You can tell alot about a society by its historical artifacts. That is obvious. But what is not so obvious is that pop culture, or "low culture" as the snobs would have it, is often just as often indicative of a society, or even more so, than more conventional barometers.
There are many who would call Sly Stallone a joke as an actor, an ancestor of Keanu Reeves, an idiotic cipher who stumbled into multi-million dollar franchises in which the lead actor's dialogue consisted primarily of a series of grunts and "woahs" interspersed with automatic weapons fire.
That assessment is true of Reeves, but not of Stallone. The man can act. And, more germane to this blog, he understood the pulse of the people. By "the people", I mean Nixon's silent majority, rather than any "people" I've ever met.
Consider Rocky. Best Picture 1976. Written by, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone, an absolute nobody to the Hollywood kingmakers.
What made Rocky brilliant was that the hero fell, but he never lost his dignity in the eyes of the audience. In all previous American blockbusters, the good guy wins. But at the end of Rocky, Rocky loses. The good guy loses.
And that was the Pulse of the People in 1976. The good guys had just lost for the first time ever. America had just lost its first war and they needed a way to make it romantic, to construct a narrative whereby they fought the good fight and lost fair and square, but lost nothing vital in the process. Rocky provided that narrative.
Stallone managed to capture the Silent Majority's psyche with two characters that appeared simultaneously in American cinema. Stallone's run of Rocky and Rambo is rivaled only by Harrison Ford contemporaneous run of Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
The character of John J. Rambo is an even more brilliant distillation of America's psyche that that of Rocky Balboa. When Rambo is given the top-secret mission of returning to Vietnam in the 80's to find proof that the Vietnamese are still holding American POW's, he asks the immortal question: "Do we get to win this time?"
Do we get to win this time?
Americans dropped more bombs on a tiny stone-age country than had been dropped by all nations combined in the history of war up to that point, yet they were convinced that they hadn't gone far enough, that some hidden cabal had restrained them and sold them out.
This is what America wanted. We would have won last time if the unnamed "they" had let us. The "they" in this equation is whoever the viewer wants it to be: the media, the liberals, the communists, the protesters, etc.
As America got over its temporary humility and embraced the Reaganist creed of credit card-fueled expiation, both Rocky and Rambo movies became increasingly simplistic and boorish, with Stallone getting progressively more oily, bronzed, muscle-rippled, and dialogue-deficient.
Just like most of US.
To many of the few people who know who he is, George McGovern is a joke, the guy who managed to lose 49 states to a man forced to resign less than two years later. But if you scratch beneath the surface of that debacle, you will find a man who contributed more to democracy than any other living American.
As I was teaching 1968 (like 9/11, 1968 requires only numbers to evoke recognition) to high school seniors, I explained the Democratic Party's primaries of that year as the first democratic elections in American history.
We have it drilled into our heads that we live in a democracy, and the power and appeal of that paradigm is sufficient to obscure the matrix for most people. But 1968 was, in fact, the first time that choosing a party's nominee was open to the public.
For every prior election in American history, the candidates were chosen by party leaders in the proverbial and/or literal "smoke-filled room". Those choices were only "democratic" if you happened to be a party leader.
After picking their frontmen, the parties would present the American people with their great "democratic choice".
If a small clique decides on the candidates without any public input, then the choice between said candidates is only "democratic" in a very indirect way. In a real democracy, the people would pick the options and then pick from among the agreed-upon options rather than to be force-fed two stale and pre-packaged "choices" to pick from.
What's more "democratic": choosing between hamburgers and cheeseburger, or choosing from an entire menu of choices?
At any rate, things changed in 1968 when Robert Kennedy went directly to the people and ran in primary elections rather than courting the party elite, to whom Kennedy was too radical and independent for their blessings.
After Kennedy's murder, the Democrats reverted to their traditional modus operandi and nominated Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey, a man who had ran in precisely zero primaries.
And so, the American people, weary of war, were given the "choice" between two pro-war candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. For many of those who still believed in the system, this was the death-knell.
But this is where George McGovern comes in. A close fried of Bobby Kennedy, McGovern stood for his slain colleague at the 1968 convention that coronated Humphrey. After the convention and the riots outside and inside the hall, McGovern set to rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party.
Long story short, it was McGovern who rewrote the rules to allow for a system of open primaries to replace the smoke-filled rooms. It was McGovern who made the Democratic Party democratic. And he was their first nominee under the new system.
McGovern was crushed by Nixon in 1972 for three reasons.
Reason the first: the old Democratic establishment tried to destroy him. Even after McGovern had won enough delegates in open primary elections, the old bosses tried to sandbag him at the convention by nominating....wait for it....Hubert Horatio Humphrey. The counterrevolution failed, but the party was split.
Reason the second: Richard Nixon was directing a vast criminal conspiracy using public and private agents of the White House, FBI, CIA, IRS, Post Office, etc., to destroy McGovern. "Rat-fucking" was the term that Nixon's campaign gave it. An example of rat-fucking? Breaking into the home of the man who had just shot third-party candidate George Wallace and planting George McGovern campaign literature.
Remember, the umbrella of shit that came to be known as Watergate explicitly and specifically originated in the Campaign the Re-Elect the President. The campaign against McGovern was so tainted that it forced a sitting president from office. That must factor into historic appraisals of that defeat; the 1972 election was hardly a fair fight.
Reason the third: Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam. Nearly everyone agreed in 1972 that the war was a tragedy. The only question was whether it was a mistake or a crime. George McGovern never called it a crime, but he was unnervingly honest and blunt in how he talked about Vietnam, and many Americans were disconcerted with his failure to condemn the Communists in the middle of each sentence.
Vietnam is the ultimate case-study in the imperial American mind. Absolutely fascinating. And here's one of the things that jumps out at me. Americans hated the war, but they hated the protesters more. Americans knew they were wrong but they hated anyone who would dare say it out loud. And McGovern said it out loud.
