

In hailing the award, the Las Vegas CityLife expressed the hope that Las Vegas would soon produce another Pulitzer winner. I nominate CityLife columnists Steve Sebelius and Hugh Jackson. They write the hardest-hitting, toughest public affairs journalism in Nevada.

Unfortunately, their kind of commentary is not likely to win a Pulitzer. Newpaper jurors, very much part of the Establishment, prefer safe and sound columnists, not guys like Sebelius and Jackson who tell the naked truth.

Cheering a disgrace

The oldest cry from the Right is that the media are liberal. Would it were so. After President Bush held a farewell press conference, White House reporters gave him a standing ovation.

A standing ovation is highly unprofessional for supposedly neutral journalists. Moreover, how could any reporter applaud the sordid eight-year record of 43?

Prudish New York Times

The New York Times, publishing in the 21st century but with 19th century prudishness, recently ran a story about Supreme Court arguments on the use of the word “fuck” in broadcasts.

“You know the word I mean,” Adam Liptak of the Times coyly wrote.

This is 2009. Sophisticated Times readers can handle that word without blinking.
Another Establishment speaker

I have endured Scripps dinner speakers for nearly three decades at the University of Nevada, Reno, journalism school. All are Establishent to the core.

The speaker this spring was no exception. Edie Lederer, an Associated Press veteran, entertainingly described how she covered wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But she never gave the faintest suggestion that these wars were unjust, uttered not a word about U.S. empire-building and gave nary a hint that U.S. provocations led to the 9/11 attacks.

Just say it plain
The Associated Press reported that a basketball player had “a torn anterior cruciate ligament and torn meniscus.”

Surely there is a more felicitious way of writing that so it can be understood by readers who are neither doctors nor medical students.

Paul Mitchell, journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a sports authority, learnedly explains the injury:

“The ligament acts as a stablizer for the knee (keeps it in place). The meniscus is a fleshy tissue that acts as a shock absorber.” If the parts wear out, “the athlete risks rubbing bone on bone in the knee joint.“

But, Paul, why couldn’t the AP simply say the player had a knee injury? Newspapers are written for general readers, not specialists.

Failure of moral leadership

2009-04-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

Politicians cannot get too far ahead of their constituents. If they do, they will not get elected or re-elected. But for Men and Women of God not to be ahead of their parishioners is reprehensible.

Martin Luther King is a sterling example of a church leader who led the nation into paths of righteousness on race. In contrast, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is a lame follower. He will not lead his Anglican flock to higher moral ground on gays and lesbians.

Williams refused to invite U.S. Bishop Gene Robinson to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, a once-a-decade meeting of bishops in the Anglican communion. Robinson was uninvited because he is the first openly gay Anglican bishop.

Paul Elie pointed out in a profile of Williams in the March issue of Atlantic that “the prohibitions against homosexuality are theologically unsound.” Strictures against homosexuals in Genesis and in the letters of Paul are un-Christian. So are church teachings insisting that the only place for sex is within orthodox marriage and that the purpose of sex is to bear children.

Williams is an accommodationist. He does not want to alienate those conservatives who oppose gay and lesbian clergy and who find gay marriage abhorrent. On the other hand, he does not want to lose progressives who espouse the Christian viewpoint.

Williams’ via media is to abdicate leadership on the supreme church moral crisis of the day.

The middle way is a cowardly way. Williams has traded truth for unity. He has failed to fulfill the hope he stirred in many of the 80 million Anglican-Episcopal adherents when he was elevated to archbishop in 2002.

Fluoride bill doomed to die

A fluroide bill has been tossed into the legislative hopper in Carson City for decades. For decades it has been defeated. So often state lawmakers don’t know what is good for their constituents.

Backers of a new bill to fluoridate Washoe County water rightly declare that fluoridation will improve dental health.

But foes say it is unnecessary and too expensive. They say fluoride is a toxic chemical. They probably think fluoridation is a death-dealing plot by al-Qaida.

Sparks Councilman Mike Carrigan, chairman of the Truckee Meadows Water Authority board, takes the fatuous position that the people have voted it down so the TMWA should also oppose the plan.

Such thinking is endorsement of tyranny of the majority. Yes, the majority rules in a democracy. But the voters often are not smart. They often oppose their best interests and the best interests of society. If form holds, the people will “win” again.

Lucky teachers

Teaching is a privilege. With that privilege goes a huge responsibility. Teachers can have a great influence on young people.

Teaching at the University of Nevada, Reno, J school, I try to do more than instruct students in the skills of journalism. I try to instill a lifelong reverence for learning, the Baconian idea of taking all knowledge to be their province.

I stress love of ideas and the play of the mind. I hope to open minds that might never have opened.

I encourage student cultural enrichment, to love literature, classical music, art, great films and theater. And I stress the importance of constant reading, books both literary classics and books on the major issues of the day.

I read students the challenging lines from Whitman: “He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own, / He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Glad to be alive

Sometimes we pause to realize how fortunate we are to be alive. Such a moment occurred recently when I looked out my office window at UNR.

Above, in a crystal blue sky, I saw a red-tailed hawk, soaring and turning, with striking black wing tips and white underwings gleaming in the sun. What a wonderful sight!

Later, while listening to the Saturday Metropolitan Opera broadcast on WCPE in Chicago over the Internet, I heard the meditation theme from Massenet’s “Thaïs.”

Beautiful. Then I heard several reprises of that lovely theme. How bereft would we be without music.

It us a sad commentary on the campus radio station, KUNR, that I must listen to the glories of opera on an out-of-town station. I have listened, enjoyed and cried over Met performances on KUNR for decades. But the Philistines there now bury the Met at 9 p.m. Sundays.

Progressive: 100 years for justice

2009-04-17T14:09:00.001-07:00

Much of the history of the United States in the past century has been told by The Progressive. It pages resonate with some of the greatest leftist writers and reformers in American history.

That honor roll includes Philip Berrigan and Louis Brandeis, Theodore Dreiser and Martin Luther King, Norman Thomas and Ralph Nader, Helen Keller and Jane Addam, Hugo Black and Bill Douglas, Sinclair Lewis and Upon Sinclair, and Noam Chomsky and Edward Said.

Those names glorify the 100^th anniversary issue of Progressive published this month. The magazine was founded in 1909 by Fighting Bob La Follette, great progressive senator from Wisconsin.

The anniversary will be marked by a conference in Madison, Wis., May 1 and 2. The lineup of speakers includes Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein, Katha Pollitt and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich, Jim Hightower and Robert McChesney, Amy Goodman and Howard Zinn, and George McGovern and Russ Feingold.

Matt Rothschild, Progressive editor, lists its main causes: championing civil liberties, combating corporate power, opposing war and empire and fighting for women’s rights and civil rights, human rights and labor rights.

Rothschild, in his anniverary issue column, writes sadly of unfulfilled goals that Progressive battled for.

“It is disconcerting to read about the need for universal health care by Jane Addams in 1909,” Rothschild writes. “It is eerie to stumble on an article demanding an end of the corrupting influence of money in politics from 1909. It is frustrating to read article after article against the death penalty, starting with Tolstoy’s in 1910.”

Some of the significant issues Progressive fought for over the past century:

Sen. George Norris in 1922 called for abolition of the Electoral College. (It still exists as a mockery of democracy.)

La Follette in 1927 deplored the armed invasion of Nicaragua. “The inevitable result of this harsh, bullying and unjustifiable action is to set the nations of South and Central America against us.”

La Follette in 1942 ridiculed Churchill, that Great Reactionary, for refusing to “preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Norman Thomas in 1946 lamented that 3,200 Americans were jailed for the “crime” of conscientious objection to war.

Philip Randolph in 1948 flayed Jim Crow as an “unmitigated evil” and pointed out the absurdity of a segregated army. Douglas decried the Red Scare in 1952. “Character assassinations have become common...Fear runs rampant.”

In 1949 Stuart Chase declared that Hiroshima was unnecessary, citing a study predicting that Japan would probably surrender in 1945. “The 80,000 children, women and men slaughtered at Hiroshima would thus be alive today if the men who dropped the bomb” had listened to the study group (Foreign Morale Analysis Division).

Martin Luther King in 1960 lauded Southern black college students for their sit-ins at lunch counters while facing “hoodlums, police guns, tear gas and jail sentences.”

In 1963 King wrote that moving classic, “A Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” He excoriated the “vicious lynch mobs” and “hate-filled policemen” who “curse, kick, brutalize and even kill.” He denounced white and colored signs in the South. He noted the indignity of being called “nigger” or “boy,” left with “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’ ”

Wayne Morse in 1964 pilloried the U.S. role in Vietnam. “We are pursuing neither law nor peace in Southeast Asia. We are not even pursing freedom.” (America, having learned nothing from history, is doing likewise today in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

Noam Chomsky in 1982 deplored the fact that Washington “continues to underwrite Israeli encroachment into the occupied territories.” He denounced the U.S. commitment “to an Israeli Sparta as a ‘strategic asset’ that frustrates the international consensus on a political settlement.” (Nothing changes. Israeli horrors continue with American backing.)

Robert Fisk in 1999 denounced NATO folly in the Balkins, breaking “international law in attacking a sovereign nation without seeking a U.N. mandate and killing “hundreds of innocent Serb civilians.”

Bernie Sanders wrote in 2004 of the yawning gap between the rich and the poor. He called unacceptable that “the 13,000 wealthiest families in this country earn more income than the bottom 20 million families.”

Howard Zinn in 2005 deplored the scourge of nationalism, calling it “one of the great evils of our time, along with racism and religious hatred.”

Alas, America rarely listens to The Progressive and its prophets. Prophets like McGovern who wrote in 1973: “America can accomplish far more by the power of example than by the power of bombing.”

Unfeeling GOP, sappy Tuesdays

2009-04-10T13:40:00.000-07:00

“This Land Is Their Land.” By Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan Books, 235 pp., 2008).

Any sensitive soul who reads this book will never vote Republican again. But perhaps that is an oxymoron. No Republican is sensitive.

“The Republicans’ most reliable trick, distraction, is beginning to wear thin,” Ehrenreich writes. “Distraction was the way to get people to vote against their own economic self-interest…The real threats to well-being, people were told, are abortionists, stem cell researchers and matrimonially minded gays.”

She enumerates many of the sins of capitalism: privatizing and profiteering, taking away workers’ pensions and benefits, downsizing workforces, refusing to insure those who might ever make a claim, falsifying records to avoid paying overtime, using child labor and Veblen’s conspicuous consumption.

She deplores “the upward distribution of wealth” built on the low-wage labor of the poor.” She cites the despicable Wal-Mart, “a union-busting, low-wage retail empire” with a $65 billion family fortune.

Ehrenreich rightly decries the fact that health insurance companies are running businesses, “the purpose of which is not to make people healthy but to make money.” They are doing that exceedingly well.

One rebarbative physician, Dr. Prem Reddy, owns eight hospitals in southern California so he naturally disdains the medical needs of the poor. He says patients “may simply deserve only the amount of care they can afford.” He “dismisses as ‘an entitlement mentality’ the idea that everyone should be getting the same high quality care.”

Indeed, Ehrenreich correctly writes that “economic issues are moral issues. Poverty is a moral issue. Forty-seven million Americans without health insurance is a moral issue.”

America remains an immoral nation while so many of its citizens mutter about God and are “noisely committed to Christian values.”

•

“Tuesdays with Morrie.” By Mitch Albom (Broadway Books, republished with an afterword, 199 pp., 2007).

I have read tons of books over the course of my long life but I do not believe I have ever read a worse book.

The hero, Professor Morrie Schwartz, is dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Death is no laughing matter. But the book grows so wearisome that you wonder if Schwartz is worth venerating.

Moreover, you begin to think that Albom, a sports columnist at the Detroit Free Press, has a third-rate mind. (Schwartz was Albom’s professor at Brandeis.)

The author never makes a contradictory point, never even questions “the Great Man’s wisdom.” He is an excellent stenographer.

Originally published in 1997, the book was “a runaway best seller.” It was proclaimed a book that “touched millions of lives.” Well, if the masses applaud it must be bad.

The book is syrupy, sappy and cloying. It belabors the obvious, offers nonsense and repeats that nonsense.

Some of the nonsense uttered by Schwartz: “No one really believes they’re going to die.” Untrue. Schwartz says men are not supposed to cry. Untrue.

“Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” Please. If you don’t learn how to live until you are dying, you have wasted your life. “Love always wins.” Not when a loved one dies.

Schwartz, who couldn’t understand why labor disputes aren’t settled by communication, revealed a woeful lack of understanding that working people cannot communicate with money-mad fiends. Even Albom doesn’t realize that scabs are a subhuman species.

Schwartz talks about the fear of aging. No one fears aging. Aging people just lament that their vigor is fading.

Schwartz on God: “This is too harmonious, grand and overwhelming a universe to believe it’s all an accident.” The professor knew little history and nothing about the world and human nature. Reincarnation? The professor said it was possible.

He says it’s a wonderful thing to see his “body slowly wilt away to nothing” because it gives him long goodbyes. Oh, for a Dylan Thomas to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Why did I persist in reading such a wretched book? Because it was recommended to me by a former student and longtime friend.

The reason he was so enthusiastic about the book was that it made him realize that his frantic 15-hour-a-day pursuit of money was a terrible mistake.

One other truth in the book is a quote from Henry Adams: “A teacher affects eternity. He can never tell where his influence stops.”

But overall, “Morrie” is merely one of those self-help, feel-good books. It is not fetching but retching.

Bile for rich, love for nature

2009-04-06T06:28:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

--F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--This is a column that you hope a friend never hears about from another friend who runs across my blog. The reason is simple: it is biting a generous hand.

My wife and I recently vacationed in Indian Wells, staying with an old family friend. Call her Dorabella. She is one of the finest people I have ever ever known: ebullient, politically savvy, a rabid liberal Democrat, the epitome of the happy warrior.

My problem is that Dorabella lives in a gated community. Let me hasten to point out that she is not rich. The reason she can afford this lavish place is that she owned a home near the beach in Southern California for four decades.

She sold that valuable property three years ago, moving here in the Coachella Valley desert. As they say in the real estate business: “location, location, location.”

The name of Dorabella’s community name speaks volumes: Dorado Villas. It is a complex of 10 condominium areas each with its own swimming pool, hot tub and tennis court.

The complexes are surrounded by date palms. The lawns are as carefully manicured as the magnificent Masters golf course in Augusta, Ga. The silence is often eerie, broken only by lawn mowers, airplanes and the twittering of mockingbirds.

The owner of one villa near Dorabella lives there just one week a year. A nearby gated community may be the poshest in America. Bill Gates owns a home there so he can play golf without being bothered by the hoi polloi.

I cannot help detesting such wealth. I have always resented the rich and their huge houses. It seems grossly unfair that they should have it so cushy while so many people struggle to make ends meet.

Gated communities, offensive from the perspective of this once poor kid, reveal such an enormous gap between the Haves and Have Nots. They symbolize the class warfare launched by President Reagan, polished by President Bush II and abetted by soulless Republicans and Democrats who betray their class.

Not even the Democrats have the cojones to note that class war is rampant in America. But The Nation as usual tells the truth: “Concentrations of wealth in America approach Gilded Age levels…America has become a nation of Wal-Mart wages for the many and private jets for the few.”

Giving our hearts away

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, /

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: /

Little we see in Nature that is ours; /

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

--Wordsworth

This desert country is paradise for the nature lover, a heaven-on-earth I all too seldom visit. So it is particularly wonderful to commune with nature, to roam the Great Outdoors

In the surrounding Mojave Desert, we visited Joshua Tree National Park, home of the twisted, spike-leafed Joshua.

In the park is Keys View (5,458 feet) with a fine view of the San Andreas Fault--or it has if there is no smog. The fault, the ever sliding boundary between the Pacific and the North American plates, runs from near the Mexican border to northern California.

Mormon pioneers are said to have called them Joshuas because they seemed like the Old Testament prophet, Joshua, waving them toward the promised land.

On another day we drove to the nearby Living Desert park in Palm Desert. The first stop is mandatory: a butterfly cage. The beautiful creatures are so unhurried. Watching them is like the restfulness of seeing fish in a tank. Hummingbirds grace the cage, their reds, purples and greens gleaming in the sunlight.

One day I drove to the Salton Sea, an inland body of saline water south of Indian Wells. The shoreline of the lake, 226 feet below sea level, teems with gulls, pelicans, grebes and stilts.

Nothing new to add to my life list. But it is ever fascinating to watch an egret hunt. The bird stands stock still for a long time then darts its spear bill at prey.

The biggest birding delight of the vacation was to watch a roadrunner scurry across Dorabella’s lawn. Once it carried a twig to its nest in a lime, pausing below the tree, its tail alternately touching the ground and slowly rising above its back.

No wonder the roadrunner is a comic favorite in the American Southwest, delighting birders and nonbirders alike.

Loneliness lauded, colonialism decried

2009-03-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

Capsule reviews of books recently crossing this columnist’s desk:

“The Best of Grammaticus.” Writings of Professor E.M. Blaiklock. Edited by David More. Wilson & Horton, Auckland, New Zealand. 1994.
It is doubtful whether more than five out of 300 million Americans ever heard of E.M. Blaiklock. Which is a pity.
Blaiklock, whose penname was Grammaticus, was an essayist of the type that no longer exists in this noisy, cluttered, fast-paced, Digital Age. His columns appeared in the New Zealand press for more than 40 years.
His style was simplicity personified: soft, gentle, thoughtful, wise, literary and historical. He was “a thinking reed,” in Pascal’s phrase. Un homme sérieux. Blaiklock, a professor of Latin and Greek at the University of Auckland, wrote with a clarity and brevity that is beyond most academics. His interests were broad. He easily discussed Housman, Dickens, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Tennyson, Kipling, Masefield, FitzGerald, Carlyle and Hans Christian Anderson.
Poetry pleased him, quoting it often. “But where are the snows of yesteryear” (Villon). “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments” (Shakespeare).
Grammaticus wrote: “Poetry sometimes reaches truth by a shorter path than prose.” He extolled “the blessings of solitude.” “Something has died in the soul of a man when to be alone is terrifying or irksome,” he wrote. “I see no disadvantage in being an only child and no harm in loneliness…I have always enjoyed work and can imagine no fate worse than to be denied absorbing activity.”
On seeing a spider’s web, he observed: “It was a structure of wondrous symmetry and beauty. There are few sights so remarkable in nature.” On academic meetings: “It has been my fate to sit weary hours in committee meetings which, if wordiness is an indication, some seemed, incomprehensively, to enjoy.” (So true. Take it from an academic who detests time-wasting faculty meetings with their endless talk, talk, talk.) Grammaticus, who died in 1983, loved literature, nature and intellectual jousting. Such a man is never really lonely.

“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952) and “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). By Frantz Fanon. Grove Press, New York.
“Black Skin” outlines the psychological damage inflicted on colonized people, especially inferiority complexes. Just as Frederick Douglass, great American abolitionist, knew that plantation owners tried to keep slaves from learning to read and write, so Fanon noted that “the black man who quotes Montesquieu must be watched.”
Or: “When a black man speaks of Marx, the first reaction is: ‘We educated you and now you are turning against your benefactors. Ungrateful wretches.’ ”
Fanon pointed out about racism: “The collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths and collective attitudes of a particular group.” It is cultural, an acquired habit disdaining reason.
Fanon’s last book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” had a profound influence on black radicals like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. To the Black Panthers, Fanon was a prophet.
This “Bible of decolonialism” limned the gross exploitation of colonialism. It rightly raged at racism. It railed against colonial masters who argued that if they left their colonies, Africans “would regress into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an introduction to “Wretched” with this command: “Have the courage to read it primarily because it will make you feel ashamed. And shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary feeling.” Colonists plundered Africa, stealing its wealth, nationhood and manhood. They kept the natives “penned in apartheid” and “scarred by the whip.”
“The church in the colonies is the white man’s church, a foreigner’s church,” Fanon declared. “It does not call the colonizeds to the ways of God but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”
Douglass had the same problem. He tells of attending a Methodist communion in the North, the blacks clustered near the back door. After all the whites had been served, the minister exclaimed: “Come up, colored friends, come up! You know that God makes no distinction among people.” Douglass never went to church again.
The New York Review of Books aptly described Fanon in 1966 as a “black Rousseau…His call for national revolutions is Jacobin in method, Rosseauist in spirit and Sartrian in language--altogether as French as can be.”
Fanon: doctor, intellectual and humanist. He urged the overthrow of barbaric capitalism and its replacement by humane socialism. He was right. But that may take centuries in America where mammon comes first.

Exploding media, college myths

2009-03-14T15:18:00.001-07:00

The answer to the enduring question, “Are the media liberal or conservative?” is easy: it depends on where you stand politically.
To conservatives, the media are liberal. To liberals, the media are conservative. If you are a leftist, the media are center-right and Establishment to the core.
But one thing often forgotten in the argument: the Bushites who broadcast on Fox and MSNBC have ever so much more influence on American public opinion than the sophisticated New York Times.
Another persistent myth: universities are swarming with lefties, poisoning the minds of youth by inculcating socialism. It simply is untrue.
Of the 608 fulltime professors at the University of Nevada, Reno, no more than a handful are leftists.
The board of the Nevada Faculty Alliance, an advocacy group for UNR professors, has 14 members. Liberals all, probably, but not a leftist among them except this columnist.
The NFA refuses to call itself a union. Unions are for “lowly” workers, not “lofty” professors.
The UNR journalism school has 15 faculty members. Most of them are liberals--but just barely. Radicalism? “Sensible” people don’t think Left.
Just as the media in America represent the Establishment, so do journalism schools.
Situational ethics
I have endured many mediocre journalism speakers, panelists and events since I began teaching at UNR in 1981. In all those decades I cannot recall a better and more applause-worthy speaker than Lynne Dale.
Dale, who spoke during the recent UNR journalism week, and her ABC colleagues broke the Food Lion scandal on “Primetime Live” in 1992.
She showed nauseating film footage: meat and fish marinated in Clorox to hide the smell, rotten spots cut out, outdated food masked with baking soda, and mouldy products relabeled with new expiration dates.
Some of the professorial “ethicists” complained that the ABC exposé resulted from undercover techniques. Yes, Dale had a camera hidden under her wig. Yes, she got the job as a food wrapper in the Red Lion superchain outlet in Pickens, N.C., by lying.
But ethical, smethical. ABC was doing precisely what the media should be doing: exposing corruption. It served the greater public good.
Purists deride what ABC did as “whim ethics.” No, it is situational ethics. Something is right or wrong depending on whether the public must know. The ends justify the means when it comes to infiltration reporting.
As the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized: “The fraud was committed on customers by Food Lion, not on viewers by the network.”
P.S.: Food Lion did not sue ABC for libel because truth is an absolute defense in libel suits. The jury in the U.S. district trial court, not allowed to see the horror film, found for Food Lion. But justice triumphed when a U.S. appeals court ruled for ABC.
Undercover muckraking is an old and honorable journalistic tradition. Nellie Bly of the New York World feigned insanity to get herself commited to an insane asylum in 1887. She wrote a devastating exposé.
Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle” revealed the horrors of Chicago meatpacking with rigorous research, extensive interviews--and by masquerading as a plant worker. The novel led to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
In 1971 the historic Pentagon Papers were purloined from Defense Department files by Daniel Ellsberg. The Chicago Sun-Times set up a bar to expose bribe-taking Chicago officials.
Life magazine exposed a quack doctor by gaining access to his house under false pretenses, surreptitiously recording conversations and clandestinely taking photographs. CBS’s “60 Minutes” went undercover to reveal that medical lab kickbacks were a way of life in inner city Chicago.
The Cincinnati Enquirer ran an 18-page investigative report detailing the unethical and illegal practices of Chiquita banana. Sure, one of the Enquirer reporters gleaned some information from illegally obtained voice messages. But the greater benefit accured to the public.
All writers need editors
Everyone who writes needs an editor, including this columnist. I am a careful writer, striving for accuracy and grammatical excellence. But this “Homer” sometimes nods.
Nevertheless, my aim is the same as Franklin put it in an essay for the Junto, an intellectual club in colonial Philadelphia: writing must be “smooth, clear and short.”
Ben’s excellent advice has never been adopted by academics. Their writing is muddy, wordy, repetitious.
As editor of the Nevada Faculty Alliance newsletter I shudder at their terrible prose. It’s the worst editing job I ever had.
Oh, the academics are learned. But they should be compelled to take a journalism writing course before getting that glorious PhD.

Dorothy Day: diaries of a saint

2009-03-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

THE DUTY OF DELIGHT. The Dairies of Dorothy Day. Edited by Robert Ellsberg, Marquette University Press, Milwaukee, Wis. 654 pp. 2008.

David O’Brien wrote in the Catholic magazine Commonweal that Dorothy Day was “the most significant, interesting and influential person in the history of American Catholicism.”
These dairies support that judgment. Indeed, they make a compelling case for her sainthood. Her life shows an extraordinary example of the gospels in action.
Ellsberg, former managing editor of The Catholic Worker, writes in the introduction that Day had an “abiding commitment to social justice.”
That commitment began in 1932 with coverage for Commonweal of the communist-launched hunger march of the jobless in Washington, D.C.
Six months later Day and Peter Maurin started The Catholic Worker, a newspaper for “the man in the street.” It carried Maurin’s essays and Day’s reporting of “poverty and destitution, homelessness and unemployment.”
The two quickly expanded the Catholic Worker Movement, opening the first hospitality house for women. Today there are 185 Catholic Worker hospitality houses in 37 states and 10 nations.
The Catholic Worker still publishes monthly and still charges $1. It is supported by people like me who donate a “widow’s mite” periodically because it really is The Catholic Radical that Maurin wanted to name the paper.
The Catholic hierarchy often disapproved of Day’s Christlike deeds. In 1949 the Catholic Worker supported cemetery workers on strike against the archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Spellman denounced the strikers, declaring that they were under the influence of communist agitators.
In the late 1960s a cardinal was in Vietnam blessing U.S. airplanes. Day was incensed by this pact with the devil. She raged:
“What a confusion we have gotten into when Christian prelates sprinkle holy water on scrap metal to be used for obliteration bombing and name bombers for the Holy Innocents, for our Lady of Mercy. Prelates who bless a man about to press a button which releases death to 50,000 human beings, including babies, children, the sick and the aged.”
Day was arrested at the age of 75 for picketing with the United Farm Workers. She was so often arrested for civil disobedience that a New York City jail kept “a Dorothy Day suite.”
Day spent an unsaintly youth before converting to Catholicism in 1927. Colman McCarthy, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, writes:
“She bibbed (drank) with playwright Eugene O’Neill and critic Malcolm Cowley…reveled with Greenwich Village bohemians, had an abortion, gave birth to a daughter and left a common-law marriage.”
But her passion for social justice and Left causes never flagged. McCarthy adds: she “interviewed Trotsky, went to jail with suffragette Alice Paul, was on the barricades with the socialists, read anarchist Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Jack Reed.”
October 1944: “I read St. Teresa’s treatises on prayer…I labored at watering the garden of my soul…the greatness of the Little Flower…She let loose powers, consolations, a stream of faith…How much richer we are because of her.”
Introducing readers to the fifties, Ellsberg writes: “Dorothy’s willingness to stand beside the communists and other targets of the Red Scare was not lost on FBI boss Hoover.
“In a note in her files Hoover observed that Dorothy Day ‘has engaged in activities which strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups.’ ”
Nov. 13, 1959: “A priest who reviewed my book (“The Long Loneliness”) insinuated that there was something morbid in my love for the poor. Strange criticism.”
All diarists can empathize with Day when she writes: “Always in my life I have found that writing about problems, putting them down on paper, can lift the burden from my heart.” (This columnist has kept a diary since 1947. Diaries are cathartic.)
Sometimes Day’s piety gets excessive. She writes: “Man’s first duty is to praise God, to adore him, to thank him.”
Sometimes Day exasperates by having nothing to say about books, authors or people. “Reading Debs book on prisons.” What does she think about book? About Debs? Nothing.
Oct. 16, 1973: “Kissinger gets Nobel Peace Prize.” Day’s comment? Nothing. The great satirist Tom Lehrer, however, was spot on: “Satire died the day they gave Kissinger the peace prize.”
And sometimes Ellsberg should have edited with a scalpel when the diary descends to trivia. Example: “Lily over tonight and we played Scrabble.”
But Day rightly rages at the ceaseless wars of America. March 5, 1973: “The hideousness of burying thousands of dead in wars.”
If all Catholics, like all believers of any religion, acted like Dorothy Day it would be a far better world.
Day was a socialist and pacifist. A voice of conscience even though often crying in the wilderness. A true servant of God. A saint.

2 books savage media

2009-03-07T12:47:00.000-08:00

Mini-reviews of books crossing the desk of this columnist recently:
“No Time to Think” by Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman. The book makes it clear why you should never watch TV news and its shouting pundits.
The shallowness is appalling. Such “shows” are more entertainment than news. People who watch them let blowhards do their thinking.
The authors are also trenchant about the media being all about personalities rather than offering understanding and enlightenment.
About opinion disguised as news and analysis. About “five grams of news and 10 grams of speculation.” About the 24-hour news cycle “when fast and faster, brief and briefer” are essentials.
As for citizen journalism, it is amateur journalism. Producer Don Hewitt of “60 Minutes” says sarcastically that he also favors citizen brain surgery.

• “Static” is not the kind of book reviewed by the New York Times. It is far too critical of the Times, the media and American policies.
The Times, the epitome of Establishment journalism, runs reviews of a seven or eight run-of-the-mill novels in the Sunday book section. It seldom reviews important nonfiction books--and none like “Static.”
Written by the sister and brother team of Amy and David Goodman, “Static” hammers the Establishment media for cheerleading for the late, unlamented Bush administration and for bowing to power rather than fighting for people.
Amy Goodman is host of the popular radio program, “Democracy Now!” She is a muckraker in the glorious tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens in the 19th century and George Seldes and I.F. Stone in the 20th.
Unfortunately, her program is not available in Nevada, one of the most retrograde states in the nation.

• “Neck Deep” by Robert, Sam and Nat Parry. The subtitle says it in a nutshell: “The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.” It’s another nonfiction work you won’t see reviewed in the august New York Times.
The Parrys denounce the expansive vision of Bush regarding executive powers: “detention without trial of ‘enemy combatants,’ coercive techniques to extract information and confessions… assertion of the president’s right to wage war with or without congressional approval and the notion that the commander in chief’s authority for the ‘war on terror’ knows no limits.”
They write about Bush’s frat boy mentality: “extensive dabbling in instant gratifications from his playboy lifestyle that included evading military service in Vietnam, heavy drinking and illicit drug use.”
They rip Bush foreign policy as having had “the same characteristics as 19th century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic penetration and control, support for leaders, no matter how brutal and undemocratic as long as they obey the imperial power, and exploitation and depletion of natural resources.”

• “Head and Heart” by Garry Wills notes the frequent hypocrisy of Christians in America, from the Puritans to the un-Christian Christians in the apartheid South, to Father Coughlin whose 1930s radio show drew 30 million listeners despite his virulent anti-Semitic diatribes.
America is one of the most Christian countries in the world. Yet its religious history is full of yes-buts. Examples abound:
Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Bay Colony for purported heresy. A Cambridge pastor said her tolerance of other religions was “the foundation of all other errors and abominations in the churches of God.”
After Hutchinson was killed by Indians, Gov. John Winthrop exulted that “God had made a judgment on her.”
Pat Robertson thinks along those lines. Robertson, one of the most rebarbative religious leaders in U.S. history, is the wacko who attributed 9/11 to the moral collapse of America because of harboring gays and allowing abortions.
Another example of gross hypocrisy. School kids are taught that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America to escape religious oppression in Britain. What they are seldom told are the hangings of religious people (Quakers) or expulsion of individuals (Roger Williams) who disagreed with them.
Thomas Paine, author of one of the greatest polemics ever written, “Common Sense,” thought it simply common sense to believe in God.
Paine, like most of the Founders, espoused deism, that “halfway house” between theism and atheism. He was reviled for his devastation of the Bible in “The Age of Reason.” But Paine had a failure of intellect when it came to belief in God.
Jefferson and John Adams also believed in a deity. Jefferson held the view that old friends would meet again in an afterlife.
Even great men sometimes utter nonsense.

Heroic prof during McCarthy terror

2009-03-02T14:29:00.001-08:00

Ever hear of James E. Schevill? Probably not. But he was a hero while McCarthyism was ravaging America.
Schevill, a courageous professor when many people trembled with cowardice, died recently in Berkeley at 88. He was a poet, critic and playwright.
But his greatest glory was refusing to sign a loyalty oath as a prerequisite for teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.
He wrote a letter in 1950 to university president Robert Sproul declaring that he had searched his conscience for several days. The result: he could not sign.
“To me loyalty is not a matter of signature but of heart and action,” he wrote.
He assailed the Red Scare haunting America. He noted that the envelope bearing his loyalty oath carried the number 78025.
“Men are turning into numbers all over the world,” he noted. Schevill refused to be a number.
He pointed out that his father had taught at Berkeley for many years, years during which his father “helped to build the university into the world reputation for free thought that it has enjoyed.”
Now, he lamented, many of his father’s friends had been fired “as if their years of service meant nothing.” He added: “I cannot bring myself to betray the devotion with which my father served a free university.”
He concluded with a ringing plea for academic freedom: “In this suffused atmosphere of questioned loyalties, which reminds me more and more every day of the half-comic, half-tragic world of Kafka’s novels, I cannot agree to the debasement of the free exchange of ideas.”
After rejecting the McCarthyite oath, Schevill taught at the California College of Arts and then at San Francisco State. From 1968 to 1985 he taught creative writing at Brown University.
The loss to Berkeley students was great. But the greater tragedy was nationwide. As Edward R. Murrow said in his 1954 telecast exposing McCarthy:
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices. If none of us ever read a book that was ‘dangerous,’ had a friend who was ‘different’ or joined an organization that advocated ‘change,’ we would all be just the kind of people Joe McCarthy wants.”
Communist witch hunts hit California particularly hard. The California state committee ot un-American Activities persuaded the University of California to adopt its infamous loyality oath. Thirty-one Berkeley professors were fired for refusing to sign even though they were not communists.
Across the nation more than 100 professors were fired. Even the American Association of University Professors, which loudly proclaimed the importance of academic freedom, did not condemn the outrage.
McCarthy’s ugly tentacles reached into Hollywood. Two hundred actors and screen writers were blacklisted, unable to get jobs in the movie industry. Red-baiters circulated Red Channels, a publication that denied jobs in radio and TV to anyone with the remotest radical connections.
The soft-on-communisn smear resonated throughout the country after Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran pushed the McCarran Act through Congress in 1950. The measure required the Communist Party to register and disclose the names of its members.
President Truman rightly vetoed the McCarran bill as a violation of the First Amendment. But many so-called liberals joined conservatives to overide the veto.
However, it was Truman himself who started the despicable red-baiting three years before Senator McCarthy sounded a bogus warning that there were 205 communists and spies in the State Department.
Truman required federal employees to sign loyalty oaths in 1947. This heinous measure soon spread to state and local government--and even to private employers.
Columnist Dennis Myers noted that Reno’s Cal-Neva forced 105 employees to sign or resign. Myers added sardonically: the “atomic spy candidates” included dealers, pit bosses, waiters and janitors.
Frank McCulloch, the best journalist ever to come out of Nevada, as editor of the weekly Nevada State News in Reno, denounced such absurdities. But such absurdities plagued the University of Nevada during the Reign of Intellectual Terror.
Al Higginbotham, head of the UNR journalism department, signed a loyality oath swearing he was “not a member of the Communist Party.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, the staunchest defender of free speech in the land, got weak-kneed during the McCarthy era. It endorsed a bill to limit picketing at federal courthouses to prevent “communists from intimidating the courts,” as Christopher Finan put it in his book, “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act.”
Worst of all, the ACLU refused to support Paul Robeson, great singer, actor and leftist, when the State Department revoked his passport. His crime? He refused to sign an affidavit denying that he was a communist.
McCarthyism was a terrible blot on the American escutcheon.

Books: ‘Dark Side’ to bawdy Bard

2009-02-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

Capsule reviews of books that have recently crossed this columnist’s desk:
• “The Dark Side” is a book that president-elect Obama should read. The author, Jane Mayer, pens a scathing indictment of the Bush administration while urging the recovery of America’s soul.
Count one: “For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held captives…torture is abhorrent to American laws and values.”
Count two: “Rather than seeing the American legal system as the country’s greatest strength, it was regarded as a burden.”
Count three: It rarely discussed “the legal, moral, ethical and rightness” of its policies.
Count four: It “nonchalantly dismissed international law, suggesting that the president could abide by it or not.”
Count five: It outsourced torture and condoned CIA torture of prisoners using sense deprivation, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, temperature extremes and stress positions.
Count six: It endorsed Abu Ghraib “with its American soldiers taunting naked, hooded prisoners.”
Count seven: Its “nightmarish secret underworld of America’s war on terror.”
Count eight: Guantánamo. Yet “another plunge into the dark side” with its further erosion of U.S. moral standing, its gulag of detainees, its Nazi-like “experiments.”
The Bush administration ignored the order of General Washington to his troops “to treat British soldiers with humanity and let them have no reason to complain of us copying the brutal manner of the British army…we should be very cautious of violating the rights to conscience in others.”
Mayer doesn’t say this expicitly but count nine could be an indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney as war criminals. Bush started two unnecessary wars and Cheney was the Vice President of Torture.

• “The Ordeal of Mark Twain” is an interpretive biography by Van Wyck Brooks first published in 1920 then updated. It is still worth reading because its portrait of a giant of American literature is devastating. That view: Twain as immature, infantile, childish, irresponsible, henpecked and with arrested development.
Money was always more important to Twain than a literary career. He yielded to the conventional for fear of losing popularity. And, worst of all, he allowed his books to be censored by his wife and himself.
Twain was afraid to publish his bitter “What is Man?” because it would destroy his image as a funny man and cause sales of his books to plummet. He suppressed the book for seven years despite a nagging conscience. Twain finally published it--anonymously.
Twain became a rich bourgeoise. As Brooks writes: “Success, prestige and wealth had become his gods.”
The great American satirist, the Voltaire, the Swift of the Gilded Age, Twain sold out.

• “The Age of American Unreason” by Susan Jacoby denounces the know-nothingism of boobus Americanus. Her litany is extensive:
“Ignorance, anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism…widespread American credulity regarding the supernatural (ghosts, angels, demons and miracles)…Nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism and evolution taught…a significant portion of Christians harbor a deep suspicion of any learning…the restless American tendency to found new churches with the manifestation of any new vision in the woods.”
American ignorance of simple political matters is enormous. “42 percent think that the Constitution explicitly states that ‘the first language of the United States is English.’ ” Or, “25 percent believe that Christianity was established by the Constitution as the official government religion.”
Jacoby approvingly quotes the title of the Arthur Schlesinger essay, “History and National Stupidity.” Excerpt: “the stupidity of our leadership, the stupidty of our culture and our ‘national stupidity’ of repeatedly fighting unwinnable wars,” in first Vietnam and now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• “Filthy Shakespeare” by Pauline Kiernan describes the sexual allusions and puns abounding in Shakespeare. She boldly prints the sexual gallery of words: dildos, boobs, balls, fucking, wanking, cock, prick, cunt, cunnilingus, fellatio and buggery.
No wonder Thomas Bowdler came out in 1818 with a 10-volume edition of Shakespeare in which those words and expressions were omitted that “cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”
Many of the allusions escape modern readers but the Elizabethans knew what the Bard meant. For Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, life boiled down to tumescence and detumescence.
But Shakespeare was writing ever so much more than “dirty” plays and sonnets.
As Kiernan writes: “His towering greatness resides in his matchless understanding of the human condition, his profound insights into the…psychology, philosophy and politics and the greed, fear, jealousy, hatred, friendship, sex and love in all its many hues.”

Speech Obama should give

2009-02-16T07:43:00.000-08:00

President Obama’s centrist cup runneth over. So, alas, he will not give this speech:
My fellow citizens. As you know, the Bush administration has left this nation with Augean Stables. I am not Hercules. I cannot divert rivers to cleanse the eight-year filth and stench. But I can offer suggestions to make this a better nation.
The first thing we must do is end our two disastrous, unwinnable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are costing the nation too much blood and money and sapping our morality.
They are quagmires, wars that will go down in history as Bush’s follies. They can achieve nothing but more disaster. Moreover, rebuilding in the two countries is costing billions.
We also must put an end to global hegemony. Our military budget is bloated, the Pentagon spending $1 trillion a year. I propose closing scores of unnecessary military bases.
The Israel-Palestine tragedy is not just intractable, it may be insolvable. It certainly will never be solved as long at the United States blindly backs Israel as it has for six decades. Nor will peace come if Israel occupies Palestinian land--and continues to steal ever more.
The overreaction of Israel to Hamas rocket fire gets a tsk-tsk from the world. So does Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying food and medicine to Gaza. Israeli checkpoints and separation wall add humiliation to injury.
Our Cuban policy is a dinosaur. We should return to Cuba the naval base at Guantanamo. America obtained it by coercion in 1903 after its unjust war with Spain. We should end our cruel boycott, open diplomatic relations and ease travel restrictions.
Latin American policy must be reversed. No wonder Latins hate America for its constant invasions and interventions, colonizations and coups. We should scrap all vestiges of the Monroe Doctrine.
In domestic matters, it is a disgrace that the United States, the richest and most prosperous nation on the globe, does not have universal national health. Civilized countries do. Britain approved it in 1945 and Canada in 1966.
The federal tax system should be drastically overhauled. Tax cuts for the wealthy should be rescinded. The once progressive tax code must be restored. Fifty years ago corporations paid 60 percent of all federal taxes. Today? 16 percent.
Something long needed in this country is compulsory national service. All citizens should serve at least one year in these kind of endeavors: the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Teach for America, YouthBuild, teaching abroad, the military or the establishment of a modern-day equivalent of the Roosevelt Civilian Conservation Corps.
That is why I support the bipartisan Serve America Act introduced by Senators Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Orrin Hatch, Utah Republican.
I urge prompt passage in Congress of a bill allowing card-signing unionization. Republicans bleat about the sacred right to vote. The truth is that voting to unionize means pressure and harassment, intimidation, threats of job losses and threats of plant closings, and the firing of workers who dare campaign for a union.
Labor is not the enemy. Management is.
Another crying need is free college education for anyone who qualifies. An educated population makes a better population. College is far too important to work parttime, go to school half-time and fall into debt big-time.
I want every K-12 school in America to teach Darwinian evolution. That is solid science. All those antediluvian views such as so-called creationism, repackaged as intelligent design, have no place in our high school curricula.
Our nation must continue what the Founders demanded: a rigid separation of church and state. Faith is for church. It is not for government.
The civilized countries of Europe are banning advertising for all tobacco products. We should too. But America, including the retrograde Supreme Court, would rather kill people than give up the immense profits. Money is far more important than the 450,000 cancer-caused deaths annually in the United States.
We should legalize drugs. To do so would be an enormous tax source. We should also legalize prostitution in all states. That too would reap enormous tax income for the badly strapped states.
The nation faces so many other problems. One is the military’s policy of don’t ask-don’t tell. It should be abolished. To argue that the gays are a threat to national security or a danger to military discipline is to laugh. Sexual orientation is not the business of the military.
We should end the death penalty in all 50 states, legalize gay and lesbian marriages nationwide, raise the pitiful minimum wage, grant funding for federal elections to end legalized bribery and pass a congressional law rescinding a Supreme Court ruling that money is speech.
My fellow citizens, all these steps are necessary to make America the best and freest nation in the world.

3 books denounce capitalism

2009-02-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

Mini-reviews of books that have crossed the desk of this columnist in recent months:
• “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein says it all in the subtitle: “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
One example of disaster capitalism: Iraq. Destroy the country then rebuild it by paying the Bechtels, Blackwaters and Halliburtons huge sums.
Klein ridicules the notion that America had an “immaculate conception” and never “sinned.”
She shows the ugly truth of American history: unprovoked wars, wars to save capitalists and the ever-lasting stain of slavery and Jim Crow laws.
And under Bush? Use of electric shock and torture, rendition for torture abroad and years of imprisonment without charges.
Klein illustrates how the dominant ideology in America for four decades has been a Milton Friedman free market economy, repeatedly fueled by frightful shocks and violence to implement reactionary politics.
“The Bush team, Friedmanite to the core,” exploited the 9/11 aftershock by successfully promoting its backward vision “in which everything from war fighting to disaster response was a for-profit venture,” she writes.
Klein says the enemy is “ruthless capitalism.” She’s right. Her bleak thesis leaves the reader full of despair. The evils of depressing capitalism: greed, deregulation, privatization, union-busting and riches for the few, economic scrambling for most people.
Yes, this a fervent cry for socialism. But, sadly, the U.S. Left is so minuscule. There hasn’t been a strong Left in America since Gene Debs 90 years ago.
In the unlikely event that the Left ever rises again in America, Naomi Klein should be canonized as an anti-capitalist saint.
• “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins. Economic hit men are consultants to developing nations. They “cheat nations of trillions of dollars by fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex and murder.”
Perkins should know. He was one of them.
On the Reign of Genocide in Indonesia under Suharto, Perkins writes: “We were promoting U.S. foreign policy and corporate interests. We were driven by greed rather than any desire to make life better for the vast majority of Indonesians.”
Above all, the economic hitmen were saving Indonesia “from the clutches of communism.” So what if one million people were killed over 30 years? It was realpolitick, aided and abetted by the CIA.
On Ecuador: the people “had suffered a long line of dictators and right-wing oligarches manipulated by U.S. political and commercial interests.”
But so what? America is a corporatocracy with profits über alles. The people be damned.
Perkins tells of “chickens coming home to roost” in 9 /11, retaliation for the CIA overthrow of Iran’s socialist Mossadegh in 1954.
• “The Soul of Capitalism” by William Greider portrays dehumanizing capitalism, a capitalism without soul, without a human face and without regard for the social contract.
In contrast, Greider writes: “Socialists in western Europe, while they did not succeed in replacing capitalism with state ownership, created a much gentler version of capitalism than America.”
Humaneness? In America, 20,000 workers are fired each year for union-organizing. Labor law? “It confines workers rather than liberates them.” Social responsibility? Retrograde economic guru Friedman proclaimed that “irresponsibility is what makes capitalism succeed.”
Capitalism meets the demands of the market but never yields to the demands of humanity.
• “What Orwell Didn’t Know,” a collection of 20 essays about Orwell edited by András Szåntó.
The 1946 Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is a classic. Political language, Orwell wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to mere wind.”
The Bush administration was masterful at inventing euphemisms. It disguised torture abroad as extraordinary rendition, a bill drafted by polluters was cloaked as a clear skies initiative, tax cuts for the wealthy were masked as tax relief, a tax on estate inheritance carried the propaganda title of death tax, a spurious argument to oppose evolution was dubbed intelligent design, a medically necessary late-term abortion was skillfully labeled partial birth, and the hunger struggle by 36 million of the nation’s poor was described as food insecurity.
The pièce de résistance of euphemism, however, was created by the Reagan administration: death squads in Nicaragua were called freedom fighters.
One essayist, Drew Westen, called the Bush years the most Orwellian of American democracy. Noting the constant repetition of the mantra war on terror after 9/11, Westen writes: “The Bush administration carefully crafted this phrase to maximize its fear appeal and to equate legitimate efforts to combat radical Islamic terrorism with the Iraq war.”
Language goes to war too.