George McGovern was a combat pilot during World War II who had killed hundreds of people and who had men in his own plane killed beside him. And he was called a coward for demanding that his country stop bombing poor people. He was hated, as so many men are, because he told the truth.
If he is to be remembered as a loser, I wish we had losers like him in politics today.
Martin Luther King is perhaps the most willfully misunderstood man in our history (One of many; Americans don't seem to want to understand their leaders). All people have a tendency to ignore those aspects of a person's life that they are discomforted by, to obscure all traces of contradiction or challenges to their own preferred and preconceived narrative.
And what is America's preferred narrative of Martin Luther King? It can be summed up in 4 words: I Have A Dream. That was, indeed, a great speech. But it is nowhere near an accurate portrayal of all that the man stood for, especially if one looks at the last year of his life.
In 1963, King was not a radical, and he was most certainly not a revolutionary, even though millions of cretinous and frothy bigots surely would dispute that fact. Rather, King was at this stage simply a reformer. And this difference is not only semantic.
A reformer accepts the basic foundations and tenets of the system in question. If one listens to what King was saying during this period, it was simply this: America is a great country with a great form of government full of great people who simply need to be challenged to live out the greatness inherent in our souls, as articulated in those twin pillars of greatness, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Proposing that a government enforce its own laws is not a radical proposal. And that's all King was saying during this period. In fact, he often pointed out that Civil Rights Acts would be entirely unnecessary if the laws already on the book were simply enforced and if people walked through life as if they actually believed in the words of the Declaration and Constitution.
In fact, King was so conciliatory toward the "system" or the "establishment", that he submitted his I Have A Dream speech to the government for possible censorship and revision before he even delivered it. That the Kennedy brothers saw no need for revision is evidence enough that King was no radical, no revolutionary.
And when, today, Americans are asked what King's message was, more than 95%, from President Obama on down, will directly or indirectly give the exact same answer: "I Have A Dream".
And again, not to detract from this speech, and it was a great speech, but dreaming that white and black folks will be allowed to have a hamburger next to each other in public is not all that audacious a dream, is it? There was nothing radical or revolutionary about it, except among openly avowed white supremacists of the type who see no difference between treating a black man as a human being and begging him to rape your daughter.
But what King should remembered for, he is not. What he should be remembered for is largely forgotten, because it challenges the dominant narrative: that all King ever wanted was for black and white kids to be in the same algebra class, and that some deranged loner bigot killed him for it.
Well, if one examines the language from King's last year, one will see swiftly, surely, and shockingly that, by 1967, King was no reformer. And he seemed to have simply skipped over the radical phase. In the pantheon of the three "R's", he was now, without a doubt, a revolutionary.
No longer was his bedrock the assumption of American goodness, greatness, and fairness. No longer was he simply seeking admission to the freest, greatest society in the world. Now, he talked of total overhaul. Now, he questioned the very moral and political and economic foundations of our entire culture. Now, he wanted more than a hamburger.
Why this shift? Well the shorthand answer to that question is the same as it is for so many seemingly unrelated questions about the course of this nation over the last 50 years: Vietnam. It was Vietnam that felled the scales from King's eyes, that obliterated the traditional quarantine between foreign policy and civil rights, and that led to a scathing critique not of some logistical question about the Cold War, but to the very soul of us.
"A time comes", he began, "when silence is betrayal." When one reads this speech, one is enlivened and awed by the intellectual and rhetorical freedom of a man who has no intention of ever running for president. The apolitical King made American politicians seem even more venal than they already did, with talks of "credibility" and "peace with honor".
"A time comes when silence is betrayal...I watched the War on Poverty broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war...we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools".
"So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the fact of such cruel manipulation of the poor".
"I knew I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without haveing first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government".
"Perhaps only my sense of humor and irony can save me when I hear the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of tons of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than 8,000 miles away from its shores".
"We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death"
Those are a few samples of King's rhetoric in his last year. First he had a dream, but 4 years later he perceived the onset of spiritual death.
Why does this matter? It matters because King must not be allowed to be confined, cribbed, castrated, really, into a paradoxical sliver of what and who he actually was: the moral and intellectual conscience of a nation.
To confine King to "I Have A Dream" is to take the view that the only thing really wrong with America 50 years ago was that blacks couldn't go to the movies with white people. That is cartoonish and dangerous.
It is quite easily work to apprehend why so many people, and especially politicians, have zero interest in remembering what King was saying as he matured. On the one hand, he's held by the establishment (only after his death, of course) as an angel, a peacemaker, a true American. But then there's the problem of the quotes above.
And therein lies the contradiction. Since President Obama has (rightly) said that his life is the fulfillment of King's (early) dream, let's do a little hypothetical. What if, next Martin Luther King day, President Obama was asked whether he agreed with quotes like those above.
We know what would happen. President Obama, casually cast as cherry on top of King's sundae, would have to publicly and explicitly say "I do not agree". We all know he would HAVE to reject such treasonous and slanderous statements, since no president has or will ever acknowledge that America has sinned.
Personally, I do not cherish the thought of Obama being so confronted, but it would be a "teachable moment", as the president says , to watch Obama have to condemn Martin Luther King's true thoughts. The whole truth about Martin Luther King is that he started out as a reformer and ended up as a revolutionary. In the officially-sanctioned memory of the man, however, his radical and revolutionary words and actions are excised from the record, leaving us with an inaccurate and unchallenging Hallmark card of a memory, and relegates a great man's greatest words to the proverbial dustbin.
There have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to start wars. And there have been a handful of American presidents with the moral cowardice to inherit and continue unwinnable wars. But there has been only one American president with the moral courage to end an unwinnable war as soon as he possibly could.
Dwight David Eisenhower, our last General President, our borderline Caesar, who behaved more like Cincinnatus or George Washington, is the only commander in chief we've ever had who actually commanded the chiefs to stop a war.