From Lincoln to Obama

2009-01-31T12:24:00.000-08:00

“The great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night / I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”
--Whitman in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” on Lincoln’s death

As a young man I idolized Napoleon. He reverenced knowledge and learning. He sailed to war in Egypt with an entourage of scientists, mathematicians, inventors, artists, writers and other savants.
He studied the lives of conquerors and famous men of antiquity, “in search of his own image,” as one of his biographers put it. Moreover, Napoleon was a brilliant, front-line general.
But the truth of Napoleon soon dawned on me: he was a monstrous killer, depleting the blood of France and Europe for his own egomaniacal glorification and empire-building.
In contrast, I never tire of reading about Lincoln. He was the greatest president the nation ever had. Indeed, it could be argued that Lincoln is the greatest man America ever produced.
In 11 days the nation will celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. Just 13 days ago America inaugurated its first black president. The symbolism is magnificent. Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Obama the black White House liberator.
The day after the inauguration the New York Times reported that aides of G. W. Bush found the inaugural address ungracious. Au contraire. It was far too gracious. Obama thanked Bush “for his service to our nation.” Actually, Bush did a great disservice to America and the world for eight interminable years.
One of the great things about Lincoln was his character. The word has fallen into disuse. But oldtimers will know what it means: integrity, honesty, compassion, sensitivity, kindness and decency. Lincoln had a powerful conscience with a fervor for justice.
Another great attribute of Lincoln was his magnanimity, a quality that Doris Kearns Goodwin found in her “Team of Rivals.” She called it unprecedented “to incorporate his eminent rivals” into his cabinet and cited it as evidence of a profound self-confidence.
Eric Foner, Columbia University historian, calls Lincoln “the politician whose greatness lay in his capacity for growth.” Lincoln opposed abolition until well into the Civil War. But he finally adopted the positions the abolitionists had staked out much earlier.
I have sought my own image in the life of Lincoln. Countless stories have been told about him, some of them probably untrue in fact but true in spirit. The Lincoln stories, like those of Jesus in the New Testament, instruct us on how to live.
One of my favorite Lincoln stories is of him clerking in a grocery store in New Salem, Ill. He overcharged a customer a few cents and hiked miles to return the overcharge. True or not, the lesson is exemplary.
Then you have Lincoln reading by firelight the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare, both with rich cadences that find echoes in Lincoln’s marvelous speeches.
Obama showed his own self-confidence by choosing Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. That confidence was evident from the very start of his first 100 days.
He issued a flurry of executive orders overturning heinous Bush policies: closing the notorious Guantanamo Star Chamber, shuttering CIA secret black site prisons, halting “extraordinary rendition” of detainees for torture, and prohibiting the torture of waterboarding. (Portia says in “The Merchant of Venice”: “Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack / Where men enforced do speak anything.”)
Obama halted the baleful secrecy of the Bush administration, ordering transparency in government. He directed federal regulators to apply California’s strict standards for tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency. He reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose abortion. He lifted the odious gag that Bush put on international family planning groups. He abolished four Bush anti-union directives.
Obama restored science to its exalted place over ideology. He will sign a children’s insurance bill twice vetoed by Bush. He signed a fair pay law to overrule a frightening decision by Supreme Court reactionaries approving sex discrimination. He allowed populist anger to burst through his cool façade at the obsceneness of Wall Streeters getting $18 billion bonuses after a bailout.
Above all, Obama has forever removed the second-class citizenship of blacks. They now can realistically aspire to the presidency.
As a black woman from Atlanta exulted at the inauguration: “Today we become Americans for the first time…All the dignity, all the respect and all that comes with being a U.S. citizen.”
For a century and a half hundreds of Americans, black and white, battled magnificently for black civil rights. Among them: King and Malcolm, Douglass and Garrison, Thoreau and Paine, Thurgood Marshall and John Brown, Robeson and Robinson, Du Bois and Garvey, Tubman and Sojourner, Lincoln and LBJ, Jackson and Booker T.
President Obama has achieved King’s dream.

Hefty Nevada tax increases essential

2009-01-24T08:47:00.000-08:00

Wanted: a Nevada politician with the courage to tell voters that taxes must be raised steeply and why. The state can no longer bumble along with nickel-and-diming while rending the social fabric.
For years Nevada boasted that it had no corporate, individual, inheritance and gift taxes. It is this free-lunch mentality that rightly enrages education Chancellor Jim Rogers. (Rogers has become a common scold but he is so often so right.) In a recent report, Rogers said:
“Monies generated by newcomers created a Ponzi-scheme economy. Those coming in subsidized those already in Nevada. Over time, neither long-timers nor new residents were required to pay any substantial taxes, causing necessary services, including education, to suffer.”
Gov. Jim Gibbons has proposed a devastating budget: cutting higher education by 36 percent, reducing salaries of state workers 6 percent and slashing state employee health benefits. To call this shameful is putting it mildly. It is nothing less than the destruction of higher education.
The need for a state income tax has been apparent for two decades, long before the new Depression pummeled Nevada. The state is facing a grim $2.4 billion budget deficit in the next biennium.
This is the 21st century but Nevada remains mired in the 19th. It relies heavily on the sales tax, an unreliable source of income.
The sales tax is regressive, the poor paying proportionately as much as do the rich. An income tax would be--or should be--progressive. Wealthier people would pay in proportion to their income.
Another urgent need for Nevada is a great increase in casino taxes. Nevada’s tax on the gambling industry is pitiful, the lowest in the nation. It has a maximum tax of 6.75 percent. In Michigan the rate is 24 percent, Missouri 20 percent and New Jersey 9.25 percent.
Mining too is getting away with grand larceny. CityLife of Las Vegas revealed that industry revenues have been up 13 percent in the past three years yet it has a maximum tax rate on such windfall profits of just 5 percent.
CityLife columnist Hugh Jackson noted that gold mining corporations made $25.5 billion from 2000 to 2007 yet paid taxes to Nevada of just $125.3 million, a gross tax rate of one-half of 1 percent.
The tax code is riddled with mining deductions. The Grant era mining law supports land grabs and giveaways. A corporate profits tax would do wonders for the state’s budget.
A third important source of income would be a state lottery. Yes, administrative costs can eat up to 70 percent of the take. But the 30 percent gained is a boon to straightened state budgets.
A lottery is painless. Say the supermarket bill is $120. It’s so easy to spend another dollar--or five--for a lottery ticket. People nearly never win but it’s an affordable loss. Hope springs eternal. It’s the hope that counts far more than payoffs.
Forty-two states and the District of Columbia have lotteries. But the Nevada gambling industry always defeats lotteries, pretending that a lottery would be unbearable competition. All three of these revenue sources are ignored because no politician has the courage, integrity and vision to campaign for them.
Nevada now has a one-note governor: no new taxes. Never. Ever. His head-in-the-sand adamancy could get him re-elected but it is not governing, it is not leading.
The gambling industry rules the state, getting what it wants, defeating what it does not want. It is concerned solely with its own profits not the good of the state.
This is a vast disservice to Nevada citizens. But the state has no political figure with the guts to say that the state must have hefty new sources of revenue—immediately.
Raising taxes is doubtless a losing position politically. But it is far better to lose over a matter of profound principle than win by being unprincipled, by showing an unconcern about Nevada’s desperate plight.
Everyone wants essential services but no one wants to pay for them. So Nevada is stuck with an archaic system. Education is suffering terribly. Social services have been cut severely. The infrastructure is deteriorating badly.
The state is already near the bottom in things that matter: 44th among the states for student proficiency in reading, math and graduation rates, and failing grades in higher education.
But the governor doesn’t care that Nevada is backward. He will increase that backwardness.
The Nevada Sagebrush, student newspaper at the University of Nevada, Reno, has called for the impeachment of Gibbons. Such feistiness is marvelous. But the Nevada Constitution gives just two grounds: misdemeanor or malfeasance. Maladministration and blockheadness do not qualify.

Obama pragmatism hardly change

2009-01-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

President-elect Obama will never please the pitifully few leftists in America. But does he have to whore after the right-wing?
Take the case of Rev. Rick Warren. Surely any administration that boasts of change would not pick an adamant foe of abortion to give the inaugural invocation.
And not just any foe. Warren endorsed intolerance and discrimination in the California Constitution, urging a ban on gay marriage. He compares same-sex marriage with incest, pedophilia and polygamy.
That is yesterday thinking, not tomorrow thinking.
Or take the Obama choices as military and diplomatic leaders and advisers: mostly hawks and recycled Clintonites. They are the very people who got the nation into two wars.
It’s as if people voted for Obama in disdain for John McCain and got McCain. Obama is keeping Republican Bob Gates as secretary of defense and naming Gen. Jim Jones as national security adviser. Jones, a close friend of McCain, would resume the Cold War by expanding NATO.
Indeed, you know Obama’s choices are bad if right-wingers like Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh pronounce them good.
Then there is hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. And Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief-of-staff designate, who pushed the disastrous NAFTA in the Clinton White House.
The story is the same on the economic front. Tim Geithner as treasury secretary and Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council are old Clinton hands. They are corporate Democrats who espoused deregulation and boosted globalization.
Enough of pragmatic politics. The nation needs boldness, not pragmatism, not business as usual, not the same-old, same-old. Obama needs backbone to stifle the absurd reactionary bleats of “lurching to the left.”
Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a soi-disant progressive, says “the country must be governed from the middle.” Straight out of the Democratic Leadership Council playbook!
And how about Eric Holder, attorney general-designate? He has endorsed extension of the heinous provision of the Patriot Act allowing federal agents to demand library and bookstore records.
Ken Salazar at Interior? Too much of a dealmaker. After eight years of environmental devastation under Bush, the country needs an environmentalist not a business tradeoff guy.
Sure, all the Obama appointments are bright. So were “The Best and Brightest,” the sardonic title of David Halberstam’s book about the men who led the nation into the morass of Vietnam. Intelligence is worthless without wisdom.
Obama has so many decisions to make to undo the horror of the Bush regime. But the No. 1 priority should be ending the nation’s two costly, endless and hopeless wars.
People out of work and struggling to buy food and medication may feel differently. But withdrawal from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to restore the worldwide faith in and moral authority of America.
Chris Hedges of the online Truthdig calls the wars state-sponsored terrorism, defying “every ethical and legal code.” America is the real rogue nation.
Paul Roberts in Progressive rightly urges the halting of gratuitous wars and a slash of “unnecessary military spending, which exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.”
On the up side, the Obama choice for labor secretary, Hilda Solis, is a keeper. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights, fighting to increase the paltry minimum wage. As a California congresswoman she voted for card-signing unionizing.
Solis is everything Bush was not.
Obama’s green team sounds like another keeper, one that will reverse the rabid Bush anti-environmentalism. Obama chose Steven Chu, Nobel physicist, to run the Energy Department and Carol Browner to coordinate energy and climate-change policies.
Leon Panetta as CIA director? California Sen. Dianne Feinstein complains that he lacks intelligence-gathering experience. Actually, that is a plus. The nation needs a director to abandon spying, torturing, assassinating and overthrowing governments in favor of its original mission of collecting intelligence.
Obama needs courage to do what is right. Among them are rapprochement with Cuba: lifting the embargo, extending diplomatic recognition and ending travel restrictions by Americans.
To end forever the one-sided, pro-Israel policies of America, including the daily outrages toward the Palestinians. He needs steel to forge a two-nation policy, demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands while facing down the potent Jewish lobby.
On his first full day in office Obama needs to end the military’s stupid policy of don’t ask, don’t tell.
None of this is to gainsay the hope that Obama brings to the White House: putting science over Bush politics, putting intelligence over Bush boobishness and putting competence over Bush cronyism.
But, overall, too many of his choices have the stench of centerism for a guy who had promised hope, change and fresh thinking. Obama had to run to the center to win the nomination. As president, he does not -- and should not.

Bush reign tarnished America

2009-01-13T06:51:00.000-08:00

The shoe-thrower in Baghdad provided a metaphor for the unmitigated disaster of the eight-year monarchy of G.W. Bush. The toss illustrated the utter contempt for Bush, the worst president in U.S. history.
Bush leaves the White House with a deep moral stain that includes torture, kidnapping for torture abroad, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. He disgraced the presidency. He left America at its all-time low in world prestige and all-time high in domestic abhorrence.
Jane Mayer writes in “The Dark Side”: “For the first time in its history, the United States sanctioned government officials to physically and psychologically torment U.S.-held detainees, making torture the official law of the land.”
Bush squandered blood, money ($3 trillion) and moral currency in two unnecessary wars. He promulgated the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare.
His domestic policies were retrograde. Tax cuts for the wealthy. Deregulation and more deregulation with a madness for privatization. The powerful fear factor after 9/11 greatly aided his reactionary agenda.
History, far from absolving Bush, will judge him as an ignoramus, an unlettered, uncultured dolt. He was shallow and hollow. A buffoon, a worldwide embarrassment.
E.L. Doctorow savaged Bush in an essay: “His mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth.”
Bush was a son of privilege, a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. He occasionally served in the Texas Air National Guard, a “champagne” posting gotten through dynastic pull. He constantly failed in business but always failed upward because of powerful connections.
Abortion violated Bush’s religious principles so he constantly undercut the landmark Roe v. Wade. His first body blow was a global gag rule on abortion providers. His last was the “right of conscience” to refuse abortion services.
Stem cell research? So what if it could lead to medical breakthroughs for the good of mankind. Bush took orders from a higher power.
He put conservative ideology over the truths of science. He destroyed the social contract and elevated property rights over human rights.
Bush trashed the environment. To him, global warming was a myth to be ignored if not laughed at. He compromised federal agencies and departments, turning the Justice Department into a political fiefdom. He refused to allow photos of 4,000 American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan in coffins.
He sealed his father’s presidential records because they might reveal terrible secrets. Russ Baker in “Family of Secrets” wonders if the Bush-friendly CIA murdered the Kennedys for ideological and political reasons.
Bush II stacked the judiciary with ugly conservatives who will influence the law for decades. He rejected the world-honored Geneva Conventions. America alone among Western nations refused to sign a U.N. resolution to decriminalize homosexuality.
The Constitution? A trifle. Bush decided the law. Civil liberties? Worth trampling for what he falsely called national defense. The FBI under him infiltrated lawful, peaceful groups. It allowed agents to gather information on citizens without evidence of wrong-doing. Bush issued signing statements declaring what he wanted congressional laws to mean.
His hubris was monumental. When an aide suggested that tax cuts for the rich might be bad policy, Bush chastised him: “If I decide to do it, by definition it’s good policy.”
Bush’s meanness was glaring. Not satisfied with ruining the country for eight years, he did his damnedest over his last three months to desecrate it further. His departing administration issued “midnight rules” presenting gifts to business and industry.
Items: He greatly weakened the Endangered Species Act...Having desecrated Yellowstone with snowmobiles, he said loaded guns were just wonderful in national parks…He made it easier for coal companies to dump rock and dirt into streams and valleys…He blocked California’s effort to regulate tailpipe emissions…He ruled that new power plants need not install technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Bush was adept at the blame game. Financial woes of the auto industry? He called it the fault of the United Auto Workers, demanding still more wage slashes. Yet the UAW made concessions in 2003, 2005 and 2007 contracts. Big Business? Oh, it’s all right to use bailout money to pay absurd salaries and hand out huge bonuses.
As for Vice President Dick Cheney, he was the svengali behind Bush. America has had evil men in power before: Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and Joe McCarthy. Cheney joins them.
Cheney said he had better things to do than serve in Vietnam. He called waterboarding entirely appropriate in the bogus war on terror. He said wiretapping was fine.
Bush and Cheney were totally unfit to be president and vice president. It speaks ill of the American people who twice put them in office over far better men.

War! War! War! War!

2009-01-13T06:49:00.000-08:00

I should welcome almost any war for I think this country needs one.
Teddy Roosevelt in letter to a friend, 1897
There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again.
Eugene O’Neill

You don’t have to be pacifist or a Quaker to be outraged by perpetual U.S. wars staining the pages of history. America is a warfare state.
Howard Zinn in his classic, “A People’s History of the United States,” underlines this warmongering: “It had instigated a war with Mexico and taken half of that country. It had pretended to help Cuba win freedom from Spain and then planted itself in Cuba with a military base and rights of intervention.
“It had seized Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam and fought a brutal war to subjugate the Filipinos. It had ‘opened’ Japan to its trade with gunboats and threats…It had sent troops to Peking to assert Western supremacy in China and kept them there for more than 30 years.”
America insisted on an open door policy in China but a closed door policy in Latin America. It maintained those closed doors with interventions under the bogus Monroe Doctrine.
“It engineered a revolution against Colombia and created the ‘independent’ state of Panama in order to build and control the Canal,” Zinn writes. “It sent 5,000 Marines to Nicaragua in 1926 to counter a revolution and kept them there for seven years.
“It intervened in the Dominican Republic in 1916 for the fourth time and kept troops there for eight years. It intervened for the second time in Haiti in 1915 and kept troops there for 19 years. Between 1900 and 1933 the United States intervened in Cuba four times, in Nicaragua twice, in Panama six times, in Guatemala once and in Honduras seven times.”
In an intervation that few Americans know about, the nation sent soldiers to Vladivostok and Archangel seeking to overturn the Russian Revolution of 1917. That was the real beginning of the Cold War.
President Wilson, seeking “to make the world safe for democracy,” entered World War I after German submarines sank merchant ships with some Americans aboard.
But Richard Hofstadter in “The American Political Tradition” labeled the casus belli a “rationalization of the flimsiest sort.” The Brits too had been intruding on the rights of American citizens on the high seas but that was OK because they were allies.
World War II was one of the few just American wars. But it was soon followed by the unjust Korean War.
In 1958 America dispatched Marines to Lebanon to “stabilize” it and to watch over Mideast oil. In 1961 American-backed forces invaded Cuba. Next up: Vietnam.
“From 1962 to 1972 the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country--and failed,” Zinn writes.
In 1970 America launched an air war on Cambodia. Next: Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama and in the Gulf War in Iraq.
The sainted Carter maintained a huge War Machine. Reagan in 1982 sent Marines to intervene in a Lebanonese civil war.
Clinton ordered bombing of Baghdad on a shaky pretense. In Operation Monica, Clinton called for air strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. He waged war in Yugoslavia.
U.S. troops are bogged down today in unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan in the next 18 months, bringing the total to 58,000. It’s goal: the hopeless task of conquering Afghanistan.
We heard that story before: how more troops were absolutely necessary in Vietnam. But that story ended in abject failure. It should have. The United States had no business being there.
The same scenario is unfolding in Afghanistan. It will end the same way: abject failure. The country is simply unconquerable. The ostensible reason for being there was to capture Osama bin Laden. But that is no justification for war.
The nation never learns. Yet it preaches peace and goodwill throughout the world--unless nations are socialistic, back the Palestinians and are on the evil empire list.
Many members of Congress know better. But they do not dare oppose wars. They know that they will be called unpatriotic and disloyal, soft on terrorism and betrayer of U.S. soldiers.
This brief survey is hardly definitive about all U.S. wars and interventions. But it is overwhelming proof of a nation at permanent war.
President-elect Obama is hardly reassuring when he says that still more soldiers must be poured into the Afghanistan quagmire.
It’s doubtful that America will ever have a political leader with the vision and boldness to say what Macbeth said to Macduff: “Hold, enough!”

Yuletide magic through recordings

2008-12-27T11:24:00.000-08:00

De gustibus non est disputandum.
We all have our likes and dislikes, our passions and hatreds. I like jazz but two highly intelligent people I know dislike it. I hate organ music, probably because it reminds me of my upbringing in the Lutheran Church.
But I learned long ago at garage sales that one man’s trash is another’s treasure. With that caveat, I present my favorite Yuletide recordings.
They are: “The Nutcracker” by Tchaikovsky; “Christmas in France” by the Little Singers of Versailles; and the “Messiah” by Handel.
Yes, I know. “The Nutcracker” has become a horrible musical cliché at Christmas. But to me it is still magical, either listening to recordings or seeing the ballet.
Little Clara and her brother Fritz peer through a keyhole to watch a fairy tale unfold. The wizard Drosselmeyer produces three enormous boxes to begin the magic show.
The storyline is familiar. Clara adores the nutcracker but is terrified by the seven-headed Mouse King…The nutcracker turns into a handsome prince. Clara and the nutcracker sail away and live happily ever after.
Throughout we hear the wonderful Tchaikovsky music with its succession of dances: “The Sugar Plum Fairies,” the “Snowflake Waltz,” the “Waltz of the Flowers,” “Arabian,” “Polonaise” and “Galop.”
There is no mystery why it has become such a Christmas staple. Children love its fantasy, its expression of the wonder and joy of Christmas.
I can still see in my mind’s eye Valerie, my six-year-old daughter, awakening me too early one Christmas morning. She was trembling with excitement and anticipation before opening her presents.
And I can still see another daughter, Vicki, nearly two, looking over a balcony, staring with open-mouthed surprise at a Christmas tree.
But we love children at any season.
Longfellow expressed that love in a poem, “The Children’s Hour.” An “old mustache” of a father is in his study when he is assaulted with love by his three daughters, “blue-eyed banditti.”
They devour him with kisses. But he is a match for them, holding them fast in his “fortress” and putting them down “into the dungeon in the round-tower of his heart.”
Purity of Children

The traditional Christmas carols have long since left me indifferent, sung by dreary rote after dreary rote each December. But the child singers of “Christmas in France” offer a remedy, singing 12 wonderful Yule songs in French.
Their voices ring out with the purity of childhood innocence. It is as if I am hearing them sing in a centuries old cloister somewhere in France.
I find the singing moving, the essence of Christmas: “Il est né le divine enfant” (the divine child is born). And Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne Suite” with its majestic opening: “Ce matin j’ai rencontré… (This morning I met…).
Glorious ‘Messiah’
A Reno Unitarian friend, knowing I was the village atheist, once asked me incredulously how I could stomach church music such as the oratorio “Messiah.”
“Because it is great music,” I replied. “It is simply magnificent.”
And so it is. I love its ringing joy, its driving score, its power, its affirmation. And, at the risk of sacrilege, its sometimes toe-tapping rhythms.
One of the greatest musical moments in my life occurred in London in 1985: a performance of “Messiah” in the 5,300-seat Royal Albert Hall.
The chorus: an incredible 400. The singing emotional and powerful. I was glowing for days afterward.
But I can see why my Unitarian friend was put off by the work: the words are straight out of the Bible.
“And the Glory of the Lord”…“For unto us a child is born”… “Glory to God in the highest”…“All we, like sheep, have gone astray”…“Why do the nations so furiously rage?”…“Lead my sheep”… “The trumpet shall sound”…“O death, where is they sting?”… “Worthy is the Lamb”…“Blessing and honor”…“Amen.”
And the incomparable “Hallelujah.”
No matter how many times “Messiah” has been sung and how many ages hence it will be sung, it will never be a chestnut. It had its première in Dublin in 1742. It will be sung at Christmas until Doomsday.
Like the great music of Beethoven, “Messiah” can never be tiresome if is performed well, if it is sung with the zest and loftiness worthy of the grand music it is.
Anyone who cannot appreciate “Messiah” cannot have a soul.

3 great Christmas stories

2008-12-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

Students at the University of Nevada, Reno, have often found me forbidding and intimidating. It’s as if I were one of those newspaper city editors of yesteryear who were crusty, gruff and brusque.
One such city editor a century ago was Charles Chapin of the New York Evening World. Chapin boasted that he had fired 108 men, including the son of the great Joseph Pulitzer.
Chaplin was so hated in the newsroom that when he called in sick one day reporter Irvin Cobb remarked: “Let us hope it’s nothing trivial.”
So, no, I am hardly a Chapin throwback. What few UNR students know is that beneath my demanding, driving, hard-shell exterior is a guy who is all mush.
I wax particularly sentimental at the Yuletide, rereadng my three favorite Christmas stories: the beginning of Luke 2, the beginning of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and H.L. Mencken’s “Christmas Story.”
Luke 2 is not my favorite biblical passage. John 8: 3-13 is. Those verses from John sum up the essence of Christ.
John relates how the scribes and pharisees brought to him a woman taken “in the very act” of adultery. They ask Jesus if she should be stoned to death according to the law commanded by Moses.
”He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,“ Jesus replied. The accusers, “convicted by their own conscience,” disappeared one by one.
(Read the King James Version published in 1611. It is literature. Modern translations may be more understandable sometimes and more accurate sometimes, but they lack the poetry, the majesty of the KJV.)
Luke 2: 1-20 is a marvelous account of the birth of Jesus. Mary is “great with child” not the prosaic pregnant. And then: “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men.”
Next: the Dickens classic. One-half of one of my book shelves is taken up by his novels and stories. The book with “A Christmas Carol” is discolored at the bottom of the spine from decades of being pulled from the shelf.
The opening delights me as often as I have read it.
Scrooge is “solitary as an oyster”… “No beggers implore him to bestow a trifle”…Christmas? “ ‘Bah!’ said Scrooge. ‘Humbug!’ ” He declares that every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”
When his nephew wishes him a Merry Christmas, Scrooge replies: “What right do you have to be merry?…You’re poor enough.”
When two visitors ask for a donation for the poor, Scrooge replies “Nothing.” Then he cruelly adds that if some people would prefer to die rather than go to rest homes “they had better do it and decrease the surplus population.”
Finally, “Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern.” Old, alone, bitter.
Next: the Mencken story. Mencken was vitrolic, acerbic, caustic, mocking, mordant, sardonic and iconoclastic.
He snarled about the “the swinish multitudes.” He declared that “One horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms.” He said “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.” He called Americans an “ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers” who “live in a land of abounding quackeries.”
HLM was the great crusader against nonsense, a disturber of the peace. He hooted at the absurdities of boobus Americanus. It sometimes seemed that nothing pleased him. But Christmas did.
Mencken reveals a tender side in his wonderful Christmas tale. It is quintessential HLM but with a twist, a classic story that few know about except Menckenoids
“Christmas Story,” first printed in The New Yorker in 1944 and published by Knopf in 1946, is gentle with its irony.
Fred Ammermeyer, a flaming infidel who sends the clergy of Baltimore a copy of “The Age of Reason,” is determined that the waterfront derelicts will celebrate Christmas without any of the usual holy roller calls for repentance.
But the bums, reverting to mission piety after several rounds of beer, begin singing Christian hymns: “Throw Out the Lifeline,” “Where Shall We Spend Eternity” and “Wash Me and I Shall be Be Whiter Than Snow.”
This was too much for the police lieutenant who wanted no part of salvation piety. He slouched off from the party scene in disgust.
He complained later to a friend: “Well, what could you expect from a bunch of bums? They have been eating mission handouts so long they can’t help it…Think of all that good food wasted! And all that beer! And all those cigars!”

Senate disgraces itself--again

2008-12-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

The U.S. Senate is clubby, an exclusive inner group that salutes its own senators even if despicable. So it was hardly surprising that it recently gave a lachrymose farewell to Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska.
Nevertheless, to honor a man convicted of seven felony counts, including illegally concealing gifts, is beyond the pale for even that often ignominious body.
A letter writer to the San Francisco Chronicle put it perfectly: “A body of elected officials so blinkered by ‘collegial’ loyalty that it offers damp-eyed kudos to a greedy, corrupt old thug like Stevens on his way to jail has a serious ethical deficit.”
Sad to say, this shabby performance was directed by Nevada’s Sen. Harry Reid, majority leader, who called Stevens a lion of the Senate.
Another senator, John McCain of Arizona, has neither ethical principles nor a sense of decency.
During a Georgia campaign for the Senate in 2002, McCain called Saxbe Chambliss disgraceful and reprehensible for maligning Sen. Max Cleland, Vetnam vet and triple amputee.
Now, six years later, McCain goes to Georgia to hail and endorse the disgraceful and reprehensible Senator Chambliss in his runoff election against Jim Martin.
The Senate has too many lowlifes like Chambliss and McCain.
Term limits fade
Term limits, which roused the vox populi a decade ago, seems to have run its course--fortunately.
It never was a good idea to impose limit terms on elected officals. Like so many supposed reforms, term limits was no reform at all.
They robbed citizens of too many good public officials with their knowledge and experience. Voters can always “term-limit the bums” at the polls.
Hail Krugman
Economists, like lawyers and judges, are some of the most conservative professionals in America. So it was amazing that the liberal Paul Krugman of the New York Times this year won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Krugman’s column sparkles amid the op-edit pages of America riddled with middle-of-the-roaders and conservatives. Paul Samuelson, another economics Nobelist, calls Krugman “the only columnist in the United States who has had it right on almost every count from the beginning.”
Damned cellphones
Walking across the University of Nevada, Reno, campus recently, I passed four students in a row with cellphones clamped to their ears. Driving home a few days later, I passed a guy riding no-hands on his bicycle, two dogs on a leash held in one hand and a cellphone held in the other.
Detestable. Cellphones have become my bête noire. They indicate hollow minds.
Football playoff
Hey, Barack Obama is going to be a great president! His first sports decision as president-elect is a call for college football playoffs to decide the national champion.
Oh, I hear the howls of the purists. That football has no business being played in colleges. That the season is already too long.
All too true. But sports is a reality, a big business. Championships should be decided on the field, not on paper.
Manny Ramirez, who forced the Boston Red Sox to trade him to the Los Angeles Dodgers last summer, is a fine batsman but a disgusting human being.
Tim McCarver, Fox broadcaster, observed: “Some of the things he did were simply despicable, like not playing, refusing to play and forgetting what knee to limp on.”
Civilized minority
The Sparks Tribune may be the freest newspaper in America. It prints my radical views that no other newspaper would. Indeed, my leftist positions may be too extreme for even left-wing magazines like The Nation and The Progressive.
Even the editor of the Trib, Nathan Orme, has had doubts about my column. He sent me an email a couple months ago wondering if I could write about “something that does not disgrace America.”
Doubtless he was being facetious. To his great credit he never censors anything I write.
I am like Iago who says in “Othello”: “For I am nothing if not critical.” I do not find much right with America. Governments, politicians, institutions, society and mores are all wanting.
So I make no apology for my views. It is my nature. I burn fiercely at injustice. As Martin Luther said at the Diet of Worms in 1521: “Here I stand. I can do no other.”
I write to please myself, not to please anyone else. Above all, like H.L. Mencken, I write for a civilized minority. Writer James Farrell explained what he meant:
“Those who believe in and are interested in ideas and the play of the mind. Those whose taste is for books in which you find truth.”

On the last frontier: atheism

2008-12-06T10:17:00.000-08:00

A woman friend once asked me: “What do you care if you tell a lie? You’re an atheist.”
The question and the statement reveal a gross misunderstanding of atheism and atheists.
Atheists are moral, ethical, humane, good and decent. It is simply that they need no god to tell them to be so.
Even John Locke, the great 18th century British philosopher whose political theory influenced the American Founders, said “atheists must not be tolerated.”
Such thinking still prevails today in America, one of the most Christians nations in the world.
Atheism is one of the last barriers to political office. Many voters believe that atheists are immoral. A Gallup-USA Today poll recently showed 53 percent would not vote for an atheist.
The nadir of atheist hatred was reached by state Rep. Monique Davis of Kentucky earlier this year. She railed against atheism: “This is the land of Lincoln where people believe in God…It’s dangerous for our children to even know that atheism exists! We believe in something. Atheists believe in destroying!”
Disregard the ravings of a maniacal cretin. But is it immoral to believe in cradle-to-grave socialism? Many atheists do.
Is it immoral to seek justice and fairness? Many atheists do.
Is is immoral to seek to improve the human condition in America and the world? Many atheists do.
Tom Krattenmaker, in a USA Today essay, wrote:
“Nonbelievers, who can be found all across the landscape engaging in acts of decency and battles for justice, are worthy citizens in a country whose Constitution imposes no religion and whose tradition cherishes freedom of choice in all matters religious.”
Atheists are far more tolerant, far more understanding of people and human nature than the so-called Christians who sang, preached and prayed at the Crossroads Bible Church in San Jose, Calif., before the recent election.
Their purpose: support for Proposition 8 placing a ban on gay marriage in the California Constitution.
A visiting preacher from Orlando, Fla., exhorted the Crossroads congregation: “Homosexual marriage is wrong. If we take sides, we must take the side of God.”
If God is for banning gay marriage I vigorously dissent. I favor the deep love, the deep happiness and the deep joy of same-sex couples marrying.
Sen. Diane Feinstein of California supports gay marriage. “I’ve seen the happiness of people, the stability that these commitments bring,” she said. “Many adopted children who would have ended up in foster care, now have solid homes. They are brought up learning right from wrong.”
Opposing love, happiness and joy is incomprehensible. Gay marriages are also made in heaven.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran a page one picture accompanying the Crossroads church story. It showed the host of a pro-Prop 8 rally praying at the Jubilee Christian Center in San Jose.
His hands were clasped, his head thrown back, his eyes closed in a fervid appeal to heaven. It was perfect picture of un-Christian primitiveness.
But even un-Christian Catholics and Mormons, far more sophisticated than the evangelicals, joined the coalition supporting the ban. Un-Christian Episcopalians have just split from the main body of the church for ordaining a gay bishop and blessing gay unions.
Surely Christian charity, now called love in modern translations of the Bible, should be extended to homosexuals.
And how about the Vatican opposition to women priests? Surely that too is un-Christian.
The Vatican notified a priest that he will be excommunicated for participating in an ordination ceremony for a woman priest. The Rev. Roy Bourgeois, who has been in the Maryknoll religious order for 36 years, was anguished by the edict.
But he rightly asked: “Who are we as men to say that we are called by God to the ministry of the priesthood but women are not? That our call is valid but theirs is not?”
Good questions, questions for which the church has the lame defense of dogma. Dogma is a bad reason for anything.
Pope John Paul II reiterated the church’s stance in 1994. He said that because Jesus chose only male apostles “the church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on a woman.”
That “authority” is two millennia old. It has long since lost any validity. But the church clings to the past, refusing to accept 21st century reality.
More “authority.” Ultra-Orthodox Jews do not tolerate women singing publicly!
No wonder Sam Harris in his book, “The End of Faith,” declares that religious faith is “the one species of human ignorance that will not admit even the possibility of error.”
Atheists are often more Christian than Christians.

Spotlighting Darwin’s finches

2008-11-29T02:54:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO--Darwinian evolution is familiar to nearly all high school biology students except those in the benighted hinterlands. But the Darwin story, although an oft-told tale, is endlessly fascinating.
Darwin was one of the great pioneers of the mind, ranking with Freud and Einstein.
So it is gratifying to see “Darwin’s Finches” spotlighted at the grand reopening of the wonderful California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.
The Darwin exhibit shows visitors how 13 species in the Galápagos evolved from a common ancestor in South America, developing different beaks for different eating patterns.
Darwin was a 22-year-old naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle in 1835. The voyage led to his huge intellectual leap, “On the Origin of Species,” published in 1859.
That leap was put well by Richard Dawkins in “The God Delusion.” He quotes Phillip Johnson as saying: “Darwinism is the story of humanity’s liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.”
But Darwin was wrong about the speed of evolution. He wrote: “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress.” This was disproved by the remarkable research of Rosemary and Peter Grant in the 1970s.

Their story is told by Jonathan Weiner in “The Beak of the Finch” (1994). The Grants showed that evolutionary change was happening now, not just something that happened aeons ago.
“Darwin did not know the strength of his own theory,” Weiner writes. “He vastly underestimated the power of natural selection. Its action is neither rare nor slow. It leads to evolution daily and hourly, all around us, and we can watch.”
There is no better place to watch than the Galápagos.
Darwin, with his great insight, concluded that the surviving species were not the strongest, not the most intelligent, but the most adaptable.
The Grants describe cactus finches: drinking cactus water, sleeping in cactus, copulating in cactus, nesting in cactus and eating cactus flowers, pollen and seeds.
Two finch species use tools, molding twigs to pry grubs from branches. But the most unusual finch is the vampire. It perches on the backs of boobies, drawing blood to drink.
The science academy offers so much more: rain forest, aquarium, planetarium, Philippine coral reef and an exhibit of California plants.
However, the academy “star” is the rain forest. You walk an ever-rising circular path, gazing at colorful tropical birds and watching butterflies float by. Some of the gorgeous creatures land on outstretched hands.
One of the enjoyable things about the museum is the interaction with visitors.
At the anaconda exhibit, a sleeve demonstrates how the snake squeezes its victims to death. Or, near the electric eel tank, you press two buttons simultaneously for a shocking shock. (The piranha exhibit is a tad disappointing. It has no water basin for visitors to feel the piranha’s nibbling power.)
Another San Francisco museum worth a visit is the Exploratorium, specializing in science, art and human perception.
It has 500 exhibits, many of them interactive, where visitors can test minds, skills and reflex speed while learning how and why things work.
Perception and association often rule reality. I drank from a water fountain that looked like a toilet bowl. My wife and her daughter refused,
Irish brogue
I saw two J.M. Synge plays, “The Shadow of the Glen” and “The Playboy of the Western World,” staged by an Irish troupe at the Roda Theater in Berkeley.
The accent was so thick it was if they were speaking a foreign language. Moreover, I discovered that in reading the play later I needed a glossary (whisht means be quiet, skelping a beating, gallous splendid, gaffer a lad and da father).
“The Glen” (1903) is a good one-act play about a man who fakes his own death, a presumed death that pleases the man’s wife. The denouement? Good critics never reveal the ending.
“Playboy” (1907) tells the story of a young man, Christy Mahon, lionized by adoring peasant women despite his claim to have killed his father.
But as Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia phrases it: the plot “is a mere backdrop for the most fertile and vigorous poetic dialogue written for the stage since Shakespeare.” Critic Martin Seymour-Smith calls the language “exuberant, extravagant, tender, beautiful.”
Synge’s use of the word shift (chemise), offending prudish sensibilities, provoked riots at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. But Yeats defended the play, rightly calling for “the freedom of the theater.”
An artist’s vision should never be blunted or censored no matter what groups and individuals howl.

Euthanasia gains v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y

2008-11-29T02:53:00.000-08:00

Two down, forty-eight to go.
Four percent of the states have now approved euthanasisa, Washington joining the avant garde state of Oregon. This is a fantastic increase of 100 percent, a doubling of the states allowing death with dignity.
Jests aside, a life of unbearable pain and suffering is no joke. It is a life not worth living.
Oregon voters realized that in 1997. The voters of Washington agreed earlier this month, giving 60 percent approval of euthanasia.
These two civilized states join three civilized nations, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, in approving doctor-assisted suicide.
The B.C. Catholic newspaper, published by the archdiocese of Vancouver, British Columbia, warned that the “stench of death” would invade Canada.
Such an “invasion” cannot happen soon enough. The terminally ill deserve it. Euthanasia is Schweitzerian reverence for life.
Even opponents of death-with-dignity admit that their worst fears have been unrealized, that Oregonians have not become mass “killers.” Just 341 people have used the law in 11 years, an average of 31 a year.
Even an archconservative Supreme Court approved the Oregon law two years ago.
Meanwhile, it may be another 100 years before every state in the union--except Utah—has adopted humane mercy killing.
Tyranny of the Majority
California, Florida and Arizona voters have approved discrimination against gays and lesbians, adopting bans on same-sex marriage. Intolerance and bigotry never ends.
But as the California Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, people have a basic right “to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one’s choice.”
One of the great things about judicial review is its ability to strike down city, state and federal laws that deprive minorities of their rights.
An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle put it well: “the courts have a legal and moral obligation to step in to protect fundamental rights.”
Voters seldom ensure those rights.
Benighted Arkansas
Then there is the backward state of Arkansas, its voters recently banning gays and lesbians from adopting children. The zealots of the religious right even reject love.
Abortion battles endless
It’s hard to believe that 35 years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade right-wing diehards are still fighting.
Abortion clinics suffer arson and property damage. “Mobs” outside clinics bellow at patients and staffers with cries of murderer and whore. The anti-choicers have been successful. They and spineless legislatures have left 87 percent of U.S. counties without abortion facilities.
Fortunately, the people at the polls are defeating those dead-enders.
South Dakota voters affirmed the right of women to make their own health care decisions. They simply do not want politicians making decisions that should be left to women, their families and doctors.
California voters defeated an attempt to mandate parental notification of abortions. Coloradans punctuated the point by defeating, 3 to 1, an initiative granting fertilized eggs legal rights.
And affirmative action too
Afffirmative action foes never sleep either. They succeeded in Nebraska but failed in Colorado.
Ward Connerly, a black who is as “white” as Supreme Court Justice Thomas, sought an affirmative action ban in both states. He remains silent about legacy appointments, affirmative action that allows enrollment in elite universities to offspring of graduates.
Sex worker discrimination
The San Francisco Chronicle is usually as liberal editorially as the city it serves--except in sexual matters. After California voters rejected a plan to decriminalize prostitition, the Chronicle rejoiced that the Looney Left had been defeated.
No, the Chron is the wacky one, sharing the sexual hangups of the vast majority of American people.
Prostitution arrests accomplish nothing. They are traumatic and often violent. They are costly to taxpayers.
It is long past time for prostitution to be legalized. It’s long past time for police to stop arresting sex workers. And it’s long past time for police to stop harassing sex workers.
“Revolving Door,” a report from the Sex Workers Project, found that 27 percent of New York City street-based sex workers had been subjected to police brutality. Fourteen percent reported police violence.
Sex workers, without politicians daring to speak for them, are not free. Until prostitution is legalized and sex workers are protected by the police, America will not be free either.
People need sex. They always will, It’s time society--and newspapers--get real about it.
Alison Assiter in her book, “Bad Girls and Dirty Pictures,” spoke volumes in one sentence. She wrote that instead of fighting porn, feminists should:
“Support the decriminalization of prostitution, call for the abolition of all obscenity laws, back the rights of sex workers…and support sex education for the young.”
Amen.

Obama and ‘Ode to Joy’

2008-11-20T16:22:00.000-08:00

Sometimes there’s God.

-- Tennessee Williams in “A Streetcar Named Desire”

Living in Michigan four decades ago, I helped a young Democratic congressman from my district, John Conyers, get re-elected.
Conyers stood for what was missing in U.S. politics: true progressivism, not the lukewarm politics of most Democrats then as now. So I held open houses at which he appeared and drove him to campaign stops.
After he won, I said to him: “John, why don’t you run next for the Senate?”
He smiled indulgently at my naïveté and replied: “You forget that I am black,”
“So what?” I said. “You’re good.”
Little did I know.

That hoary taboo has been shattered forever by the historic and transformational election of Barack Obama as president. The country is finally judging White House candidates on their ability and not the color of their skin.
John McCain represented the past, Obama the future. The Bush adminstration produced countless anguished nights of the soul. McCain would have been more of the same agony.
The reality today is that the Republican Party is racist, reactionary and white in a multidimensional society. As Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist, puts it: “The GOP has become the party of intolerance.”
Much of the world was euphoric and much of America rejoiced over the Obama triumph. But imagine the special joy of veterans of the trenches of Civil Rights battles.
People like Jesse Jackson. Jackson, attending an Obama victory party in Chicago’s Grant Park, was shown on TV with tears streaming from his eyes.
Indeed, many elderly blacks thought that they would never live to see such an incredible day. They lived in the dread days of Jim Crow, days in the 60s with attacks by police dogs and cannonades by fire hoses.
Eugene Robinson, black columnist for the Washington Post, wrote: “I remember a time of separate and unequal schools, restrooms and water fountains, a time when black people were officially second-class citizens.”
Apartheid reigned so supreme that some Southern courthouses used two oath-taking Bibles, one for whites and one for blacks.
States in the South nullified and defied the 15th Amendment with fraudulent grandfather clauses and absurd literacy tests. The Supreme Court, so often so conservative throughout its history, ratified these unconstitutional laws.
Happily, it has all changed. A 109-year-old black woman from Texas, whose father was a slave, today votes freely.
Robinson also reminded us of another truth: “At the hour of its birth the nation was stained by the Original Sin of slavery.”
People like me have been supporting black rights, empathizing with blacks, for five decades. But I am white. I can never know viscerally what it is to be black in America.
I can never truly comprehend the frequent affronts to blacks. Like the insult hurled at black writer Richard Wright. Crossing the border into Texas carrying a portable typewriter, he was asked by a customs official: “Hey, boy, why are you carrying that typewriter?”
Of all the moving commentary on the Obama success, one of the most affecting was written by Bob Sanders, Fort Worth-Star Telegram columnist.
Sanders was not just voting for Obama. He said he “was voting for Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass; for Abraham Lincoln and Sojourner Truth; for W.E.B. and Booker T; for Franklin and Eleanor; for John and Bobby; for Martin and Medgar; and for César and Lyndon.”
And he said he was voting for Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, murdered in Mississippi for registering black voters in 1964.
The plea of writer Langston Hughes is ever so slowly coming true: “O, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet--and yet must be. The land where every man is free.”
And the pledge of Martin Luther King has been redeemed. He had climbed the mountain top and seen that blacks would “get to the promised land.”
Obama carries an immense burden of hope into the presidency. But he also brings fine attributes. He is forceful, intelligent, compassionate and charismatic.
Those qualities should make him an excellent president.
Hope, to many cynics, was just an campaign slogan. But the nation desperately needs hope after the daily outrages and agonizing eight years of Bush.
The German poet Schiller captured that hope in “Ode to Joy”:
“Joy, thou spark from Heav’n immortal, / Daughter of Elysium! / Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing…/ All men become brothers / Where thy happy wingbeats are.”
The magnificent, ever-moving choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony seizes that theme: “Alle Menschen werden Brüder.” (All men become brothers.)
Hopelessly idealistic, true, yet full of the hope that Obama inspires.