There are 4 points in postwar (aka imperial) American history when presidents could have ended unwinnable wars. 3 of 4 times they escalated.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson was sworn in to the presidency in his own right. To be sure, if Kennedy were not a corpse, Johnson would never have been president, but John Kennedy was not nearly as hawkish on Vietnam as was LBJ; the Vietnam war was still not inevitable when JFK was killed.
In any case, Johnson ran in '64 on the premise and the promise that he would not "send American boys to die in Vietnam". That promise, among other things, gave him the biggest landslide victory to that point in our history. A mandate, to say the least, to not make Vietnam an American war.
Three months after the inauguration, Johnson sent in the Marines.
In 1968, Johnson abdicated the presidency, a de facto resignation, in the face of rage over his war. Richard Nixon ran on the premise and the promise that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. He was elected to end the war.
Instead, he invaded Cambodia, carried out the heaviest bombing raids in human history on North Vietnam over Christmas, and presided over more than half of the American and Vietnamese deaths in the war before he resigned.
In 2008, Barack Obama ran on the premise and the promise that our response to 9/11 was catastrophically conceived and executed.
He categorically rejected the invasion and occupation of Iraq and vowed to end it.
He categorically rejected the concept and reality of Guantanamo, and all the sordid acts that fall under that now nearly pornographic word.
He acknowledged the logic of action in Afghanistan, and vowed to rehaul the effort.
But now, he deigns to nearly double our presence there, which will double our casualties, which will make it doubly hard to withdraw.
The only president who has done the right thing in similar circumstances was Ike. 25% of our presidents until JFK were Generals. Ike was the last.
When Eisenhower ran in '52, his only promise and premise was the maddeningly innocuous "I shall go to Korea". But that was enough to win. And after he won, Ike went to Korea and ended the war. We didn't "win", but we stopped dying, killing, and spending on a wormhole of an endeavor.
When Ike came in, he stopped a pointless war, without worrying that nobody would trust us anymore, that nobody would think we loved freedom anymore, that nobody would think we had a small collective penis. Ike didn't need to act tough. Because he knew what tough was.
As Ike left office, he delivered one of the masterpieces of American oratory.
"We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.
To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle--with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment."
"Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."
"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage."
Sounds like Barack. But it was Ike. And I never thought I'd say this, but I wish Barack had a little more Ike in him.
Of all the death that this society endured during the 60's, there were two sorts. The micro and the macro. On the macro side were the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, with an average age of 19. 19. No voting. No beer. No fatherhood. Just high school and then death. Add to that 3,000,000 Vietnamese, and macro is macro indeed.
On micro side were the handful of political assassinations which greased the wheels of the larger slaughter. Medgar Evars. John Kennedy. Malcolm X. Martin King. Robert Kennedy. Fred Hampton.
And of all those losses, each one unbearable in and of itself, the loss of Robert Kennedy was the greatest.
By all accounts, Robert Kennedy was a spoiled brat who never had to hold down a square job, a petulant and moralizing son of a bitch, who paraded his ruthless ambition for his older brother as selfless public service, like the most cynical Roman general, seizing power "for the good of the republic".
None of these accusations are necessarily untrue. Bobby Kennedy was no angel. He played a part in pursuing the assassination of Castro and the wire-tapping of King, among other sordid acts. But Bobby changed.
There are certain things you can't fake, even if you are as cynical and hypocritical as Kennedy haters believed Bobby to be. And Bobby Kennedy did not fake his reaction to John Kennedy's murder.
For reasons which can only be adequately parsed in another blog, Bobby Kennedy lived his last 5 years believing that he was partly responsible for his brother's death. He changed. He learned, overnight and instinctively, to relate with those who have suffered unbearable loss.
And during his campaign in 1968, Bobby was saying things no American politician with a realistic chance of being elected president had said before or has said since.
He talked of moral failure in Vietnam, as opposed to simply bad judgment.
He talked about poverty as an act of criminal negligence by American society, as opposed to simply the unfortunate collateral damage of the nearly-perfect free market.
He talked about life, love, about intimate things, about what makes us human. He quoted Sophocles to all-black crowds in inner-city ghettos in the North. He visited dirt-floor shacks in the south, drawing news cameras into places where American children died of hunger, where many had ever seen a white man, never mind a television camera.
Was he riding his brother's corpse? Was he cynically changing his politics to accord with the polls? Was he destroying the Democratic party by running against the sitting Democratic president?
The answers to those questions only seem important because we are trained to see them as such. But if you think about it, those questions only matter to a few people. People with no floors in their houses didn't care about these things. Bobby Kennedy understood that.
There has been no man in American life who comes close to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. President Obama is the only man who has drawn the same frenzy from as many citizens, and as genuine as that frenzy was, and I must confess with pride to weeping with joy when Obama was elected, Barack is not a revolutionary. Bobby was.
And then he was murdered. Just like his brother, shot in the brain while with his wife, in front of dozens of onlookers.
When Teddy Kennedy eulogized his brother, he distilled what we had lost. Teddy had lost 4 of his 7 siblings to violent death. 2 in planes. 2 with bullets to the brain. And that shattered and flawed man was left to try to explain what Bobby's death meant.
Here is what he lived in those last 3 years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why; some men dream things that never were and ask 'why not'?"
Our largest loss.
The upcoming trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will be less than flattering for this nation. But what is far less flattering than this circus-to-be is the fact that it took this long to get to this day and that there are many among us who consider following the rule of law to be a sign of weakness.
These people, mostly Republicans of course, are outraged by the idea that such a bad man would be given a trial, with the implicit assumption being that only good people should be tried, which in turn raises the questions of why good people would be on trial and what we should do with the bad people if not try them.
The idea that a murderer be given a trial seems scandalous to these critics, far more scandalous of course than kidnapping, torture, and detention without charge, trial, or contact with families or lawyers.