Obama by far the best

2008-10-21T16:40:00.000-07:00

Voters have many reasons to vote for Barack Obama for president, none for John McCain.
First and foremost: Obama is not Bush. McCain is a Bush carbon copy. Obama would bring fresh air to the White House after eight years of the Bush miasma. Obama is young and zesty. McCain is old and fusty. Obama is intelligent, McCain is dim-bulbed.
McCain means perpetual war. Obama would pull out from Iraq. McCain means more deregulation and privatization, the ruinous policies of the Bush administration.
McCain wants more tax cuts for the wealthy and is still urging the thoroughly discredited trickle-down economics. It means more bailouts for Wall Street but no extension of jobless benefits for Main Street.
McCain means anti-choice, Obama is pro-choice. McCain would pack the Supreme Court with right-wingers. Obama’s model is Earl Warren, America’s greatest chief justice.
An Obama adminstration would be pro-labor, pro-environment, pro-science. McCain means more of the same backward Bush policies.
McCain chose a bubblehead, Sarah Palin, as vice president. The choice is worse than absurd. It is surreal. Palin is a preppie, a pompom waver. She emits folksy yeahs, doggone its, betchas, gonnas and sayin’s. And that come-hither wink. Please.
Palin’s ducking and bobbing is worthy of Muhammad Ali. Her inarticulateness is jarring. Her contradictions are glaring. Palin is an embarrassment even to some Republicans.
The Palin-McCain ticket, lagging in the polls, has resorted to the Sludge Machine Guns. Palin says Obama is “palling around with terrorists.” Such demagoguery, worthy of Joe McCarthy, brings out cries from the vigilantes: “kill him” and “off with his head.”
GOP audiences are reminded that Obama’s middle name is Hussein. His “terrorist” friend, a radical when Obama was 8, is a respected educator today.
McCain has run such a hate-filled, race-baiting, cynical campaign that even many conservative gurus have endorsed Obama.
McCain, who was smeared out of the presidential nomination in 2000, is so desperate to win the White House that he is stooping to smears.
Many doctors are concerned about McCain’s health, 2,768 of them taking out a fullpage ad in the New York Times. The doctors, urging McCain to release his medical records, said: “McCain is 72 years old and has been diagnosed with invasive melanoma.”
McCain’s labeling of Obama as a socialist is laughable. Obama voted for Bush’s unconsitutional wiretapping bill. His rants about Venezuela and Cuba are as bad as Bush’s. He would keep the inhumane Cuban embargo. He grovels before the Jewish lobby.
Obama wants a surge of U.S. troops in Afghanistan instead of cutting the nation’s losses, declaring victory and getting out. He chides the Supreme Court for refusing to allow the execution of child rapists. He catered to the NRA after the Supreme Court’s pro-gun ruling.
But none of Obama’s positions compares with McCain’s retrogradeism on just about everything.
The great satirist Tom Lehrer noted that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It died a second time when McCain said he would clean up the mess in Washington. McCain has been an integral part of that mess for 26 years.
McCain as war hero? A myth.
He flew 23 bombing missions over North Vietnam. He was awarded two Silver Stars, two Legions of Merit, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, three Bronze Stars, the Vietnamese Legion of Honor and three Purple Hearts.
Not bad for a war criminal, as he himself admitted to Mike Wallace on CBS’ “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children,” he said.
McCain was killing Vietnamese--the same people who had savcd his life--from the safety of an airplane without fear of nonexistent enemy aircraft and anti-aircraft guns.
Douglas Valentine, writing in the CounterPunch newsletter, said McCain was North Vietnam’s “go-to collaborator.” He “provided his voice in radio broadcasts for the North Vietnamese,” his Vietnamese handlers using “him regularly as a prop at meetings with foreign delegations.”
McCain was on the air so often in propaganda broadcasts that a wire service headlined a dispatch in 1969: “PW Songbird Is Pilot Son of Admiral.”
Valentine, author of “The Hotel Tacloban,” a story of his father’s imprisonment by the Japanese in World War II, concludes that McCain was a psychewar stooge, “a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power.”
Valentine also doubts that McCain was tortured. He quotes McCain’s two senior officers in prison, Ted Guy and Swede Larson: “It is our belief that no prisoner was beaten or harmed…No one else in that camp was.”
In his 1999 autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain says he felt bad throughout his captivity because he was being treated more leniently than fellow POWs. Why? His father was commander of the Pacific fleet.
But never underestimate the stupidity of American voters.
This is a nation where the majority believe in ghosts, 57 percent of adults believe God’s intervention can save a life even when doctors declare the case hopeless, and 45 percent of noncollege grads believe in the literal truth of the Bible.

Philistine irks opera lover

2008-10-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

The man that…is not moved with concord of sweet sounds…the motions of his spirit are dull as night.
--“The Merchant of Venice,” 5, 1, 83

The deep secret of Cory Farley, hidden from his legions of admirers in the Truckee Meadows, was revealed in a column he wrote recently for the Reno News & Review. The secret: he is a philistine!
Farley, so right in his battles with the reactionaries of northern Nevada as a columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal and now the RN&R, is so wrong about opera.
“In my heart, I don’t believe anyone truly enjoys opera,” Farley wrote. “The ululations of sopranos, particularly, torture my ears. When that caterwauling starts, my hand snaps to the tuner like a frog’s tongue to a fly.
“I’ve been told this is a failing in me and not in the world at large but the belief persists: opera lovers are faking it.”
Opera lovers are not faking it. Farley should listen to his intelligent head and not his insensitive heart.
I love opera. I have listened to Met broadcasts since the 1950s when Milton Cross was the announcer. Opera’s magnificent arias, lovely melodies and lively tunes put to shame crass Country, raucous Rock and ridiculous Rap.
I never tire of hearing ballet music like “The Dance of the Hours” in “La Gioconda.” The haunting barcarolle of “Belle nuit” in “The Tales of Hoffmann.” The joyous toast to champagne, the King of Wines, in “Fledermaus.”
Opera is fine theater with great lines in the libretto. In “Tosca,” the lustful Scarpia cries out: “Tosca, you make me forget God.” In “Otello,” the evil Iago declares: “I believe in a cruel God who has created me.” In “Der Rosenkavalier,” the Marschallin gazes into a mirror and realizes with heartbreaking sadness that she is getting old, her beauty fading.
I don’t think Rossini ever wrote a bad note. In stark contrast, Ben Jonson wished that the incomparable Shakespeare “had blotted a thousand” lines. Rossini’s operas, exemplified by “The Barber of Seville,” are joyful, tuneful and wonderful.
No one ever wrote so many great operas as Verdi and Puccini. Anyone who cannot appreciate their sheer lyricism, their poignancy, is fit only “for treasons, strategems and spoils.”
I sometimes get chills when great voices sing great arias. Even “La Bohème,” the most frequently performed opera, will never be a chestnut if sung well. (One opera buff says “La Nozze di Figaro” is breathtaking even when sung poorly.)
Listening to live broadcasts of the Met, I have been moved to the essence of my being when beautiful voices sing glorious arias. At such times tears stream from my eyes.
Every spring the Met, after closing its New York season, would go on the road for couple of weeks. They often came to Detroit, where I was then living.
My paperbook of “Stories of Famous Operas,” tattered and falling apart, is covered with notations of Met performances and singers. In the book I list my favorite operas.
No. 1 is “La Bohème,” doubtless for sentimental reasons. A vinyl version was given to me by a newspaper buddy in Baltimore, Pat Sloyan. What an introduction to the Joys of Opera! The two principal artists on the RCA Victor are operatic eminences Victoria de los Angeles and Jussi Bjoerling.
Others on the list: 2) “La Traviata”; 3) “Lucia di Lammermoor”; 4) “Tosca”; 5) “Aïda”; 6) “Rigoletto”; 7) “Il Trovatore”; 8) “Der Rosenkavalier”; 9) “Fledermaus”; 10) “The Tales of Hoffmann”; 11) “Fidelio”; 12) “La Gioconda”; 13) “Tannhäuser”; 14) “The Barber of Seville”; 15) “Madame Butterfly”; 16) “Cavalleria Rusticana”; 17) “Carmen”; 18) “The Marriage of Figaro”; 19) “I Pagliacci”; and 20) ”Hänsel and Gretel.”
Once when the Met was on tour I saw a performance by Joan Sutherland in Cleveland. Indescribable magnificence. But I learned something walking to the exit: every generation has its stars.
As I passed two grandes dames, one said to the other: “She was good but nothing like Galli-Curci.” (Galli-Curci was a great coloratura soprano in the Golden Age of Caruso.)
Wagner, a giant of opera, is an acquired taste, much like scotch. But some of his music is marvelous, his leitmotifs compelling.
I watched the Ring cycle on PBS-TV years ago, gaining much greater appreciation of Wagner as a composer and dramatist.
Opera plots? Convoluted, contrived, absurd. But what really matters is the music and singing just as the “music” in Shakespeare is far more important than the plots.
I have gone to Nevada Opera productions every year since I came to Reno in 1981. I go, not to be seen and preen as some opera goers do, but because opera is one of the great pleasures in life.

Troglodytes choose McSame McCain

2008-10-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

Blackness is all.
That is why John McCain will win the presidency next month. He is white, Barack Obama is black. The era of Bubba politics is far from over.
If Obama were white he would be leading by 15 to 20 points. His stance on the issues is good, McCain’s retrograde. This is really a Democratic year.
President Bush has been unspeakable during eight years in office. He went to war in Iraq with lies. He sanctions torture and violates the Constitution. His immoral policies destroyed worldwide belief in America.
His disastrous reign has seen the economy collapse into financial chaos and left the treasury $10 trillion in debt. He rejects the truth of science for reactionary ideology. He trashes the environment and packs the Supeme Court with troglodytes.
But none of that matters to boobus Americanus. Color does. Racism triumphs over issues, justice and decency.
American voters love military men. Seventeen of 43 presidents have been generals or fought in wars.
Navy pilot McCain was shot down in Vietnam and held prisoner for five years. This hardly qualifies him to be president but for too many voters it does.
Other factors point to a McCain victory: Rovian dirty tricks, swift-boating, demonizing Obama (middle name Hussein), Republican ballot-tampering and its success at keeping blacks from the polls.
Another depressing reality is that so many Americans vote GOP against their own economic interests. Union members voted in droves for Reagan and Bush II despite their hostility to labor. Reagan smashed the air controllers’ strike. McCain’s 45 percent support of union members is probably higher because of closet racism.
Then there is the factor of voter gullibility--not to say stupidity. McCain, the Great Same as Bush, is trying to pass himself off as a populist. Yet he supported the financial mess the nation is in. He boasted that he was a deregulator extraordinaire.
He backed Sen. Phil Gramm for president in 1996 because he was an archderegulator. McCain voted repeatedly against efforts to tighten regulation of the savings and loan industry. He was involved in the Keating Five S&L scandals, escaping with a reprimand by the Senate Ethics Committee.
His holier-than-thou positioning is as brazen as it is absurd. McCain declares that he takes care of veterans. Not so. He opposed the new GI Bill of Rights. The Disabled American Veterans give McCain a 20 percent rating compared with Obama’s 80 percent. The Iraq and Afghanistan Vets give McCain a D, Obama a B-.
McCain is a warmonger and a fearmonger. He constantly sees “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq but in reality that war and the war in Afghanistan are unwinnable. As Talleyrand said of the Bourbons: McCain “has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”
And what about the straight talker? McCain is a phony, a hollow man lacking in character. His integrity is nil. No wonder Mike Green, Nevada historian and astute political observer, calls McCain “the biggest whore in American politics.”
McCain confessed that he lied in 2000 about his hooraying for the Confederate flag. He admitted he knew little about economics then denied having said so. He proclaimed the fundamentals of the economy strong as recession clouds gathered.
The St. Petersburg Times calls McCain’s so-called straight talk “a toxic mix of lies and double-speak.” He fibs when he says Obama would raise taxes on all Americans. The Obama tax plan would cut taxes on 80 percent of households and raise them on those who make more than $227,000 a year.
McCain implies that Obama is a traitor for not supporting the Iraq war. He blames him for high gasoline prices. He calls the centrist Obama a tax-and-spend liberal, a flagrant leftist. The absurdities are obvious.
McCain made a grossly irresponsible choice for veep, picking an ignoramus. His dash to the Right is frantic. As a maverick he supported Roe. Now he is opposed. He once called tax cuts for the wealthy wrong but now he favors them.
And what about that military background? He finished 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy. He was such a lousy pilot that he crashed five planes before being shot down in Vietnam.
Newspaper people learn never to make predictions in print. Nevertheless, the feeling is inescapable that McCain will win.
Many blacks wept tears of joy when Obama won the nomination. The fear is that they will weep again after Obama loses, tears also shed by millions of Americans of all parties, all races, all colors and all creeds.

Congress embraces socialism for rich

2008-09-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

The ugliness, materialism and ruthless human exploitation of capitalism affronts sensitive minds.
--Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”

America has long had socialism for corporations and social Darwinism for everyone else. It privatizes the profits and nationalizes the losses.
The latest example: a proposed trillion dollar bailout for failing financial giants, behemoth banks and gigantic insurance firms.
In vivid contrast, universal health care is forbidden. That is dreadful socialism. Making money is more important than health. Besides, capitalism flourishes even more if people have to pay big sums for insurance.
Congress is bought and paid for by campaign contributions. This influence racket and legalized bribery works. Corporations get off scot-free, taxpayers pay the bills.
The retrograde President Reagan proclaimed his faith in free markets. He called big government the problem not the solution. But government is the solution for Big Business failure. Recall that in the late 1980s the savings and loan industry got a $200 billion welfare check.
After Ayn Rand’s glorification of self-interest in “Atlas Shrugged,” the motto of the Right became greed is good. Immoral? Certainly.
Naomi Klein skewers that notion in her recent book, “The Shock Doctrine,” aptly subtitled “The Rise in Disaster Capitalism.”
Some still think America had an “immaculate conception” and has never sinned. Her book shatters such illusions. Indeed, it is profoundly upsetting, filling the reader with black despair.
Klein traces the economic genocide to the teachings of “Dr. Shock,” University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. His mantra was deregulation and privatization.
He urged deep slashes in the social contract. He preached “free trade, low taxes and minimal government intervention.” Indeed, he was such an archreactionary that he proposed abolishing public schools.
William Grieder noted in a Nation article that Friedman “championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that pushed aside human sympathy.”
The horrible results were evident in Chile, post-Sovet Russia, China and Iraq.
Friedman’s “gospel of wealth” was adopted in America with tax cuts for the wealthy under Reagan. It continued in the archconservative reign of Bush II. His deregulation madness produced the scandal of Enron’s energy shell game.
Wall Streeters get eight-figure salaries. CEOs reap outrageous salaries even when their corporations fare badly. The CEO of Nike earned $6.3 million in 2007.
Yet Congress still embraces socialism for the rich. The tax system is regressive, the minimum wage a pittance.
Congress really has just one party, a party oozing love for Big Business. It lets corporations set up tax havens offshore, avoiding $50 billion in taxes yearly. Subsidies. Outsourcing. Sweatshops. Plants abroad with scandalously low pay and inhuman hours.
Bill Moyers in a Nation article puts it about as well as anyone since Marx: “freedom to accumulate wealth without social responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else.”
France’s Le Monde observed: “Inequalities constitute one of the world’s cancers.”
America has that cancer with the ever-widening gap between the Haves and Have Nots. The class system abounds in America although few dare mention it. The new $1.3 billion Yankee stadium was built with tax free bonds subsidized by taxpayers.
Its skyboxes and luxury suites are for the fatcats, removed from the rabble. Seats behind the dugout will cost $850 a game, seats near home plate up to $2,500.
Look at the sad state of many Americans. The economy near recession, home foreclosures stunning. Trapped by debt. Joblessness exceeding 6 percent.
Pensions cut back, wages and salaries slashed. Medical costs ever-rising, gas prices onerous. Thirty-seven million living in poverty. Nearly 50 million without health insurance.
Even Barack Obama, who is far worthier of being president than John McCain, is limp in the financial crisis. He lacks the Rooseveltian fire and blunt-speaking. Teddy: “the malefactors of great wealth.” Franklin: “the privileged princes” of “economic dynasties.”
But even that is better than McCain mouthing clichés about corporate tax cuts and smaller government.
The horror of capitalism is cloaked by what Marx called sham watchwords: democracy, liberty and freedom of the press. These are “cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment,” he wrote.
Capitalism is soulless, what Helen Keller indicted as an intolerable system. America epitomizes that heartless, predatory system, promoting war, destroying unions and displaying hostility to working people.
Civilized nations like France have long since rejected Friedmanite capitalism.

Palin pick disgraces America

2008-09-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Few people vote for vice president. What matters is the presidency. But if people did vote for the No. 2 spot, Joe Biden is highly qualified and Sarah Palin is highly unqualified.
Biden has been in the Senate for 39 years. Palin’s résumé is incredibly thin: small-town mayor and governor of Alaska for less than two years.
The GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, is hardly ancient at 72. But he is vulnerable actuarily. He has had serious skin cancer. It is frightening to think of a president Palin if a president McCain dies.
Of the 43 presidents, eight have died in office: W.H. Harrison, 1841; Zack Taylor, 1850; Lincoln, 1865; James Garfield, 1881; William McKinley, 1901; Warren Harding, 1923; Franklin Roosevelt, 1945; and John Kennedy, 1963. Another president, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign in 1974.
McCain boasts that his country always comes first but actually he thinks first of McCain. He cynically picked a poorly credentialed running mate because she is a Great Diversion from his 95 percent support of the disastrous President Bush.
Columnist Richard Cohen of the Washington Post calls the choice “opportunistic and irresponsible.” Columnist Maureen Dowd of the New York Times ridicules Palin as a “glamorous Pioneer Woman, packing a gun, a baby and a Bible.”
McCain has reversed his occasional maverick positions to appease the Right. He would rather be president than right.
All summer McCain accused Barack Obama of lacking the experience to be president. Palin has far less experience than Obama. Karl Rove, GOP smearmeister, called it “not a governing decision but a campaign decision.”
McCain’s campaign manager admits it, declaring that “this election is not about issues.” Appearances are all. Palin proves it. She is a babe with a come-hither look, a rambete, a beautiful foil to the aging warrior, top gun McCain.
Unfortunately, such superficialities attract boobus Americanus.
Palin’s ideas are appallingly reactionary. She opposes abortion, gay marriage, benefits for same-sex partners and stem cell research. She supports sexual abstinence programs. She debunks global warming.
She wants drilling in the Alaskan wildlife refuge, belittles the Endangered Species Act, calls the listing of the polar bear unscientific and thinks it great sport to shoot wolves from a helicopter.
Palin insists on the literal truth of every word in the Bible. She urges teaching of creationism. She sees the troops in Iraq as doing a “task that is from God.” It is “God’s will” that the federal government contributes to a gas pipeline in Alaska. She says Christ will return in her lifetime.
Her foreign policy expertise? She can see Russia from Alaska. She says her son is going to Iraq to fight the 9/11 perpetrators. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Palin denies her past with anti-rhetoric. She favored the “Bridge to Nowhere” but now denies she did. She says she opposes tax increases but raised taxes as mayor of Wasilla. She says she opposes pork-barreling but delights in federal largesse for Alaska. She says she opposes political corruption yet served as chief fund-raiser for the corrupt Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. She rails at the political establishment which McCain has served 26 years.
Her gibes at Obama are sophomoric. She absurdly says Obama is more concerned about the rights of terrorists than their threat. She belittles Obama’s altruistic and commendable community organizing.
National conventions are a charade, all about marketing. The hypocrisy of the GOP convention was flabbergasting. It trumpeted change while masking the fact that McCain is McSame. It talked insurgency yet it has been running the White House and Congress for most of the past eight years.
Convention delegation differences were stark. The GOP delegates were white, rich and conservative, the Democratic delegation loaded with minorities, women and progressives.
Biden? He is hardly a paragon. He was on the wrong side when he voted for the Iraq war. Wrong again in backing so-called free trade acts that hurt workers. Wrong again to push the bankruptcy bill clamping down on millions of families mired in debt. And wrong again to flack for the credit card business.
As head of the Senate Judiciary Committee he gave the nation the reprehensible Justice Thomas, refusing to allow corrobative evidence for Anita Hill’s scathing indictment of Thomas’ sexual harassment.
And oh, my, how Biden talks and talks and talks.
Still, Biden is a liberal. Except for the Thomas lapse, he has fought for liberal judicial appointments, has superb environmental credentials and battled valiantly for the Violence Against Women Act.
He stands for everything Palin does not.

Homage to ‘Gulag’ Solzhenitsyn

2008-09-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

It is within the power of writers and artists to defeat the lie!
For in the struggle with lies, art has always triumphed.
--Solzhenitsyn
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the world’s most powerful post-World War II writer, was in the great Russian mode of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
Awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1970, the jurors cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.”
Solzhenitsyn, who died last month, was jailed in the Gulag network of labor camps, camps for the destruction of body, mind and spirit. Camps where prisoners went to die, camps where 50 million suffered over five decades. Camps, as Orwell phrased it in “1984,” of “a boot stamping on a human face.”
The Gulag was Stalin’s holocaust, important to his reign of terror. Prisoners landed there for trivial reasons--or no reason.
Solzhenitsyn, while serving in the Red Army, was sent to the Gulag in 1945 for referring to Stalin in a letter to a friend as “the man with the mustache,” “the whiskered one.”
Counterrevolutionary words written by an enemy of the people! Such words cost him eight years at hard labor. But Solzhenitsyn’s revenge was the magnificent novel, “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” based on his life as a zek (prisoner).
The novel, with its protagonist Shukhov, a simple guy, a type beloved by Russians, created a sensation. “One Day” first appeared in Novy Mir (New World), liberal monthly magazine, in 1962. It sold out the entire run of 95,000 copies the first day.
Despite the slavery, the intense cold and “work, work, work” in the Gulag, the novel concludes on an upbeat note: “Shukhov went to sleep fully content. He’d had many strokes of luck that day…he’d swiped a bowl of kasha (porridge) at dinner. He’d built a wall and enjoyed doing it. He’d smuggled that bit of hacksaw blade…A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day.”
The New York Times applauded Solzhenitsyn for “holding a mirror up to Soviet society.” The Soviet authorities did not like the reflection, finally exiling him in 1974.
Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume “The Gulag Archipelago,” part history, part autobiography and part analyis, cemented his literary immortality.
It told how the notorious Article 58 of the criminal code swelled the Gulag. “There is no step, thought, action or lack of action under the heavens that could not be punished by (its) heavy hand,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in the first volume.
It decried the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, “the Sentinel of the Revolution,” as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogration, prosecution, trial and execution.”
In the third volume, Solzhenitsyn gives a breathless account of two escapees whose encounter with a kitten revealed that the hardened zeks had not lost their humanity. Another stirring chapter, “The Forty Days of Kengir,” tells how rebellious zeks seized a camp and ruled briefly.
The two most important post-Stalin rulers of the Soviet Union were Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
Khrushchev, despite his shoe-banging at the U.N. and crude rhetoric of “We will bury you,” began the de-Stalinization. Then his thaw allowed the publication of “One Day.” Gorbachev, with his glasnost (openness), showed that socialism had a human face.
The last two decades of Solzhenitsyn’s life were sad.
He extolled Holy Russia, defended Holy Church and espoused Holy Capitalism. A victim of cancer in 1953, he attributed his recovery, not to a successful operation, but to “a divine miracle.” In a speech at Harvard in 1978 he called man “God’s creature.”
In that same speech Solzhenitsyn denounced “the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment,” a pitiful descent into reactionaryism. The Enlightenment was the Age of Reason, applying intelligence to politics and morality. It attacked ignorance and superstition. It replaced dogma with science, knowledge and truth.
Solzhenitsyn also lauded Russian President Putin for the “restoration” of Russia. Some restoration. He restored the autocratic rule of Czars and Soviet leaders. He fostered the dictatorship of business rather than the communism he once served.
Solzhenitsyn lectured America about its “vulgar materialism” (true) and lamented its hasty capitulation in Vietnam (false). He deplored the country’s music as intolerable (true) but attacked its unfettered press (false).
He repudiated socialism, calling it “a false and dangerous doctrine.” He declared that it “leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind.”
Socialism is not the problem. Stalin was. Civilized nations, abandoning the savagery of capitalism, have long established democratic socialism. It works. Scandinavian countries with cradle-to-grave socialism prove it.

‘Liberty’ stars at the Louvre

2008-09-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

PARIS--This is the art capital of the world, providing a Lucullan feast for the culture vulture. But if one painting symbolizes the revolutionary history of France it is “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix.
A monumental, bare-breasted woman leads the charge across the barricades. In her left hand she carries a rifle with fixed bayonet. In her right she holds aloft the tricolor, the blue, white and red flag of France. On her head is the Phrygian cap of liberty as she exhorts the insurgents.
The 1830 painting is stirring in its militant portrayal of the July Revolution. It is one of the many treasures of the Louvre. But the Louvre, the biggest and best museum in the world, has many other masterpieces of painting, sculpture and antiquity.
One is Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker” (1670). The painting, just nine inches square, is luminous. The woman, her yellow blouse shining, is concentrating intently on her work. No less an authority than Renoir called it one of the best pictures in the world.
A 17th century artist “starring” with six works in the Louvre is Georges de la Tour, one of my favorites. I like the way he uses the light of candles and torches to illuminate the darkness of his canvases.
Anyone enamored of the Impressionists must visit the d’Orsay museum. Two paintings there are quintessential Impressionism: Monet’s “The Station at St. Lazare,” filled with gray-white steam, and his picture of the London houses of Parliament, a reddish sun piercing the dense fog of London.
Particular delights: the Manet portrait of fellow artist, Berthe Morisot; the Degas “Ballet Dancers Rehearsing on Stage”; Monet’s “Magpie” perched on a stile in a snowscape; the colorful Van Goghs; works by Caillebotte, the best “unknown” artist of the era; and the Toulouse-Lautrec showing two young lovers sleeping in bed, a beautific expression on the young man’s face.
The Rodin museum houses some of the world’s great sculptures including “The Thinker.” The museum has wonderful grounds and gardens which my wife, Mary Foxton, savored.
Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” gives me the chill that comes from confronting the works of a genius. Some of the sculpted men are stoic, others anquished as they face death. The veins, ropes and keys seem to be alive.
“The Kiss,” Rodin’s homage to women, shows a man kneeling before a woman, gently kissing her abdomen. It is modeled on Paolo and Francesca, the lovers in canto No. 5 of Dante’s “Inferno” who “read no more that day.”
The Chagall ceiling in the opera house is hardly the equal of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. But it is a joyous, colorful work, splashed with red, green, yellow, blue and pink. An angel plays a cello, a corps de ballet rehearses, animals prance. Throughout are such Paris landmarks as the Eiffel Tower and the Arch of Triumph.
The Orangerie museum is disappointing--until you see the Monet water lilies. Calm. Peaceful. Relaxing. Balm for this frenetic, driven, workaholic. I liked best the panels showing branches dangling near the water.
At the Cluny Museum of the Middle Ages religious symbols abound. Stained glass. Wooden statues from the 13th century of Christian “heroes.”
The tapestries are impressive, one showing the wine harvest: picking, stomping grapes in a barrel and pressing them. “The Lady and the Unicorn” tapestry is remarkable for its beauty, its bright colors sparkling.
But amid the welter of art in Paris are disappointments: the Pompidou museum of modern art and the Picasso and Dali museums.
The Pompidou houses much Klee, Léger, Gris, Gorky, Arp, Miro, Braque and Picasso. But all leave me cold. Will no one shout: “This may be art but it is not good art”?
At the Picasso museum an engraving, “The Frugal Meal” (1904), impresses with two emaciated figures. But most of the Picasso works exhibited are rife with colors, lots of lines, bizarre heads, breasts out of position and unrecognizable body parts. All cubistic--and all junky. But, hey, a squiggle by the great Picasso is worth $10,000.
Perhaps modern art can be summed up by a painting in the Pompidou by British artist Francis Bacon, “Female Nude Standing in Doorway” (1972). The woman is misshapen, grotesque. Nevertheless, paintings by Bacon paintings are worth millions, proving there is no accounting for tastes.
Dali? He was a showman, a con artist. But his talent was immense. A bronze sculpture at the Dali museum pleases: a melted watch and a teardrop stemming from his signature painting, “The Persistence of Memory” (1977).
Very little in life is perfect but the Paris art banquet comes close.

Paris brings out the superlatives

2008-08-31T07:16:00.000-07:00

PARIS—This is the greatest city in the world. It overflows with priceless art. It abounds in fine museums and famous and historic landmarks.
But August is a terrible time to visit. Many Parisians shutter their businesses then, leaving the city to the hordes of worldwide tourists who rob Paris of much of its pleasure.
Contemplation of the “Venus de Milo” and the “Mona Lisa” in the Louvre is impossible because of the swarms of people with their constant photographing.
Nevertheless, Paris is worth enduring such a pestilence.
Père Lachaise, for instance, is the best cemetery in the world. It houses the famous like Molìere amid the thousands of nonentities buried in a jumble of graves.
The city of the dead has streets, avenues and boulevards lined with trees. One street leads to the tomb of Oscar Wilde. A sign warns visitors not to deface it. But they do, smoothering it with lipstick kisses, scrawling messages in many languages and sullying it with graffiti.
A must visit at Père Lachise for leftists is the wall where 147 Communards were slaughtered by French firing squads in 1871. Not everyone has forgotten the noble socialist Commune. On the day I visited a fresh pot of deep red roses was placed before the wall.
You can spend hours looking for the graves of the celebrated but one section not to be missed is dedicated to the dead in the Nazi concentration camps. A particularly moving memorial is a bronze skeleton twisted in the agony of a frightful death.
Another celebrity buried in Père Lachaise is Edith Piaf, chanteuse who wrote “La Vie en Rose.” She once said: “I don’t believe in God but I believe in St. Teresa.” Worldwide believers in St. Teresa of Lisieux included the saintly Doris Day of Catholic Worker fame.

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Paris is full of those detestable McDonald’s and Starbucks, global capitalism having spread its ugly tentacles. No self-respecting Frenchman goes into such places…The Michelin guide to superb dining in France is now global. It lists 66 three-star restaurants in 10 countries. Namely: 26 in France, 9 in Germany, 8 in Japan, 7 in Spain, 5 in Italy, 4 in America, 3 in Britain, 2 in Switzerland 1 in Belgium and 1 in the Netherlands.
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Paris is indeed the city of love. Lovers embrace, kiss lingeringly along the banks of the Seine, on park benches, under arcades and in Métro stations…Cellphones are as ubiquitious in Paris and as annoying as they are in America. Anyone yakking on a cell is not a serious person.
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The International Herald Tribune reports that President Bush has approved the execution of a soldier convicted of rape and murder, the first such action by a U.S. president since 1957.
Bush is retrograde by only 175 years. Lamartine, poet, politician and historian, denounced capital punishment in the French National Assembly in 1833.
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Le Monde is France’s best newspaper, going into depth as only the New York Times does in America. But Homer sometimes nods.
Le Monde reported twice in one story that Teddy Roosevelt was re-elected in 1904. He was not, first gaining office through assassination. The same story referred to Walter Lippmann, newspaper guru of yesteryear, as Lippman. Hardly federal cases. But once an editor always an editor, even in another language.
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Balzac, great French author of “Le Père Goriot,” was addicted to coffee. His sole objection: “coffee only makes boring people more boring.” Which is another way of saying that teetotalers can be bores.
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Napoléon, still a hero in France because he brought it la gloire, lies in a beautiful sarcophagus in Les Invalides. But the truth is he sold out the French Revolution. And, as poet Alfred de Vigny wrote: “he sacrificed his country to his personal ambitions.”
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It’s a truism that you can’t go home again. Another might be that you shouldn’t visit the same place again. I didn’t mind the one-hour wait to climb the 400 steps of the tower of Notre Dame. But at the top I was enclosed in wire netting and could not walk among the wonderful gargoyles as I did years ago. Ditto at Stonehenge. Decades ago I was able to walk among the monoliths. Today, alas, you cannot.
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At the west end of the Isle de la Cité where the Pont Neuf crosses the Seine stands a fine statue of King Henry IV, le vert galant (ladies’ man). He’s astride a horse, bearded, smiling.
He switched from Protestanism to Catholicism in 1590 to secure the French crown, remarking: “Paris vaut bien une messe.” (Paris is well worth a mass.)
Indeed it is.

Bush leaves calamitous legacy

2008-08-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

We talk about a representative government. But what a monster of a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind and the whole heart are not represented.
--“A Plea for Captain John Brown,” Thoreau speech, 1859

It’s legacy time for a president in his final five months in office. For President Bush, that legacy is all bad.
He is the worst president the nation has ever suffered. America under Bush is the No. 1 rogue regime in the world, hated by most people abroad. He is a warmonger and a war criminal at the apex of U.S. global hegemony.
He has turned the “land of the free” into a quasi-police state, the so-called war on terror warring on the American people and their Constitution.
Bush has transformed the nation into a perpetual War Machine, the New Rome with bases all over the planet. The Pentagon, misnamed the Defense Department, has an annual budget of $1 trillion.
Iraq is the pivot of that military empire. It is draining America physically, financially and morally--delighting Osama bin Laden. The U.S. has built more than 100 mega-bases in Iraq. The war in Afghanistan is another Bush calamity.
Generals parade like wooden soldiers before Congress, spouting the “national interest” line for staying in Iraq. The propaganda does nothing for the shattered credibility of Bush.
Bush has approved torture, enraging the world and embarrassing America. He uses the typical administration euphemism, “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But torture, is torture, is torture.
Justice Brandeis, dissenting in the 1928 case of Olmstead, noted: “Our government is the potent and omnipotent teacher…it teaches the whole people by its example.”
The Bush example is catastrophic.
U.S. atrocities at interrogation centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba would make a Third World dictator blush.
Bush ignores federal law and international treaties. The United States is AWOL when 111 nations ban cluster bombs. A federal district judge recently blew the whistle on an underhanded atttempt by the Bushites to impose an onerous Medicaid regulation.
As the New York Times editorialized: “The administration has been caught in a flagrant attempt to ignore the will of Congress and unilaterally chart its own path.”
The outrages of the Bush administration have occurred almost weekly. Right-wing politics triumphs over science. The so-called Justice Department is rampant with politics rather than nonpartisan justice.
Key positions in government in the agencies are filled by hacks who do Bush’s bidding. Cronyism and incompetence reign. It is ward-heeler government.
Bush is a quintessential environmental outlaw, mandating the trashing of the nation’s glorious heritage. Mountain tops are stripped bare for coal, the debris falling below and causing health problems. It is OK to explore for uranium just outside the Grand Canyon, one of the great natural wonders of the world. And, yes, snowmobiling in the temple of Yellowstone is all right.
The administration sneakily defies a federal court order as it implements new rules permitting logging in national forests. Its EPA vetoes California’s efforts to reduce tailpipe emissions. Bush stops the EPA from lowering ozone limits. His NASA public relations flacks distort accounts of research on global warming.
The secrecry by the Bush administration has been unparalled, seeking to avoid any scrutiny of its misdeeds. It fosters what former White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, calls the culture of deception. No photos are permitted of coffins shipped from Iraq.
Habeas corpus, that sacred writ, is ignored by Bush.
He ostentatiously gives up golf while U.S soldiers are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he opposes a new GI Bill of Rights, declariing fatuously that it is too expensive and discourages reenlistment.
The compassionate conservatism that Bush promised is an oxymoron, exemplified by the phony war on drugs that targets patients prescribed marijuana by their doctors.
Bush absurdly accuses Barack Obama of appeasement for suggesting diplomatic talks with nations he perceives as evil. Bush refuses to admit the truth of Muslim hatred: occupation of Islamic lands and theft of Arabic oil.
He socializes losses to boost laissez-faire capitalism. He scorns labor. The enforcement of wage-and-hour laws has dropped drastically in the GOP regime. His Labor Department is so anti-labor that it has become the Department of Business.
Bush insists on permanent tax cuts for the wealthy and elimination of capital gains and inheritance taxes.
His whole presidency belies his purported Christianity.

John Brown and ugly Americans

2008-08-06T10:30:00.002-07:00

French symbolist poet Mallarmé wrote wearily: “The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.”
Naturally neither he nor I read all the books. But his point is valid. No illusions left. No surprises. The political reality is so gloomy, America so retrograde.
Yet sometimes you do read something significant that you had not read before: Thoreau’s 1859 essay, “A Plea for Captain John Brown.”
Thoreau’s anger and passion for the hero of the Harper’s Ferry raid are palpable. Brown was an American giant put down as insane.
Thoreau on Brown: “He is not Old Brown any longer. He is an angel of light”…who sought the “liberation of four million slaves”…And asks: “When were the good and brave ever in a majority.”
Never.

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Gas-swallowing sport utility vehicles and big pickup trucks are not selling because of soaring gas prices. Ugly Americans never get wise until they feel the economic pinch.
President Carter was farsighted in a 1977 speech, urging Americans to conserve energy, develop solar power and research for alternative fuels.
The American people, not just scoffed at His Crankiness, but threw him out of office.

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Linda Greenhouse, New York Times reporter retiring from the Supreme Court beat after three decades, noted in her “farewell address” that “as the court’s makeup changes so does the law.”
She certainly should know. The law of the land has changed vastly from the liberal Warren Court (1953-1969) to the reactionary Roberts Court of today.

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At a recent G8 summit in Japan focused on solving the world’s food crisis, the world leaders feasted on a 6-course lunch and an 18-course dinner. The tony food included caviar, milk-fed lamb and sea urchins. Fine wines were imported from Europe and America.
The irony and hypocrisy were obvious, the difference between fhe Haves and Have Nots striking.

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The thieves of the Transportation Security Administration confiscated a tube of toothpaste and a harmless container of after-shave lotion from my carry-on luggage at the Reno airport.
On my return from Oakland, the TSA purloiners took an innocent jar of marmalade given to me by my daughter.
The aggravation is enormous, the absurdity manifest.

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At Central Park theater in New York recently, Hamlet came on stage in bare feet. I don’t object to modern dress for Shakespeare plays if the magnificent language is kept. But undress?
Bare feet are a distraction in the most intellectual of Shakespeare’s plays. It reminds me of Jacqueline de Pré, a British cellist during the 1980s. Blonde, golden girl, stunningly gifted. She once performed at a concert barebreasted while caressing her Stradivarius cello. Distracting gimmickry.

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One disgrace deserves another. South Carolina has long flown the Confederate flag over its statehouse. Now the state is issuing a license plate showing a Christian cross with the slogan “I Believe.”

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Leftists rightly lament the drift to the right of European nations. But European policies remain far to the left of America’s.

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The old-fashioned zoo with animals pacing up and down in small cages is, blessedly, a thing of the past. But what many people don’t know is that zoos have become centers of education, species conservation and scientific research.

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Newspaper headline: “Flip-flops are not the best shoes for walking, study finds.” It needs no study to reveal that.

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I recently watched on video the Woody Allen movie, “Annie Hall.” When it was released in 1977 I thought it a funny film.
So I laughed anew at the Allen quips. But after about an hour I quit. A little bit of Woody Allen now goes a long way.

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Shameful, just shameful. I recently read a Reno Gazette-Journal Sunday paper in 10 minutes, five of them on sports.
It is obvious you don’t have to be any good when you have a monopoly. It is also no way to cut newspaper circulation loses.
The same day the New York Times book section did not have one review worth reading. As usual, most of the reviews dealt with third-rate novels. The nonfiction books reeked of the Establishment. The memoirs were by nonentities.
A San Francisco group giving itself the glorious name of the Presidential Memorial Commission is seeking voter support of a petition to change the name of a water treatment plant to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
All true patriots will support the noble effort.

Caution: lobbyists for penny at work

2008-08-06T10:30:00.001-07:00

Why does the government still mint pennies when each one costs 1.26 cents to make?
Lobbyists for the zinc industry and Coinstar. The penny is made of 97.5 percent zinc and Coinstar is a company that makes coin-counting machines converting coins to bills.
Probably half the waste in government could be eliminated by doing away with lobbyists. But, alas, it will never happen.
The First Amendment establishes the right to petition the government (although it is hard to see how the metallic content of a penny is redressing a legitimate grievance).
Character

Character is a word seldom heard these days in the old-fashioned sense of decency, honor and concern for other people.
Socrates, as portrayed in Plato’s “Phaedo,” is minutes away from death yet he says: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius. Will you remember to pay the debt?”
That’s character.
Before drinking the hemlock, Socrates says: “I think that I had better repair to the bath first in order that the women may not have the trouble of washing my body after I am dead.”
Character.
Thoreau in “Walden” tells of borrowing an ax. Then writes: “I returned it sharper than I received it.”
Character.
Irony
The greatest irony of modern history may be this: America at the end of World War II imposed a constitution on Japan calling for perpetual peace yet has itself launched several unprovoked, unilateral wars.
Opinion vs. fact
The ombudsman, public grievance editor, of the New York Times recently discussed the issue of a columnist stepping over the line between opinion and writing inaccurately.
Opinion can be provocative, even outrageous to many readers. All columnists “stack the deck,” emphasizing the points that bolster their argument and knocking down those of the opposite view.
But facts are sacred in the newspaper business. I have written columns for four decades. Never once did I deliberately write something false. The factual errors in my columns have been rightly pointed out by readers, causing me great embarrassment and forcing me to make profuse apologies.
Life imitates art

I recently saw a painting, “Whistlejacket,” by George Stubbs, British animal artist. It is a 1762 portrait of a big, brown, powerful, prancing horse with the look of a champion.
I thought immediately of Big Brown, a big, brown, powerful champion. Big Brown won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes. But he lost the Belmont Stakes in an attempt to become the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed 30 years ago.
Accounting for Big Brown’s loss, a friend notes that the realistic Stubbs painting did not reveal the slight crack in the colt’s left front hoof.
‘Leaves of Grass’
William Carlos Williams, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, writes an introduction to a Modern Library edition of “Leaves of Grass” claiming that poems are made of words not ideas.
Nonsense. Whitman wrote the poem “To a Common Prostitute” with this line: “Not till the sun excludes you do I exclude you.” Surely that is an idea. It is a line pleading for understanding, tolerance and humanity.
Media trivia
A reporter from National Public Radio was recently interviewing a John McCain staffer about possible choices for vice president. The aide gave a good rundown of five or six possible choices, noting the strengths and weaknesses each would bring to the GOP ticket. Then the reporter closed brightly: “And which choice might be more enjoyable around the barbeque?”
Please! Broadcast already has far too much entertainment at the expense of news without the serious NPR also entertaining.
Why?
Blogger and columnist Arianna Huffington contends that she heard Sen. John McCain say he did not vote for President Bush in 2000. Not true, McCain says.
The question is not whether he voted for Bush. The question is why he would have voted for Bush. The Bush campaign in 2000 smeared McCain so frightfully that you would have thought that he was a Democrat.
Short takes
Gas is more than $4 a gallon, which should soon drive those terrible SUVs off the roads. It’s no consolation but gas costs twice as much in Europe…It’s still a man’s world as any woman will tell you. Because of Title IX, girls in high school and women in college are participating in sports in record numbers. However, men dominate the coaching jobs, coaching 57 percent of women’s college sports teams.

Bush impeachment hearings essential

2008-07-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

There are too many idiots on this Earth.
--Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin, White Faces”
Among the idiots are President Bush, members of his enabling Congress and Americans who twice voted for him.
Bush, the worst president in U.S. history, is sponsoring wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are imperialistic, unilateral, illegal, immoral and unjustifed. They have not been declared by Congress.
Bush has given about 10 reasons for the Iraq war, all of them lies. What he has not said is the real reason: oil.
His colonialism was epitomized in a cartoon by Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times during the First Gulf War. It showed a GI sprawling on the sand saying to his buddy: “Do you think we’d be here if all the Middle East produced was broccoli?”
No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former Republican chairman of the Fed, confessed in his memoir: “Everybody knows that the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Dick Cheney, CEO of the energy behemoth Halliburton before he became vice president, told the oil industry: “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day…While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil…is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
The Geneva Conventions makes it illegal to invade other countries for their resources. But Bush violates the Constitution and the nation’s laws so international conventions mean nothing to him.
As for the so-called Democratic Congress, the leaders in the Senate, Harry Reid, and in the House, Nancy Pelosi, have been appalling. Both have cooperated in the Bush destruction of the Constitution.
Reid is a conservative at heart and Pelosi is gutless, beginning her feckless Speakership by declaring that impeachment is off the table.
It shouldn’t be. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has the fight that Pelosi lacks. He first introduced 35 impeachment articles then narrowed it to one: falsifying reasons for invading Iraq,
Congress has no intention of removing Bush from office. Moreover, even people who hate Bush ask why bother because he has just six months left in office.
Because it is worth the bother. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” and war crimes of Bush should be embedded in history.
Impeachment hearings would hold King Bush accountable. They would provide a record of his great betrayal of American ideals. They would prove to be a valuable teach-in, educating the people about his usurpations.
The catalog of abuse of power by Bush is staggering: smashing international laws against torture; torture rendition; abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib; making Guantánamo a global symbol of injustice while adopting communist torture tactics; spying on American citizens; obstructing justice in the outing of a CIA agent; politicizing the misnamed Justice Department; destroying the credibility of federal agencies; and issuing signing statements that defy the will of Congress.
But the Congress too is the great betrayer of the Constitution, repeatedly capitulating to Bush, repeatedly passing laws to back the Bush positions.
Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, said the Framers “would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion” of the Democrats in protecting Bush.
Congress made a pact with the devil, funding the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for another year while pardoning telecommunication firms for crimes committed while spying.
Seymour Hersh, writing in the July 7 New Yorker, revealed another of the daily outrages of the Bush administration agreed to by Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress.
They authorized--in secret--$400,000 for a Presidential Finding to destablize the Iranian government. Hersh writes: “The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change. ”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Prime Minister Mossedegh nationalized Iran’s oil so he was overthrown in 1953 by a CIA-engineered coup.
The limits of presidental power were spelled out by the Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer (1952). The court overturned President Truman’s seizure of steel plants to end a strike during the Korean War.
Justice Jackson, in a concurring opinion, said seizure “represents an exercise of authority without law.” The president should never be above the law.
Using the ersatz cover of executive power, Bush has done extensive damage to the sacred beliefs of America, worldwide opinion of the United States and democracy.

Supreme Court invokes rule of law

2008-07-05T07:53:00.000-07:00

John Adams, second president, popularized the words enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution: “A government of laws not men.” G.W. Bush, 43rd president, reversed that truism to the great detriment of the American people.
A perfect example of that reversal is found in the arrogant attitude of Vice President Cheney. He was being interviewed by Martha Raddatz of ABC. She noted that two-thirds of the American people thought that the war in Iraq was not worth fighting.
“So?” Cheney asked.
“So? You don’t care what the American people think?”
“No.”
Cheney doesn’t care but the Supreme Court does. Three times since 2004 it has rebuked the lawless Bush administration with ringing declarations that this is a nation of laws not men.
The latest decision, Boumediene v. Bush, declared that prisoners held at Guantánamo have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
Habeas corpus, the Great Writ, still rules despite the efforts of Bush to quash it.
The roots of habeas corpus go back nine centuries to England. Its rudiments can be found in the Magna Carta of 1215 when barons at Runnymede forced King John to yield some of his arbitrary power. Habeas corpus was codified by Parliament in 1679.
In America, habeas corpus has been considered legally holy. It has been called “the most important human right in the Constitution.” Chief Justice Chase declared in a 1868 ruling that habeas was “the best and only sufficient defense of personal freedom.”
In a 1963 case, Justice Brennan was absolutely ecstatic about the writ. He wrote:
“Its history is inextricably intertwined with the growth of fundamental rights of personal liberty. For its function has been to provide a prompt and efficacious remedy for whatever society deems to be intolerable restraints. Its root principle is that in a civilized society government must always be accountable to the judiciary for a man’s imprisonment.”
Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in Boumediene, said that liberty and security must be reconciled “within the framework of the law,” that President Bush cannot “switch the Constitution on or off at will.” He added:
“Within the Constitution’s separation of powers few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the executive to imprison a person.”
Many of the 270 Guantánamo prisoners have been held for six years without charges. Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor, said Bush “has made extreme claims that are lawfully and constitutionally unfounded.”
But to dissenting Chief Justice Roberts, the Great Writ is nothing more than “a procedural right.”
Another dissenter, the reactionary Justice Scalia, complained of the majority’s “inflated notion of judicial supremacy” and declared that the ruling “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Scalia is the same despicable justice who told BBC in February that torture may sometimes be justified.
Scalia, a supposedly brilliant guy, speaks an infinite deal of nonsense. He concluded his dissent by declaring that “the court warps our Constitution” and that the nation “will live to regret” the decision.
Scalia is a sorry excuse for a justice on a court that once had giants like Brandeis, Holmes, Warren, Murphy, Black and Douglas.
A New York Times editorial praised the Boumediene decision and denounced the “imperial overreaching” of Bush. It noted:
“With the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and throw into never-ending detention.”
Columnist Eugene Robinson, noting that Bush had put a “chainsaw to the rule of law,” wrote that he was amazed that there was anything to debate about “arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and torture.”
Bush also put a chainsaw to the Constitution, international treaties and the military code of justice.
Few people know what it means to be a true American, to be a real patriot. It is not wearing a flag pin. It is not flying the flag.
No. It is words like these by Holmes dissenting in Olmstead (1928): “For my part I think it is less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”
Or those by Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher…it teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.”
Or these by Murphy dissenting in In Re Yamashita (1946): “The immutable rights of the individual…belong to every person on the world.”