There is only one rational reason why KSM should be denied a civil trial. If he were a soldier of a foreign force. The very critics of the trial are precisely the same people who insist that KSM is not a "lawful combatant". He is NOT a soldier, they say.
I am willing to buy this. He's not a soldier. He didn't wear a uniform. (None of our enemies have worn uniforms since World War II...might be time to update the rules for the first time since TV was invented)
But if KSM is not a soldier, then he must be a civilian. And if 9/11 was not a legitimate act of war, then it must have been homicide. And civilians who commit homicides are given trials. Period.
Those who insist that KSM is NOT a soldier who was captured during lawful combat must acknowledge the logical conclusion of their argument; if KSM is not a soldier, he is a civilian.
To escape this clear-as-day contradiction, these people invented a third category: unlawful combatant. These are people who commit violence against this nation on behalf of a hostile foreign movement, but they are not classified as soldiers because they don't follow the "rules" of war (as we wrote them).
But neither are they civilians. Why? Well, because....they're....evil. And evil they are. But was Ted Bundy not evil? Was Charles Manson not evil? Was Timothy McVeigh not evil? Was Ramzi Yousef not evil?
Those are just a few people, some Americans, some not, who have blown up buildings and/or murdered dozens or hundreds of Americans. Yet all these men were given civil trials. They were convicted of homicide. They were sent to prison. And we threw away the key. Why would it be considered scandalous to deal with KSM this way?
Because the critics fear what the trial will tell. Specifically, it will spell out the folly and the danger of the Bush policy, which classified people captured in the war on Terror as neither soldiers nor civilians.
Americans involved in the war on Terror, of course, are all seen as either innocent civilians or equally innocent soldiers. So an American soldier in Iraq is more "legitimate", more "lawful" than the Iraqi fighting to expel foreign invasion of his country.
There is no 3rd category for us. But our enemies? They're ALL 3rd category. And isn't that convenient.
This trial will show us the utter moral, legal, and logical bankruptcy of Bush's position, which held that anyone who would dare raise arms against us has automatically surrendered their status as a human being. And since only human beings can have inalienable rights, that solved that problem.
Instead of being brought before a military commission (as a soldier would) or before a civil court (as a civilian would), these 3rd category people were found to have absolutely NO rights, which meant in practice that they could be kidnapped from any nation in the world, tortured, held without charge or trial, denied contact with lawyers or families, and held until the end of time or until America was "safe" again, whichever came first.
And who can say that this approach has not damaged us? It is perhaps the most vulgar iteration of American exceptionalism; the belief that the rules don't apply to us. This belief in practice gives us programs such as those implemented by Bush.
Torture is illegal and waterboarding is torture, but it's not torture when Americans do it because....they're Americans. And Americans don't torture. And so forth.
Now the world will see this sordid affair for what it was. KSM could have been tried by a panel of military judges or by a civilian judge years ago. That wasn't done. Now that it is being done, we have to explain to the world why evidence obtained under torture is now admissible in a court of law, and why murdering Americans is the greatest sin under heaven, so much so that a millenium of legal precedent evaporates in its face.
It is natural for people to wonder, even before the twilight of life, what they will be remembered for. One can learn about one's self by posing this question. And so can nations.
Today's arrangement of 200 nation-states is a snapshot of a fleeting moment in history. The very idea of the nation-state is only about 300 years old. In those 300 years, nations have been born, killed, and reincarnated. In the last 60 years alone, the number of nations has increased from less than 50 to more than 200.
To take an even broader view, the location of today's continents is also a snapshot. We know about continental drift; if the very location and composition of Asia is not sacrosanct, then how sacrosanct is the 38th parallel bisecting the Korean Peninsula? Not very.
The point is that nations, just as mortals, pass away. It need not necessarily be a sad thing; in fact, death is the most democratic institution on earth. And we all love democracy. Well, what will the United States be remembered for when it fades away?
There are all sorts of reflexively jingoistic answers, of course, beginning with the assertion that the United States never will fade away because Americans can do anything. For those of us who are sober-minded enough to accept that the USA can't cheat death, we still might tempted to say something about democracy or somesuch.
We all think that the United States is a unique nation in some regard. And we're right; we are a unique nation. But not always for the reasons that we presume to be. For example, democracy.
The only period in our history when the United States was somehow uniquely democratic was from the Revolution until just before the Civil War. It is true that during this period, the United States was the only large nation with principles of democracy practiced among most of its citizens.
But "citizens" during this period is not to be confused with "Americans". Most Americans were not citizens at all, pre-emptively excluded by virtue of the accident of their birth. If you lacked a Y chromosome, for example, or if you were as dark as or darker than an Italian, you were out of the club.
So yes, we were the only vaguely democratic nation. But we were only vaguely democratic. If we had been a multiracial democracy, that would have been unique. If women had been allowed to vote, that would have been unique.
The savvy reader surely noted that the period during which our nation was relatively more democratic than all other nations was also precisely the period that we practiced chattel slavery on the most massive scale in the modern world. So.....yeah.
To re-iterate, when we actually were a uniquely free country, well less than 1/3 of American adults could vote, senators were appointed rather than elected, and millions of people born in this country were bought, sold, and worked to death without wages under color of law in a nation "based on laws".
Today we are democratic to varying degrees, but so is nearly every other nation. We have to look a bit harder to find our uniqueness.
What do we have aside from our form of government? Our wealth. But people won't remember us for our wealth, especially because the period of our unique wealth was paid for by two world wars, which were the two biggest windfalls in the history of the American economy. And especially America has the most uneven distribution of wealth of any industrial nation.
Our military might? Well, that's an interesting story. America used to be unique in a military sense because it was the only large nation that refused, as a matter of principle, to maintain a standing army.