Why McCain may win—alas!

2008-06-28T07:13:00.000-07:00

Pessimism should spring eternal within the human breast. Politics has proved time and time again that hope is a delusion. So here is why John McCain will probably beat Barack Obama in the presidential election:
Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black.
Anecdotal evidence abounds. A customer tells a Reno barber that he will never vote for a “nigger.” A man at a San Francisco Bart station, asking directions from a black newspaper vendor, addresses him as “boy.”
More solid evidence: 17 percent of white voters in the Pennsylvania primary said “they wouldn’t vote for a black.”
Unspoken but real is white fear. This sort of illogic: “If Obama wins what will blacks want next?” Or, “If Obama wins, blacks will think they are running things.”
A black First Lady? What an absurdity!
The rebarbative Joe Lieberman, asked on Fox News if Obama is a Marxist, replied that he would “hesitate to say” but that some of his positions “are far to the left” of mainstream America. (Untrue)
The GOP smearmeisters will say Obama “lacks American roots.” His middle name is Hussein, isn’t it?
McCain will tout his foreign policy experience while declaring that Obama has none. McCain will cite his military experience while declaring that Obama has none.
The troglodytes on radio and TV talks shows will shrilly denounce Obama, calling him an appeaser, too willing to talk to “rogue” leaders.
Fact: American voters usually pick the worst presidential candidate. Look no farther than the White House incumbent.
Here is why Obama must win:
He is right on most of the issues. McCain, a Bush clone, is usually wrong.
Obama wants to pull out of Iraq. Warhawk McCain will keep troops in Iraq “100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years” just as long as there are few U.S. casualties.
McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, has that military mindset, a mindset that says war is good, peace is bad. He loves the U.S. empire with its 1,000 bases spanning the globe.
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone writes that McCain believes war is “righteous and necessary, a tonic for the national soul, intrinsically noble.”
McCain wants to solve problems with force. He admits: “There’s gonna be other wars.” He declares defiantly: “Bomb bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
What a stunning contrast with the view General Grant expressed in his great Civil War memoir: “This war was a fearful lesson and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.”
McCain invokes the GOP ghosts of yesteryear. He uses fearmongering. He says Obama is naïve, weak on national security and soft on terrorism. All are bogus arguments but play well with boobus Americanus.
McCain, the soi-disant Mr. Clean, was involved in the Keating Five scandal concerning the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan. He has cozied with the K Street lobbyists.
Asked what he had been reading lately, McCain said he was inspired by the books of Texas pastor Joel Osteen, who preaches the gospel of greed. “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny he has laid out for us,” Osteen says.
McCain is a champion flip-flopper. He first opposed tax cuts for the wealthy but now he not only wants to make them permanent but proposes more tax cuts tilted toward the rich.
As a tortured prisoner of war. McCain once opposed the barbarous practice. But now he favors it. He once denounced Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh as “agents of intolerance” but now the religious right is OK. McCain once favored abortion but now is strongly opposed. He once favored gay marriage but now is opposed.
Indeed, McCain may be the only politician to oppose positions of two bills that bear his name, campaign finance and immigration reform.
McCain’s lust for the Oval Office leaves him devoid of principles.
Political writer Taibbi put it scathingly in another article: “The media-manufactured ‘maverick’ has remade himself into a dumbed-down Republican Party stooge.”
McCain belongs to the Grand Old White Party which pushes capitalism and corporatism at the expense of most Americans. He voted against the Martin Luther King holiday. He wants to drill for offshore oil although he knows it will be of little help at the pump.
McCain voted against limiting the CIA to the Geneva Conventions. He backs Bush wiretaps without warrants. He opposes a new GI Bill. McCain would stuff the federal courts with right-wingers.
The Brave New World of McCain offers the same dreary world of Bush.

Obama offers hope after gloom

2008-06-21T11:19:00.001-07:00

Amid the uproar of empire…the gentle stirring of…hope.
--Albert Camus in 1957 lecture at Uppsala University

Presidential politics are fought in the center. You cannot be too leftist or too rightist to win a major party nomination. The middle ground is precisely where Barack Obama stands after wresting the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton.
Historian Howard Zinn observes that Obama offers no change from the status quo, just more “capitalistic greed and militarism.” Doubtless proper cynicism. That view is supported by Obama’s appointment of Jason Furman as his economic adviser, a centrist favoring Wall Street over Main Street.
Nevertheless, a President Obama would re-invigorate the Oval Office in contrast to the despicable foreign policy and musty domestic policies of Bush-McCain.
Obama’s instincts are progressive, McCain’s retrograde. As Lincoln phrased it in his First Inaugural, Obama can summon “the better angels of our nature.”
Two candidates on the Left were forced to drop out early, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards. Kucinch, the best, would have pulled U.S. troops from Iraq immediately and battled for Canadian-style universal health care.
The populist Edwards rightly denounced corporation money controlling politics and the ever-growing gap between the Haves and Have Nots.
As for Clinton, she is a warhawk. She vowed to “totally obliterate” Iranians in the event of a nuclear attack on Israel.
She is a gross exaggerator--if not a liar. She claimed that she had been against NAFTA “from the very beginning.” Truth squad: she spent 10 years praising trade deals. She ignored concerns of labor, farm and environmental groups to urge passage of NAFTA in 1993.
Even worse, when an Obama nomination seemed inevitable, Clinton hinted that she would not quit because he might be assassinated.
She slimed Obama. She said that when it comes to national security, she would prefer McCain to Obama.
Another truth: the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, are not very nice people, betraying long-time friends and supporters.
Clinton’s first “concession” speech was no concession. It showed her utter lack of class, her gracelessness.
Yet it is clear why so many women supported Clinton. They were anxious for her to break the ultimate glass ceiling: the White House.
So many women have felt the sting of bias in the workplace: sexual harassment, denial of justified promotions, squashing of justified executive hopes, less pay than men in comparable jobs and advice ignored as “mere” woman-talk.
To them, the nomination of Clinton would have been wonderful payback, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
As it is, the Democratic nomination fight had important political and sociological significance. For the first time one of the two major parties produced a black man and a woman who were powerful candidates for president.
Obama’s record and speeches offer hope again after eight years of hopelessness under the wretched Bush administration.
Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” has observed of Obama: “He is a remarkable human being, not perfect, but humanly stunning as King was and Mandela is…He is the change America…must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people.”
Running for the U.S. Senate in 2002, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq. He pointed out presciently that such a war would “fan the flames of the Middle East…and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.” (Mission accomplished!)
In the Illinois Legislature he made his mark by championing civil liberties. So he rightly lauded the recent Supreme Court decision to grant Guantánamo detainees habeas corpus, hailing it as “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”
In bleak contrast, McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Obama would raise the Social Security payroll tax from the maximum of $102,000 to $250,000, noting that it is unfair for most workers to pay the tax on “every dime they make” while millionaires and billionaires pay a tiny percentage of their income.
Even in relatively minor matters Obama exudes a marvelous feel for humanity, He advocates the end of federal intervention in medical marijuana cases, wanting states to make their own rules.
But the paramount issue in the presidential campaign is ending the sickening Iraq War quickly, withdrawing U.S. soldiers and shuttering military bases.
If Obama would do this as president the great bulk of the American people would applaud and the Muslim world would have far less reason to hate U.S. policies.

Top court sides with corporatocracy

2008-06-16T12:19:00.001-07:00

It speaks volumes about the Supreme Court when it could not rule on a case recently because it lacked a quorum of six. Three justices recused themselves because they held stock in companies being litigated. A fourth justice recused himself because his son works for one of the firms.
Embarrassing, yes. But it shows that the justices are rich and therefore seldom rule for the vast majority of people.
Seven members of the court are millionaires. Justice Kennedy, poor fellow, has a net worth of just $750,000. Weep too for Justice Thomas who has gotten just $1 million in book advances since 2003.
Earlier this year Chief Justice Roberts recused himself in a drug case because he owns stock in Pfizer, the parent company of a defendant in the litigation. This resulted in a 4-4 decision, upholding the appeals court.
The same thing could happen when the court soon hands down a decision on the damage suit against Exxon in the Valdez oil spill. Justice Alito recused himself because he owns stock in Exxon.
Executive branch officials are required to divest themselves of stocks that could be a conflict of interest. Not the justices. They are a law unto themselves.
The Supreme Court is the least known branch of government. That’s why few people realize that it is very much a part of the corporatocracy ruling America, the unholy triumvirate of corporations, banks and government.
The court made clear its preference for that corporatocracy when it ruled in April that the Indiana voter photo identification law was constitutional.
In effect, the decision restored the poll tax, designed to hold down black votes in the South, which the Supreme Court had abolished four decades ago. The ruling also nullified the 24th Amendment which prohibits poll taxes.
The Indiana law, upheld 6-3, requires citizens to show a photo ID at the polls, either a driver’s license or a passport. The decision reverses two centuries of jurisprudence declaring a voter signature sufficent ID.
The majority opinion, fracturing logic, was written by Justice Stevens, once a liberal but now becoming senile at 88 and returning to his GOP roots. He claimed the risk of voter fraud is real.
Palpable nonsense. Voter fraud is so rare as to be nonexistent. The truth is that photo ID is part of a concerted effort by Republican state lawmakers to prevent blacks, Latinos and the elderly from voting. Why? They tend to vote Democratic. The court ruling has prompted 20 states to seek enactment of photo ID statutes.
Up to 13 percent of Indiana voters, most of them Democrats, will be ineligible to vote for lack of photo ID. Indeed, about 20 million Americans do not have a driver’s license bearing a photo.
In dissent, Justice Souter saw through the chicanery. He said the photo ID requirement was a serious burden, one that Indiana had not justified.
Comparing photo ID to the poll tax struck down by the Supreme Court in 1966, Souter said: “the onus of the Indiana law is illegitimate because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise.”
The New York Times noted the irony of the ID decision: “Seven years after it invoked the Constitution to vindicate what it saw as President Bush’s right to fair election procedures, we are still waiting for the court to extend this guarantee with equal vigilance to every American.”
Illegal immigrants voting? Ridiculous. As illegals, they would hardly risk exposure by trying to vote. However, vigilant officials did stop a subversive group from voting in the Indiana primary this year: a group of nuns without voter ID!
Driving down the voter turnout will help the corporatocracy rule in perpetuity. Keeping the poor, the elderly, racial minorities and college students--who are wild about Obama--from voting fosters that sinister design.
The head of the Republican Party in Alabama has admitted that the Republicans object to restoring voting rights of former felons “because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.” Positions are taken in politics, not because they are right, but because of partisan advantage.
America is far from the great democracy it boasts of being. Bush brags about the wonders of voting in Afghanistan and Iraq while his party denies the franchise to voters who do not have a driver’s license.
This is the reactionary Supreme Court that gave us eight years of the Bush stain and is now ruling so McCain can continue that imperial, unconstitutional reign.

Court decisions dent gay bias

2008-06-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

Intolerance. Hatred. Bigotry. Prejudice. Discrimination. Ignorance. Fear. All were dealt a severe blow by the courts as gays and lesbians recently won two sparkling victories.
One declared the right of same-sex couples to marry and the other portended the end of the military’s absurd policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The California Supreme Court struck down state laws that had limited marriage to a union between men and women. And, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a suit against the Air Force, declaring that the military cannot discharge people because they are gay.
In the gay marriage case, Chief Justice Ron George wrote for the majority: “In view of…the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution…guarantees this basic civil right to all Californians.”

The ruling gives gay couples the benefits and protections of hetrosexual marriage. They can get tax and insurance benefits and the right to family leaves and hospital visits.
An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle had it right: “Two

people who love each other should have the chance to build a life

together, raising children, sharing dreams and balancing careers.”

Predictably, the Yahoos went beserk from their mental caves. They wailed about the sacredness of marriage, lamented ruination of the culture, decried the end of religious faith, declared that marriage was for procreation, labeled homosexuality immoral and damned “activist judges.”
Sanctity of marriage? What’s so sacred about marriage if one out of two end in divorce?
In dissent, California Justice Marvin Baxter complained that the majority, unsatisfied “with the pace of democratic change…subtitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the people themselves.”
But as Justice Holmes pointed out, courts must act for “the felt necessities” of the times. Chief Justice Warren reinforced that view when he declared that courts must act for fairness and justice.
“Judicial restraint has too often meant judicial abdication of the duty to enforce constitutional guarantees…for too long we have been sweeping under the rug a great many problems basic to American life,” Warren said. “We have failed to face up to them.”
Leaving public affairs up to the people often produces injustice.
Look no farther than California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. Under this reprehensible legislation enacted by the people, some one goes to prison for life for a third felony even if it is as trivial as stealing a bag of golf clubs.
I.F. Stone rightly noted during the 1960s: “If you give power to the people we’d all be in jail.”
Under the Justice Baxter rationale, it would have been up to the states to outlaw segregation. But without the Supreme Court’s activist role, Alabama and Mississippi still would have apartheid.
The fear here is that a California referendum in November could nullify the humane court decision.
In the federal decision, the court said that the Air Force must prove that Major Margaret Witt’s dismissal farthered the military’s goals of readiness and cohesion.
The court cited the 2003 Supreme Court decision invalidating the Texas anti-sodomy law as an unconstititional intrusion on privacy.
Witt, a flight nurse, was suspended in 2004 after the Air Force learned that she had a relationship with a civilian. Dismissed in 2007, she filed suit.
But a U.S. district court tossed out her case after the military argued that gays are bad for morale and lead to sexual tension. (Some antediluvians in the Pentagon still argue that homosexuality is a mental disorder.)
Writing a concurrence for the appeals court, Judge Ron Gould noted: “When the government attempts to intrude on the personal and private lives of homosexuals, the government must advance an important interest…and the instrusion must be necessary to further that interest.”
An attorney for Witt, James Lobsenz, hailed the appeals court ruling as the beginning of the end for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The military policy is so lame. It fires hundreds of highly capable gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors. It spends millions to recruit and train replacements. It turns down college students who are gay while practically enrolling the lame, the halt and the blind for duty in Iraq.
Social progress in this nation is maddeningly slow. It may take centuries before America is truly civilized. At least the courts are nudging the nation toward civilization.

60 years of Palestinian hell

2008-05-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Israel is rejoicing over the recent 60th anniversary of its founding but for the Palestinians it is nakba, unmitigated catastrophe.
The Israelis have usurped Palestinian land, illegally established a Jewish state, imposed a brutal occupation and systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Palestine.
As Henry Siegman, director of the U.S.-Middle East project in New York, wrote in a Nation editorial: “Israel’s occupation is maintained by Israeli Defense Force checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, targeted assassinations and military incursions…it is unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians.”
Many Palestinians have been exiled from their own land in an unspoken ethnic cleansing. Israeli continues to build settlements on Palestinian soil. It has reduced many Palestinian villages to rubble. It has erected a wall of separation.
Israel chokes fuel supplies in Gaza. Its military strikes are violations of international conventions. It blockades 1.5 million people.
It has established more than 500 West Bank checkpoints that divide Palestinian land and make Palestinian lives hellish.
One Palestinian living in the West Bank, an emergency room doctor, now has a two-hour trip to his hospital, a trip that took 30 minutes before the checkpoints were set up.
Israel has, in effect, imposed apartheid, once roundly condemned in the American South and in South Africa.
Israeli historian Benny Morris has painted a grim picture: “Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers and daily manipulation, humiliation and manipulation.”
Despite all this horror, the European Union and the United Nations remain frighteningly silent.
Israel does not want peace. It will not negotiate without preconditions as Jimmy Carter has urged, rendering all so-called road maps to peace worthless.
Israel does not want a Palestinian state. And it will not grant one as long as America gives its mighty and unstinting support to Israel. The United States is backing the gross injustice of land theft. It supports the fragmentation of the land Palestine does occupy.
America has established military bastions in Iraq, protecting Israel and threatening to attack Iran, the archenemy of Israel,
A case could be made that the “Jewish cabal” of Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Richard Perle, with the backing of Vice President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, urged the war so that a Saddamless Iraq would recognize Israel.
The cost of that war: Iraq destroyed and more than 100,000 Iraqis killed, more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and thousands maimed in body and mind, expected expenditures of $3 trillion and destruction of much of the world’s belief in America.
Former President Carter had the courage to write a book recently, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” urging the legitimate rights of Palestinians. He had the courage to meet recently with the exiled leader of Hamas, militant Islamist group.
It was the same courage he showed to broker the Israeli-Egypt peace accord in 1978 and the courage to return the Canal Zone to its rightful owner, Panama.
The shameful treatment of the Palestinians raises a profound religious question. How can Israel claim to be a religious state yet treat the Palestinians with total disregard of religious values, morality, decency and humanity?
It cannot.
The occupation is endless. The war of the Israelis against the Palestinians will never end as long as the United States continues to pledge allegiance to Israel.
Nor will that allegiance change no matter who wins the presidency in November. The powerful Israeli lobby and the craven pro-Israeli politicians in America guarantee that. Example: Hillary Clinton vows “massive retaliation” and obliteration of Iran if it threatens Israel.
This inhumane treatment of Palestinians has a lengthy pedigree. In 1969 Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir denied that a Palestinian people even existed.
Another Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that a Palestinian state was incompatible with the historic Jewish right to Palestinian land and the concomittant Israeli right to security.
Such attitudes make it clear that these two bitterly opposed peoples can never live in peace.

U.S. mired in racism, double standard

2008-05-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
--Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”

It’s already the 21st century yet much of the nation is still mired in ancient racism. Lately the racism is coming from an astonishing source: Hillary Clinton.
Politics has always been a dirty business, using incredibly foul means like the Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004. But to have Clinton stooping to conquer through gutter politics is unbelievable.
She says Barack Obama’s support “among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans,” is ever-weakening. (See, Obama is black.) Earlier Clinton used the ethnic gambit. Asked if Obama is a Muslim, she replied: “Not as far as I know.” (See, he’s a closet Muslim.)
Now here’s John McCain, Mr. Rectitude and Mr. Integrity, gleefully noting that Obama has been endorsed by Hamas, the radical Islamic group in power in Gaza. (See, Obama is a virulently un-American. In contrast, Hamas will find that he, the Great McCain, will be its worst nightmare.)
America is a country where innuendo and symbols are far more important than substance. (See, Obama is not wearing a flag pin. At best, he is unpatriotic, at worst, a terrorist.)

Feminists like Gloria Steinem contend that men do not want a president wearing skirts. True of some men.
But the problem is not a woman in the White House. The nation needs to shatter women’s ultimate glass ceiling just as it needs to end the black presidential taboo. Clinton, however, is the wrong woman.
She and her husband Bill Clinton sold out the liberal soul of the Democratic Party. Their triangulation was reprehensible, stealing Republican programs and adopting them as Democratic measures.
Abolishing welfare “as we know it” was not the Democratic way. Neither was pushing trade treaties that benefited only corporations. Neither was promising to abolish the bar to gays in the military but cravenly caving in to the Joint Chiefs,
Bill Clinton kept cruel embargoes on Cuba and Iraq. He spinelessly signed the Defense of Marriage Act. He fired a surgeon general who told the truth about sex. He repudiated the head of a civil rights unit who had written a scholarly article about proportional representation.
But back to racism. America is a land of double standards, one for whites and quite another for blacks. It is a double standard that blacks know all too well, many having faced its grim consequences.
Examples abound.
Patricia Williams, The Nation columnist, points out how blacks like Rev. Jeremiah Wright are derided as over-emotional preachers yet a madman white preacher endorses McCain and McCain gets a free pass from the media.
Wright, once Obama’s pastor in Chicago, says “God damn America” and his words are run constantly on TV, reinforcing American racism. It is guilt by endorsement. Wright is angry about America so Obama must be too.
Obama’s wife, Michelle, relates her pride in America. The remark is either ignored by the media or she is asked tendentiously: how long has she been proud of America?
But when the Rev. John Hagee of a Texas megachurch backs the Sainted McCain the pundits utter not a word and TV virtually ignores Hagee’s wackadoodle remarks. Such as: God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly for scheduling a gay parade.
A double standard also operates in politics. As Democrats, Obama and Clinton are subject to constant judgments from right-wing pundits. But the talkmeisters never note that the Republican Party has 245 senators and representatives in Congress. Not one is black.
One in 100 American adults is in jail. The rate is skewed along racial lines, with one in nine black men, ages 20 to 34, behind bars.
James Fellner of the Human Rights Watch notes: “Most drug offenders are whites but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are blacks.”
Other examples of racism: schools are resegregating. More than half of the elementary schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district in North Carolina, once a model of court-ordered racial balancing, are 90 percent black or 90 percent white…Redlining, wherein banks refused to lend money based on a borrower’s neighborhood, is staging an ugly comeback. The mortgage policy now is to charge borrowers higher fees if they live in minority neighborhoods…Police in New York City bullet-riddle unarmed blacks. They torture blacks. They harass them with unnecessary stops in racial profiling…And the cops in Philadelphia recently beat three black shooting suspects.
Racism is hardly something from the dim past. Blacks still suffer the “crime” of being black.

Bosses need ethics, not J students

2008-05-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

To the foundation of a school for publishers, failing which, no school of journalism can have meaning.
--Press critic A.J. Liebling
Idealistic students at the University of Nevada, Reno, have developed an ethical pledge that all journalism graduates will be asked to sign. The key part of the oath is to “uphold and apply the highest standards of integrity and ethics.”
Fine idea, noble idea. But one enormous problem: media bosses themselves often do not have ethics.
Journalism history abounds with ethical bounders. Hearst and Pulitzer indulged in gross sensationalism and wild fakery during the Spanish-American War.
Will Irwin began a 15-part series for Collier’s in 1911 taking an in-depth look at American newspapers. Irwin’s muckraking series denounced yellow journalism, revealed that advertisers exerted baleful pressure on the press and found the Hearst papers guilty of running articles boosting their advertisers.
Over the years there have been a spate of articles in journalism reviews, newsletters and books detailing ethical shortcomings of the media.
The great press critic George Seldes noted as long ago as 1938 the unholy alliance between advertisers and editors to keep articles linking smoking and cancer out of magazines.
A.J. Liebling, another great press critic in the 1950s and 1960s, wrote two memorable truths: 1) “The function of the press in society is to inform but its role is to make money.” 2) “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
In recent decades we have had many outstanding media critics. Among them: A.E. Rowse (“Slanted News”), Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney, Norman Solomon, Michael Parenti and Richard McCord (“The Chain Gang,” a devasting exposé of Gannett).
The classic case of ethical blinders locally concerned the conflict of interest that Sue Clark-Johnson brazenly displayed in 1994. She served on the board of directors of Harrah’s while she was publisher of the Reno Gazette-Journal. She was badly compromised although she refused to admit it.
Her case shows why ethics classes in journalism schools are worthless unless publishers and station managers have ethics. Media bosses should be like Caesar’s wife: above suspicion. They should not serve on community boards or work with any organization they cover no matter how worthy.)
The UNR students who proposed the oath mean well. One of the leaders of the ethical movement, Cortney Maddock, is an earnest young woman. She is engrained with the highest ethical standards. She wants to engender her spirit in all journalism graduates.
Although she will not be a media problem her bosses may be. The day may come when she will discover an ethical lapse in her boss. She may be faced with the dilemma that so many journalists face: resign on principle or continue to work for an unethical boss.
Journalism graduates, fired by the idealism of youth, will one day discover sadly the truth of the dictum of the 19th century cartoonist Thomas Nast: “Policy strangles individuals.”
The New York Times repeatedly killed the columns of Sydney Schanberg for not hewing to the paper’s editorial policy. It sent reporter Ray Bonner to Coventry because he told the truth about a massacre in El Salvador. It fired reporter Sydney Gruson at the behest of the CIA. It sat for one year on a story about spying on citizens ordered by President Bush. Then, it allowed the White House to edit the final version.
The Portland Oregonian suppressed a story about financial problems of one of its key advertisers. A column by Rollie Melton was killed by the Reno Gazette-Journal because it criticized a city council decision to demolish the Mapes hotel. The Washington Post fired columnist Colman McCarthy because he refused to honor the “sacredness” of the marketplace.
These are just few of the many examples of media lack of ethics.
J students will also discover another truth: Wall Street comes before Main Street, newspapering a distant second to commerce. Worship of mammon has long since supplanted Pulitzer’s reverence for newspapers. (The gargantuan profits of the Gannett chain is a profound ethical question. It should have been the first thing journalism students discussed in ethics class.)
J students will also learn of the self-censorship of the media. They will learn of the cheerleading of Fox’s so-called newscasts, which once sanitized, distorted and slanted a story about Monsanto chemical. They will learn about media deference to power, the general gutlessness of newspapers.
Their glorious vision of newspapering will vanish into cynicism and despair.