Americans back then rightly feared what would come to be called the military-industrial-congressional complex, and intuitively grasped that aggressive wars are the greatest of sins, and that nations with standing armies had a curiously persistent habit of finding reasons to wage aggressive wars in the name of peace.
In contrast, Americans now think they are unique for precisely the opposite reason. We are unique now not because we refuse to live in a constant state of imminent war, but because we insist on reserving the right to destroy all life on earth in 20 minutes, should our Commander-in-Chief deem it strategically necessary.
The cynic might conclude that Americans presume they are unique, but are not particularly interested in the reasons for that uniqueness; the only principle at work is that we must be on top, regardless of what we are on top of or of how we got there.
For my money, if the human race as we know it is here in 1,000 years, the United States will be remembered for two things: inventing and using nuclear weapons and sending men to the moon. One out of two ain't bad.
Well, we've finally built our 9/11 memorial, and it's.....a warship.
There are many things about America that Americans seem to accept as being logical which in any other Western society would be considered scandalous. Things like health being for sale, minors being executed, and so forth. This week we witnessed another of those things.
9/11 was the most murderous assault perpetrated on this continent since the 1860's, and the worst attack upon this country by outsiders in our entire history. Such trauma is worthy of memorial. Such trauma BEGS for a memorial, for an official iteration of what it is that makes us human beings: memory.
There were two probable ways to physically memorialize that dark day, two ways to rebuild at ground zero.
The first way would have been to erect a big middle finger at the terrorists by building an even bigger shrine to American capitalism where the World Trade Center had stood, to signify our defiance by building essentially the same thing as had been destroyed.
The second way would have been to construct a memorial not to the World Trade Center but to the thousands of souls killed there. This iteration would have involved not an office tower, but some sort of somber, serene, and defiantly optimistic shrine, involving fountains or eternal flames or somesuch.
We did neither. Indeed, to this day Ground Zero, the mass grave of our lost innocence, is just an empty pit. In any other culture which treasures its dead and its history, this would be a scandal. Here it is not.
But perhaps worse than the calcified scar that remains in Manhattan, worse that what we have NOT built, is what we HAVE built. We have built a warship with the steel salvaged from Ground Zero.
What does this say about the lessons learned that day? That one more warship would have averted the tragedy? In fact, the lesson should have been that warships and similar hardware were utterly useless in defending against terrorism.
How is it that we have built an instrument of destruction to honor our dead when we have failed to do so much as plant a fucking tree at Ground Zero? Is this what the dead would have wanted?
This is a time for building. And, more importantly, this is a time for building things which are not intended to destroy but which are intended to honor and preserve.
The more time that passes, the more it becomes manifest to the reality-based community that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were probably the worst stewards of this nation's wealth and safety that we have ever had. In my lifetime, these two men have been in charge for over half of the time. And they have ruined us.
To the non-reality-based community, of course, these men are remembered as heroes, as visionaries, as leaders who made us feel good about ourselves, as men who knew evil when he saw it and did not shirk from confronting it. Staying up all night drinking feels good, too, but the morning always comes.
In reality, however, these men governed through denial and fear. Denial that the rules of economics, or even simple mathematics, applied to the Greatest Nation in the World. Denial that any person or nation that did not bow to our superiority could be anything other than Hitler incarnate. Denial that our nation was anything other than the love child of Jesus and George Washington. And fear. Always fear.
Reagan and Bush were charlatans of the highest order, leaders who serially and unfailingly kicked the can down the road, burdening ourselves and our children with debts that are literally impossible to repay, racking up most of this debt to build and buy weapons that will never be used, all the while convincing many if not most Americans that they were "protecting" us.
Hard as it may be to believe, Reagan and Bush each individually accumulated more debt than every other president combined. Dwell on that for a moment. These two "fiscal conservatives" each spent more than every president from 1789 t0 1981 COMBINED. What is most distressing about this profligate dereliction is that these men are remembered fondly as fiscal conservatives. And Stalin was pro-life.
They each represent something that is quite distressing about our culture. American Exceptionalism is the delusion that the rules of history do not apply to the United States. You can't perpetually spend more than you earn? We're AMERICANS. You can't conquer Afghanistan? We're AMERICANS. You can't expect invaded and occupied nations to welcome the subjugation of their nations? We're AMERICANS.
These two men were profoundly skilled at avoiding responsibilities for their actions, and they both actually believed that saying something made it so. They both truly felt that America is the greatest nation in the world, with the greatest citizens in the world, but that the government comprised by, of, and for those very citizens was a tyrannical and amoral maw of corruption and inefficiency
Accordingly, both men aimed to destroy the government of the nation they so "loved", theoretically with the aim of proving that Americans are so great that, as opposed to every other civilization in human history, we don't even NEED a government.
The after-effects of these policies have crippled, and will continue to cripple, this nation severely. Reagan and Bush, of course, did not cut government spending; THAT would have been ideologically coherent, a vice neither man is often accused of as having possessed.
Instead, Reagan and Bush accomplished something much more insidious. Step one was to ridicule the very idea of government. Step two was to cut taxes so as to starve the government whereby it would inevitably falter, thereby "proving" the theory that it was inherently worthless. Step three was to spend record amounts of money, even while cutting the amount of money collected. Step four was to guarantee that the record spending was funneled nearly entirely to the military.
This is the worst of both worlds. With the kind of debts these two men ran up, you would think they had handed out Ivy Leagues educations to every American teenager. Or supplied clean water and penicillin to every human on earth. Or built great universities and hospitals across the third world. But no. We spent our trillions on weapons we can never use and on some weapons which, when they are used, simply drive us further into debt.
And through this charade, these men are lauded as leaders who "made America strong", who made us "feel good" about ourselves. I for one, don't get a glowing feeling when I consider that my birthright, and that of my grandchildren, was spent on hydrogen bombs and space lasers before I was out of short pants.