Hussein firing profoundly disturbing

2008-05-02T12:04:00.000-07:00

Milton Glick, in his brief tenure as president of the University of Nevada, Reno, wielded his public relations skills to erase some of the stain left by the reign of his predecessor, John Lilley.

Although vapid and sometimes evasive, Glick showed none of the autocratic traits of Lilley. But in the past half year Glick has become the “big hatted” Texan. He no longer acts like the first among equals a president should be in a community of educators and scholars.

This sudden switch to dictatorial rule is profoundly disturbing. His treatment of whistleblowers shames UNR.

First, he backed the athletic department in firing soccer coach Terri Patraw in retaliation for complaining to the NCAA about UNR infractions. Then Glick banned her from the campus “to protect life, limb and property and to ensure the maintenance of order.”

Life? Limb? Property? Order? Please. Patraw is hardly a danger to anyone.

Now Glick has fired Hussein, tenured professor of animal nutrition who has an international scholarly reputation. His crime? Blowing the whistle on abuse of UNR research animals in 2004.

Glick overrode the findings of Peter Breen, retired Washoe District Court judge who served as special hearing officer. Breen, a highly respected jurist, saw no evidence of plagiarism nor any evidence of Hussein profiting in business practices. Glick also trumped the findings of a four-member faculty committee, only one of whom recommended dismissal.

What Hussein calls a “cycle of terror” was evident in the fascistic manner of his “arrest.” Campus police escorted him from his office in the Agriculture building like a criminal rather than the distinguished professor he is.

Also evident is the horrible Lilley legacy. After Hussein blew the whistle, the Lilley administration did everything to hound and harass him. His office was placed under camera surveillance.

If Hussein sometimes appeared difficult it was because he was goaded into it by Lilley and his hatchetman, his Provost John Frederick. But if being difficult is dismissable offense a lot of professors would be sent packing.

Hussein’s problems with the university began before his whistleblowing. At an annual evaluation he was declared excellent but his dean downgraded it to commendable and cut his merit pay. Hussein rightly challenged the decision.

The animosity over the years was glaring as his annual evaluations dropped precipitously, from commendable, to satisfactory and to unsatisfactory.

Hussein should be a hero not a villain. He deserved an apology from UNR, not a “death penalty.” His complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture was legitimate. It led to a USDA investigation that cited 46 UNR violations, including leaving 10 research pigs with inadequate water and housing, poor sanitation at animal care facilities, lack of veterinary care and failure to investigate complaints of neglect.

Retaliation against whistleblowers is nothing new. Corporations are good at it. Sherron Watkins, Enron vice president for corporate development, exposed fraudulent accounting amounting to a Ponzi scheme at Enron in 2002. She became an outcast, finally resigning after finding herself with nothing to do.

While hardly in the same league with Enron, a small-town bank in Virginia fired its accountant, Dave Welch, several years ago for blowing the whistle on the bank’s fuzzy bookkeeping.

But there is a vast difference beween business culture and academic culture in regard to whistleblowing. Businesses are dictatorships. Universities must be citadels of academic freedom, sanctuaries for free speech without fear of retaliation.

Plagiarism and “proper business practices” are murky, nebulous concepts at UNR. What is plagiarism? What are proper business practices? Definitions are far from clear.

UNR professors have used practices similar to the wrong-doing Hussein is accused of with the blessing of deans and department heads. Indeed, one action cited against Hussein earned him a research award.

Glick, in the letter declaring the sacking, said Hussein has demonstrated “serious misconduct over many years.” One allegation is that Hussein used money due the university to renovate his lab. But the funds were gifts not grants, as UNR maintains. It was one more link in the conspiracy to oust “the troublemaker” Hussein.

Glick has hardly proved his case. He cannot. So he manufactured a reason to destroy Hussein’s career. If you don’t like someone, you make up a reason to oust him.

Glick’s decision shows once again that there is as much politics at UNR as there is in Washington, D.C. The ruling leaves all UNR professors vulnerable. They too can be fired without cause since Glick has the dictatorial power to override a judge and a faculty committee.

Trade pact good—for corporations

2008-04-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

The love of money is the root of all evil.

--First Timothy 6:10

“The Soul of Capitalism,” written by William Greider in 2003, is a fine book except for the title. Capitalism has no soul.

This truism is proved once again by the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement. “Free trade” is not free.

Jonathan Tasini, in his online “Front Page Posts,” tears down the façade erected by treaty backers.

“Foreign investor rights--a typical pro-corporate measure--would tighten the grip that large corporations have on Colombia’s natural resources and launch a large-scale plundering of timber and minerals,” he writes. “Without a government willing to nationalize such resources…you can be sure that huge riches will flow to a handful of people while most of the population will remain penniless.

“The underlying dynamic for so-called free trade is corrosive: driving down wages and seeking the lowest cost and most compliant labor pool.” (The lowest rate is Vietnam at $50 a month. The Thailand rate is a magnificent $70 a month.)

Every so-called agreement starting with the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 has been proclaimed as a wonder of the economic world. Yet that “wonder” has been nothing of the kind.

The Colombia pact is being pushed by President Bush just as he recently lauded NAFTA. But if Bush is for “free trade” it is bad for everyone but Big Business.

Free trade is unfair trade. It means job losses in the United States. It means sweatshops abroad. It means exploitation--and murder in Colombia.

Nearly 2,600 union members have been killed in Colombia since 1991. The government lets paramilitaries do the killing. Some of the vigilantes are even paid by U.S.-based multinational corporations.

Unfortunately, such crimes against humanity, condemned globally, are OK in America just as torture is.

No wonder AFL-CIO president John Sweeney says: “Congress must reject this agreement until workers in Colombia can exercise their fundamental human rights without fear.”

Another reason Bush gives for adopting the treaty is a bad reason: Colombia is one of the few allies the United States has left in Latin America. Bush’s reasoning is that Colombia is a foe of Venezuela and other leftist governments escaping U.S. tutelage.

Another reason Bush promulgates is equally bogus: national security. Many sins are committed in the name of national security. It is used by governments to hide embarrassment or, in the trade case, to cloak corporate bias.

It recalls an illustrative story. When under intense fire during Watergate, President Nixon asked an aide: “Gee, what’ll we do, what’ll we say?”

“Say it’s national security,” the aide replied. Et voilà!

Now the Establishment press is rallying behind the pact with its Big Business mindset. The New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, liberal on social issues, urge treaty ratification. The Times argues fatuously that the union murder rate has “improved,” dropping to 39 last year from 197 in 2001. Some “improvement”!

More and more American companies are outsourcing. They are what The Nation calls free riders. “They enjoy all the benefits of being ‘American,’ getting government services and subsidies, protection of the U.S. military while discarding reciprocal obligations to the host country, jobs, economic investment and paying a fair share of the tax burden.”

NAFTA started the trade deceit. It was ratified by so-called Democrats joining the money-hungry Republicans in Congress. The Central American Free Trade Argreement followed, passing because of GOP chicanery that included, in effect, bribery.

Before the 2005 CAFTA vote, President Bush visited the Capitol to twist the arms of reluctant GOP lawmakers from textile-producing and sugar-growing states. Then Speaker Dennis Hastert kept the vote open for nearly two hours to cajole opponents, getting them to switch sides with promises to do whatever necessary to restrict imports into their districts.

Now the lobbyists for the Colombia pact have brought the siege guns to batter Congress. More than 50 members got all-expense-paid trips to Colombia, including dinners at posh restaurants. Meanwhile, Clintonites are applying pressure on behalf of ratification.

Tocqueville, that acute observer of America in the 19^th century, noted that nothing is greater in America than commerce. It’s still true. It’s also true as Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto”: capitalism leaves “no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous ‘cash payment.’ ”

Gorbachev showed the world that socialism has a human face. It is impossible for capitalism to have a human face.

Intellectuals: critics, rebels, loners

2008-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Intellectuals live the glorious life of the mind. But they are often unhappy because they see the grim reality of public affairs rather than the fantasy and apathy of most people.
What is an intellectual? Definitions vary.
Richard Hofstadter in “Anti-Intellectualism is American Life” answers: radical critic…someone who loves to grapple with ideas…moral antennae of the human race…custodians of values like reason…someone who searches for truth…someone who strikes angrily at gross abuse…and someone with a passion for justice.
Intellectuals put reason above all else. The world is their country, all mankind is their brethren, as Thomas Paine put it. Their concern is the human condition.
Intellectuals have a wide cultural background, knowledge of art and music. (Nietzsche: “Without music life would be a mistake.”) Intellectuals know U.S. and world history and have a deep knowledge of political science.
Few academics qualify as intellectuals by those definitions. PhDs, advanced degrees, law degrees. Bright people. Some brilliant scholars. But most professors are narrow in scope.
Classic literature is beyond them. As Hofstadter writes: “It is painful to imagine what our literature would be like if it were written by academic teachers of ‘creative writing’ courses whose main experience was to have been themselves trained in such courses.”
Few academics wrestle with the thoughts and ideas of the great minds of literature throughout the centuries. Few have the outrage of three great intellectual writers like Voltaire, Hugo and Zola (“J’Accuse”).

The culture of most academics is stinted. They know little about art, painting, sculpture and music. Not many professors grapple with concepts ranging from religion to politics, mores to history.
Few academics can talk knowledgeably about the intellectual clash between Hamilon and Jefferson. Few are capable of noting that the self-righteous, racist PhD Wilson gave America the great gift of Justice Brandeis.
Few academics can give a preference between two great American poets, Whitman and Frost--and why. Few can discuss why “Hamlet” is better than “King Lear” or vice versa. Few see beauty and truth in lines of poetry. Few can say that Beethoven was greater than Mozart--and why--or vice versa.
Intellectuals repudiate American policies domestically and internationally. They note the crassness and vulgarization of society, its materialistic cravings. They note America’s shameful history of invasions, seizure of Indian and other nation’s land, its empire-building and its feeling of “manifest destiny” to rule the world.
Intellectual are rebels. They are constantly in opposition.
Emerson said of Thoreau that that he was always in opposition, as if that is bad. Emerson did not understand his man. Thoreau was right to oppose slavery, the Mexican War. Thoreau was right to see John Brown as a great man rather than the madman nearly everyone else called him, including the fiery abolitionist Garrison.
But then Emerson was so often wrong about Thoreau. He fatuously declared that Thoreau, ”instead of engineering for all of America,” was a mere “captain of a huckleberry party.”
Intellectuals should be democratic socialists. Capitalism may be “religion” in America but as Hofstader wrote: capitalism is ugly, materialistic and guilty of “ruthless human exploitation.” all affronts to “sensitive minds.”
Intellectuals see the stark reality of world and national affairs, not the glowing exceptionalism that Americans feel about their county. Intellectuals are exponents of critical thinking. They point out that the emperor has no clothes. They are atheists. They are leftists. They see the soullessness of capitalism. They see the lie behind the rhetoric of freedom and democracy.
Intellectuals should not become advisers to politicians. Why? Because they cannot serve power and truth. Intellectuals feel alienated from society. Indeed, most are alienated in their thinking from most of their colleagues. Intellectuals are loners, not better, but ever so much different from most people.
Intellectuals see that Bush, with his master’s degree, may be the most schooled yet ignorant man who ever lived. Jefferson read widely and deeply. Lincoln read the Bible and Shakespeare. Eisenhower? Western novels. The cretinous buffon Bush II? He does not read.
“The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time,” Hofstader wrote. “No subsequent era in our history has produced so many men of knowledge among its political leaders.”
The nation has regressed from intellectual leaders to ignoramuses like Bush.

Court rules for property (as usual)

2008-04-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

The pro-business bias of the Supreme Court was clearly laid out in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine. It was aptly titled: Supreme Court Inc.
Yet the article by Jeffrey Rosen was hardly surprising. Law schools inculcate conservatism. Lawyers, judges and law professors are overwhelmingly conservative. They have been swept into the Big Business orbit and the mania for rampant capitalism.
Exceptions prove the rule. Justices Brandeis, Holmes, Black, Douglas and Brennan have been certified liberals. Brandeis was a people’s justice but naturally conservatives complained that he was a socialist and hence un-American. Douglas was such an economic populist that he was “ready to bend the law in favor of the environment and against the corporations.”
But the vast majority of the 111 justices in history have been conservative. They have put property over people. That’s why the late, lamented Warren Court was the best court ever. It put people over property.
Even the social liberals on today’s Roberts Court are conservatives in business cases. They doubt the validity of lawsuits challenging corporate wrong-doing, what conservatives call “regulation by litigation.”
These court rulings, as Jim Hightower phrased it in his Lowdown newsletter, allow “owners to reap all the profits of corporate activity while they are protected from any responsibility for corporate illegalities.”
In the 2006-2007 term the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, powerful lobbying force for business, filed briefs in 15 cases. It won 13. Of 30 business cases decided last term, 22 were decided unanimously or with only one or two dissents.
Business cases, in which the arguments are often abstruse, get little attention as opposed to enflaming issues like abortion, the death penalty and affirmative action.
But as Rosen notes of business cases: “They involve billions of dollars, have huge consequences for the economy and can have a greater effect on people’s daily lives than the often symbolic battles of the culture wars.”
Already this term the Roberts Court has ruled, 8-1, that makers of medical devices like heart defibrillators and implants cannot be sued for personal injuries if the FDA approved the devices.
A New York Times editorial noted that the decision written by Justice Scalia showed far too much faith in the FDA. “The supposedly expert and rigorous reviewers at the FDA are hardly infallible,” the editorial said. It cited many reports of “serious defects in the agency’s management and scientific capabilities.”
The decision lends support to the Rosen thesis. It also underscores the success of regulatory agencies in the Bush administration to protect corporations at the expense of aggrieved citizens.
But how could it be otherwise? Chief Justice Roberts once argued cases for the Chamber of Commerce. He was described glowingly as the “go-to lawyer for the business community.” (Forty years earlier Justice Lewis Powell had been a corporate lawyer.)
Two other court decisions this term show pro-business bias. In one, the court refused to allow a shareholder suit against suppliers of Charter Communications. In the second, the court refused to hear an appeal in which investors are trying to recover $40 billion from Wall Street banks that aided the Enron fraud.
It has always been thus.
Thomas Cooley, a Michigan judge and law professor, was highly influential in the 1860s with his “Treatise on Constitutional Limits.” He argued that “legislative enactment is not necessarily the law of the land” and that state laws to curb business excesses were interfering with liberty and property.
In 1894 President Cleveland sent federal troops to bust the Pullman Car railway strike, wrecking the union. Strike leader Eugene Debs was arrested on a charge of contempt. Thousands of strikers were blacklisted.
Thus, Social Darwinism reigned in the 1880s and 1890s with judges striking down hundreds of state laws. The reign continued into the 20th century. In 1905 the court killed a law limiting the working day of bakers to 10 hours, provoking a stinging dissent from Holmes that the Fourteenth Amendment (due process) does not enact Herbert Spencer’s reactionary policies.
After the court ruled in 1918 that a law barring child labor was unconstitutional, socialist Debs denounced the decision as allowing the “junkers of Wall Street” to “grind the flesh and blood and bones of puny little children into profits.” And Holmes excoriated the majority for intruding its personal judgments into “questions of policy and morals.”
In business matters the elite justices triumph over the will of a vast majority of Americans. They are economic royalists backing the evils of capitalism.

Obama confronts demon of racial bias

2008-04-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me. And yet I swear this oath: America will be!
--Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”

Langston Hughes, a powerful voice in the Harlem literary renaissance during the 1920s, suffered discrimination and desegregation as most blacks in America have. But he continued to hope that America would “be the dream the dreamers dreamed,” that it would be the “great strong land of love.”
Barack Obama has the same hope and and drive for social justice that poet Hughes had. And that is why Obama has stirred mass enthusiasm, heavy voter registration and ardent support throughout the nation.
Obama confronted the demon of racial prejudice with a speech recently that was hailed by some observers as great, magnificent, a landmark, a masterpiece.
Columnist Bob Herbert of the New York Times said it should be required reading “in classrooms across the country.” Author George Lakoff called it “one of the greatest ever,” comparing it to the eloquence of Lincoln.
Perhaps. Time will tell, not the emotions of the moment. As Shakespeare said: “Ripeness is all.” The Obama speech has yet to ripen.
Nevertheless, the speech was terribly important. Obama sought to exorcise forever the racism in politics. He wanted to render race irrelevant--as it should be. Yet the bitter truth is that race-baiting has played a despicable role in politics for more than 40 years. It still wins elections.
Nixon in the 1970s developed the racist Southern Strategy. Reagan made a point of opening his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., the site of the grisly murders of three civil rights workers, as a blatant gesture to racists. Bush II started his 2000 campaign at Bob Jones University, which prohibited interracial dating. And McCain condones the segregation-forever Confederate flag flying over the state capitol in South Carolina.
Another bitter truth: so many people in America vote their racial prejudice at the expense of their own economic interests. So many people vote for Republican candidates who are strongly opposed to their social and domestic needs.
As Obama told columnist Herbert: “It hard to address big issues if we’re easily distracted by racial antagonism.” And as he said in The Speech: the enormous challenges the nation faces, in Iraq and Afghanistan wars, in the failing economy and in climate change, cannot be solved in an environment riven by divisiveness and hostility,
The Speech had its own symbolism. Place: Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were framed. Site: Constitution Hall. Obama, surrounded by the de rigueur American flags, began his speech with the first words of the Constitution: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union….”
Then he urged “a more just, more equal, more free, more caring” America. He repeatedly noted the “empathy deficit,” what author Lakoff calls “the heart of progressive politics.”
The policies of the Bush administration have been anything but empathetic and progressive. A President Obama would reverse those shameful policies. He has already displayed his empathy by posting the most liberal voting record in the Senate.

The ‘Economic draft’
The Iraq war is being fought with an “economic draft.” As Michael Zweig wrote in The Nation recently:
“Members of the armed forces come mainly and disproportionately from the working class and from small town and rural America where opportunities are hard to come by. The economic draft operates, in effect, to recruit young people from these communities as they sign up to gain job skills, experience and educational opportunities absent from their civilian lives.”
Mac Bica, former Marine officer turned peace activist, makes the same point: “It is apparent that the burden of this war is not being shared fairly. Only a fraction of our citizenry is directly affected while the majority go about their consumption-driven lives as usual, oblivious to the sacrifices and the death and destruction being prosecuted in their names.”

Dulce et decorum est
Wilfred Owen, British poet killed in World War I, wrote of “The old Lie: dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” The lines come from a Horace ode in the first century B.C. They mean: “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”
Untrue. Never has been. Governments take those lives.
Dalton Trumbo in his 1939 anti-war novel, “Johnny Got His Gun,” wrote: “You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life…You can find them in newspapers and Congress.”
Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, went to jail in 1947 for refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about former communist associates. Then he was blacklisted.
Trumbo. American hero.

America exports ugly union-busting

2008-03-22T16:10:00.000-07:00

Union-busting, a lucrative business in America for three decades, is spreading its ugly tentacles around the world.
Britain is now feeling the “octopus.” The virulent tactics of union-busting are admittedly low key in the more sedate and reserved Britain. But the crass capitalistic money-making ways of America have a global reach.
British union busters, while secretive about their nefarious tactics, are being hired by some firms salivating over the $5 billion yearly anti-union industry in America.
The Guardian, Britain’s best newspaper, says some U.K. firms are using aggressive, U.S.-style union busters to persuade their employees not to join a union. It quoted John Logan of the London School of Economics: “The basic message is that unions are poison.”
“Employers are told that a union will result in conflict, confrontation and strikes with a consequent loss of earnings,” Logan said. “Unions are said to be interested only in raking in members’ dues so that a small number of fat-cat union bosses can live the high life.”
All of those arguments are blatant falsehoods. But employers use them successfully.
The Burke Group (TBG) of Malibu, Calif., is one of eight union-busting firms operating in Britain. Its Website brags of its anti-union expertise: “union avoidance consulting, counter-union campaigns, supervisory training, union vulnerability assessments and card-signing mitigation.”
The new British tactics follow the U.S. pattern. As labor specialist Logan points out: “Union busters work through company supervisors who use one-on-one meetings with employees, forced-attendance group meetings and anti-union leaflets and videos. Discrimination against union organizers and firings get the message across.”
If those baleful tactics don’t work union-destroyers in Britain resort to a trump card: unionism is communism!
Stewart Acuff, an American AFL-CIO official, has watched with anguish as tactics pioneered in the South have proliferated around the globe. He puts it unassailably:
“It’s become an American export, the most shameful American export. We talk about freedom all the time and yet our workers are deprived of the most basic freedom: the freedom to organize.”

Intervention in Russia
For many years I have yet to encounter a student at the University of Nevada, Reno, who had ever heard of the U.S. military intervention in Russia in 1918. The reason is partly that the teachers themselves don’t know. It’s also because high school texts seldom present the downsides of U.S. history.
Even the usually knowledgeable President Kennedy showed his ignorance, declaring of the Soviet Union: “Almost unique among the major world powers we have never been at war with each other.”
The Cold War actually began with that U.S. invasion, not the Churchill iron curtain speech at the end of World War II.

Great paranoia
Bobby Fischer, world chess champion and world class eccentric, may have been the greatest chess player of all time. But he spent a pathetic end game as a mentally sick man full of anti-American and anti-Semitic rants.
Fischer, who died recently, hailed the 9/11 killings as great news. Jews, he said, were “filthy, lying bastard people” who kill Christian children and use the blood for black magic rites.
He abounded in conspiracy theories. The communists were out to poison him. Worried that “secret signals” and “controlling forces” might be channeled through his jaw, he had his dental fillings removed.
Pal Benko, a grandmaster now living in Budapest, once told Fischer that he was paranoid. Fischer’s reply: “Paranoids can be right.”
Nevertheless, Fischer’s skill at the 64-squared chessboard remains his legacy. Personality shortcomings should never dim genius.

Genius dethroned
And speaking of genius. Mark Fox, University of Nevada, Reno, basketball coach, was a genius last year when he had pro-bound star Nick Fazekas. Without Fazekas Fox is a mere mortal.

Great lit line
One of the finest lines in literature is spoken by Mr. Bennett to his daughter Elizabeth in “Pride and Prejudice”: “Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins and I will never see you again if you do.”

Profound music
Listening to Beethoven string quartets, opuses 59, 74 and 95, I thought, as I have for decades, that they are some of the most profound music ever written. If you want music even more profound, listen to Beethoven’s late string quartets, opuses 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 and 135.