And what have these men protected us from? Ronald Reagan is credited with saving the world from Soviet Communism, as if Mikhail Gorbachev and the dozens of peaceful protests movements throughout Easter Europe were inconsequential, as if those were merely footnotes to the real reason for victory, namely that America bankrupted its children and grandchildren for the sake of being able to brag that "we won" the Cold War.
George W. Bush is credited by protecting us by being stoic and unwavering in the "war on terror", as if he were not in charge during the most criminally negligent moment in the history of the security state on 9/11, as if he had not started two wars which have each lasted longer than the Vietnam War and which show no sign of ending, and if he had not reaped near universal contempt and scorn, prancing about in flight suits like some tawdry autocrat.
Both of these men are remembered for greatness, but they have been our greatest failures. Theirs is the greatness one earns by taking the whole country out for drinks, buying round and round, only to skip out on the tab and leave us drunk, disheveled, penniless, and with no ride home.
Nikita Sergeivitch Khrushchev. Peasant. Tyrant. Everything in between. But when some future historian looks back at the 20th century, unburdened by the reflexive JFK-worship that plagues our contemporary scholarship, the two men who saved the 20th century from itself will be understood to be Khrushchev and Gorbachev.
Mikhail Gorbachev will go down as one of the great men of all time. Perched atop a decrepit and tyrannical empire, Gorbachev did what no other leader has ever done; he acknowledged that history was against him, that his empire was held together will duct tape and terror, and he allowed it a peaceful death.
The Soviet Union could just as easily have ended in nuclear Holocaust as an anti-climactic whimper, and I credit Gorbachev with something in between profound and historical humility and saving mankind from itself.
But if Khrushchev had not done what he did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gorbachev would be irrelevant. And I would never have been born. And if you were born after 1962, you would never have been born, either.
In 1962, the United States had surrounded the Soviet Union with land-based nuclear missiles throughout Europe and Turkey. It had also repeatedly tried to oust Cuban leader Fidel Castro, with tactics ranging from sabotage to terrorism to proxy invasion to several failed assassination attempts.
To deal with these twin realities, Khrushchev surreptitiously placed land-based nuclear missiles in Cuba, hoping to make the America feel the same threat the Soviets felt while at the same time protecting his ally Castro. Whether this was justifiable or not depends on your objectivity and your politics. But suffice it to say, Khrushchev was hardly unprovoked.
Once the crisis came, both Kennedy and Khrushchev were advised to go to war by most men who surrounded them. The two leaders resisted these pressures. It is of course wholly absurd and unacceptable that any two mortal men had as much power over the life and death of billions of human beings as did Kennedy and Khrushchev, but at least we can be thankful that they stopped short of obliterating the world.
Kennedy is credited with single-handedly saving the word, especially in this country, and especially since his "martyrdom", which was really more of a cheap and vulgar spasmodic murder than an actual martyrdom. By this, I mean that Oswald wasn't trying to prove anything other than the fact that he existed. Kennedy wasn't really killed for any cause at all.
At any rate, we should consider Khrushchev, surrounded by men even more hardened, more paranoid, and less democratically-minded than those surrounding Kennedy. Khrushchev withstood immense pressure, and knowingly sacrificed his power and position in the world by backing down. It was much harder for Khrushchev not to fight than it was for Kennedy.
I recently taught my students about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and an excerpt from Khrushchev's telegram to Kennedy struck me as one of the most sublimely profound paragraphs ever uttered, a paragraph which may have literally saved the world.
"Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot. And what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly well what terrible forces our countries possess."
An amazing sentiment. And one which reminds me of another quote, this one from Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara: "The indefinite co-existence of thermonuclear weapons and fallible human beings is a recipe for guaranteed suicide."
Q: If the richest country in the world invades the poorest country in the world, who will win?A: Whoever can stay the longest.This week marked the 8th anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan. In 8 years' time, this war has shifted from "the war" to "to other war" to "the forgotten war" to "the good war" to "the endless war". And there it will stay.On September 12, 2001, the United States possessed the clear moral authority to employ violence against al Qaeda. That moment was the most morally unambiguous moment for Americans in 60 years; we wanted to kill, and we knew we were justified in our bloodlust.I have a hard time owning those words, as they make me seem innately violent; I am nearly as far from that as is possible, but I am not a pacifist. And there are moments where violence is not only necessary, but also morally right. When someone rapes your mother. When someone flies a plan full of people into a building full of people.That being said, our war in Afghanistan no longer remotely resembles its original manifestation. Our aim was to exterminate the people who planned and supported the 9/11 massacre. So we went to the country where their headquarters were. That made sense. But we fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this enemy from day one.9/11 was not plotted in Afghanistan. It was plotted mostly in Germany. Yet we didn't invade Germany after 9/11. (Technically, we didn't have to invade Germany, since we're still occupying it from the last time we invaded, but I digress). The Taliban government of Afghanistan was not sponsoring al Qaeda; al Qaeda was sponsoring the Taliban government. Usually, governments sponsor terrorist groups. But in Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world, the situation was reversed; the terrorist group was richer than the state, so the terror group sponsored the government rather than the usual arrangement. We fundamentally missed this from day one.What this means is that the Taliban government was not the blood enemy of the United States. Are they medieval cretins? Yes. But they are not worth investing the wealth and blood and prestige of this nation to destroy. We can co-exist with the Taliban."Taliban" means "student" in Pashtu. So aiming to destroy the "Taliban" is like trying to eradicate "the intellectuals" or "the jocks" or "the conservatives"; it is a fundamentally impossible task, a contradiction in logic unless you're Hitler or Ghengis Khan.The good news is that the huge majority of the people who planned, paid for, and carried out 9/11 are dead. The bad news is that we don't yet realize this and we are doubling down on a war that became irrelevant to our security about 6 years ago.This war is turning into a Vietnam parable. Vietnam never had the intimate foundational context that 9/11 provides for us re Afghanistan, but the mentality and the strategy in these two war are distressingly similar. We stay and fight because the people who live there won't surrender to our self-evident superiority. Put simply, we kill the locals because they refuse to like us.That never works. The fundamental problem is that every President we've had since World War II, including Barack Obama to some extent, insists on manifesting the delusional doctrine of American Exceptionalism. The idea that History does not apply to US."Every empire that has ever invaded Afghanistan has reaped only ashes? Well, Mr. Egghead, that's really interesting, but you seem to forget that we're AMERICANS." There is not a member of our national government that would contradict this theology.History does apply to us, of course, and in our short history we have witnessed or committed every major sin and error of mankind. Ethnic cleansing. Slavery. Civil War. Legal discrimination. Domestic terrorism. Assassination. Stolen Elections. Imperialism. We've been there. We've done that. We just refuse to learn from it.We're not Americans. We're Human.
He not busy being born is busy dying. And thanks to the reptilian rogues who comprise our Congress, my sense of cynicism is born anew. To paraphrase the Army lawyer who finally publicly and verbally bitch-slapped Senator Joseph McCarthy, "I never truly gauged the depth of your cruelty and recklessness...at long last, sir, have you NO shame?"
I'm not surprised that the health care debate is failing. I'm not surprised that the super-majority is worthless when the Democrats are "in charge". I'm not surprised that the Democrats couldn't get laid in a monkey whorehouse with a bag full of bananas. I knew all those things. And I knew that the Republicans were every bit as venal as the Democrats were lame.
But what I never accurately gauged was the extent to which both parties in Congress would collude to guarantee that the American people would not have access to the quality of care that the members of Congress themselves enjoy. Make no mistake; the vultures abound in both parties and the practical effects of their actions are that they are fundamentally allied with each other.
After all, when health care reform fails, the Democrats will blame the Republicans and gloss over the fact that the Democrats were in a position to pass reform without a single Republican vote; know this: it is the Democrats who will kill health care. The republicans just serve as a useful foil for pre-emptive excuses.
So the Democrats control the Senate, and they are preparing to come to the American people and tell them with a straight face, "we couldn't get the votes", assuming the people will forget that the senators ARE the votes. If there is no public option, it will be because the Democrats chose not to pursue it. Period.
So the Democrats are investing their energy now not into how to pass what the public demands, but into how to blame the minority party for the failure of the majority party to pass any meaningful legislation.
We know the Republican position on health care. It was beautifully (in the sense that a mushroom cloud is "beautiful") articulated by a leading Republican congressman at a recent town hall meeting. A woman in the audience rose to ask her congressman what she should do after losing her health "insurance" after she was diagnosed with cancer.
Firstly we should stipulate that this is the only country in the world where the above circumstance would ever occur. That being said, the congressman's answer was illuminating (in the sense that a mushroom cloud is "illuminating"). First, this woman should turn to charity. Then, she should turn to.....Medicaid! So, first beg, then go red.
Let's think about this: this is a congressman's "plan" on how his own constituents should deal with serious illness. First, the person should beg. Okay. Secondly, the person should pursue government-run health care (after they are already deathly ill). The ingenious aspect to this suggestion, of course, is that one does not qualify for Medicaid until they are dirt poor.
So actually, there are 3 steps to the Republican plan. Step 1: beg. Step 2: lose all your assets trying to pay out of pocket for medical bills. Step 3: after you have lost your car, your house, your retirement fund, and all other savings and assets, file for Medicaid (if you're still alive).
That's their "plan" for how to deal with something that happens to hundreds of citizens every day. In shorthand, their plan reads thusly: "go fuck yourself". Actually, "give all the assets you've saved for your entire life to hospitals and doctors....and then go fuck yourself."
One might ask why the Congress deems it unseemly to offer the American people the health care if gives itself. Yes, the Congress has awarded itself government-secured health care, which provides for any conceivable level of care. Each Congressperson pays about $600 per year for this blanket coverage. And let me put it this way: when a Senator gets cancer, he doesn't lose his insurance.
What can we say about people who would deny every single one of us the very things they grant themselves with our tax dollars? What can we say about lawmakers who refuse to make it illegal to take away a person's "insurance" when they get sick? What can we say about people who think it's okay for a person to lose every single thing they have earned and saved over a lifetime as the just punishment for the sin of getting sick?
I'd call them vultures, but that would be an insult. To vultures. The few, the wretched, the Congress.
There are many current and concurrent political and ethical and psychological threads at work presently in our country, and most observers have done a sub-par job at connecting the dots. But make no mistake: hate is here.
This week, a census worker in Kentucky was murdered. His body was subsequently hung from a tree with the epithet "Fed" scrawled across his chest. Be on notice, my friends, this was the canary in the coal mine. Hate is here.
The census worker's job is to count citizens in each of our thousands of localities. Why? Primarily, their goal is to ensure that each locality has the proper amount of representation in, and funding from, the federal government.
So, every 10 years we have to count our localities to make sure they have enough representatives in the Congress and to make sure that they have enough federal funding for schools, roads, etc. In other words, census workers aim to make sure people have enough POWER and MONEY.
But there is an element in this country that is bred into a blood feud with the federal government. That strain has been exponentially strengthened and hyperbolized with the election of Barack Hussein Obama.
Such people do not look at the census taker as an opportunity. Nor do they look at the census taker with apathy. Nor do they look at the census taker with mere distaste or mild paranoia. No, this element sees the census taker as the person who walks around compiling a hit list for the Feds.
And, since the Feds are now led by Iraq Hussein Osama, the Kenyan Communist, the Muslim Mulatto, this census taker takes on all-the-more ominous a tone. Someone in Kentucky saw a mortal threat in this census taker. Why?
Well, this person probably assumed that this census taker was personally sent by President Obama to compile a list of heterosexual white Christians to exterminate. Dare we imagine what the murderer would have done had President Obama come to his town?
And can any of us honestly believe that this murderer has not boosted his venom on our airwaves? I'd bet my life he watches Glenn Beck.
Freedom of speech is God's greatest terrestrial blessing. But, just like free will, it is anarchic and self-immolating without that ultimate virtue, DISCRETION.
The man that murdered the census-taker is not alone. He has many peers, many of whom are more capable than he. If and (God forbid) when that awful and ultimate shot is taken at our President, we will not have the satisfaction of calling the assassin an outsider.
If our President ever bears the will millions of Americans wish him, I can assure you this: the assassin will be born and bred on American media. And he will call himself a patriot.
Every now and then I'm drawn to reflect on the profoundly un-democratic nature of our democratic republic. The health care debacle reflects this truth profoundly, and so does the census map I received yesterday.
The Senate of our republic, much like the Senate of Rome, does not remotely reflect the demographic realities of our country. Apportioning equal power to all states in the Senate does not protect the rights of the small states; it destroys the rights of everyone else.
Also, like the Senate of Rome, most of our Senators are petty and sniveling dilettantes who have legalized the most wretched corruptions and who are threatened by nothing so much as the possibility that Caesar, or the president, might actually have a good and popular idea. Because that, of course, would be "a threat to the republic".
A glance at my census map informs me that California has a population of 34,000,000 and Montana has a population of 900,000. Yet they carry equal weight in the Senate. This does not protect the voice of the 900,000; it destroys the voice of the 34,ooo,ooo.
California's people have the same voice as Montana's, even though their are 34 times more of them. So, the people of California actually have 1/34 the power per person as the people of Montana.
When a man who represents more cows than people is allowed to single-handedly steer health care reforms that tens of millions of people are clamming for, and that will effect every single person in this country, that is not a democratic process.
The way power is apportioned in our Senate is a direct result of a compromise with slave states to entice them to join the Union. After committing this mortal sin in order to win the favor of the south, the south repayed the north with treason, secession, and civil war.
And after all that, we still maintained the system born of sin, the attempt to give states with low (free) populations the same power as those with enormous ones.
Montana was no slave state, of course, but it and others like it have been grandfathered into this anti-democratic apportionment of power that was first designed to bribe slaveowners into loyalty.
Who voted for Max Baucus? He represents half the population of his state. That's 450,000 people. And how many of those people are adults who went out and physically voted for Max Baucus? 100,000? And how many people voted for Barack Obama? How many dozens of millions?
You do that math. But however you dice it, the sum product is not democracy.
The LP is soon to be extinct in all its forms, be it vinyl, tape, or CD. The very concept of an "album", never mind the concept of a concept album, will be foreign far too soon.
This eulogy came to mind today because I'm ear-deep in Only Built For Cuban Linx II. It's an album, not a collection of songs one might download and eventually hear the entirety of after months of shuffling about on the mp3 player. (And for any Wu-Tang fans, I am shocked to inform you that OB4CL pt. II was worth a 14 year wait)
Recorded music available for the masses to own is a very new phenomenon, and the LP has been the medium throughout. Singles have always had their place, but they have more often than not been appetizers for LPs, rather than works in their own right.
Baby-boomers know Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as an album, not as a collection of singles. Indeed, one of the reasons Sgt. Pepper is considered the quintessential album of all time is that each song bleeds into the next, so that to listen to the "singles" is akin to staring at amputated limbs, which lose all grace and symmetry when cleaved from the body. Sgt. Pepper may have 12 tracks, but the music does not stop once in its 40 minutes, so it plays as one song.
As a son of the golden age of rap (1993-1998), there are albums I and my peers learned front to back which would simply never have worked as elements of a shuffle list on an mp3 player.
Here is a by-no-means comprehensive list of hip-hop LP's whose greatness would wither and die were they shuffled about as singles. So, since the LP is dead, here are the purest hip hop LP's in my library. There are dozens of brilliant songs which are not part of this list, but here are the best hip-hop albums I have ever heard:
1992 The Predator Ice Cube
1993 Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan
1994 Illmatic Nas
1995 Me Against the Word Tupac
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx Raekwon
Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Verson Ol' Dirty Bastard
Liquid Swords Genius / GZA
1996 Ironman Ghostface Killah
Reasonable Doubt Jay-Z
1997 Wu-Tang Forever Wu-Tang Clan
The Carnival Wyclef Jean
1998 It's Dark and Hell is Hot DMX
Aquemini Outkast
2001 The Blueprint Jay-Z
Stillmatic Nas
2004 The New Danger Mos Def
2006 Idlewild Outkast
2007 The Carnival II: Memoirs of an Immigrant Wyclef Jean
2008 Nigger Nas
Despising Gaius Julius Caesar is sort of a prerequisite for polite American company. Certainly anyone aspiring to political office must distance him or herself from the notion that Caesar was anything other than the prototypical tyrant.
It also doesn't help that we spent 3/4 of the last century with either the Germans or the Russians as our mortal foe, and that they plenty of kaisers and czars in their sordid histories.
There are two viable forms of government. One is democracy. Real democracy. Direct democracy. Greek democracy. The other is dictatorship. The problem with those who condemn Caesar is that they are so blinded by the "principle" that they ignore the facts and still misapply the principle, to boot.
The principle is that no man should be able to overthrow a democracy; that the rule of the people is preferable to dictatorship. I heartily agree. But that does NOT mean that Rome was a democracy before Caesar became dictator. Rather, it was an oligarchy, the worst of all possible worlds.
Oligarchy, or rule by a small elite, is perhaps the inevitable transitory phase between dictatorship and democracy. It's the acne-ridden awkwardness of government's maturing process. But it is the worst form of government imaginable. And it's what Rome had before Caesar.
The Senate did not represent "the people" of Rome. It was comprised of wealthy landowners and slaveholders of noble birth who would scoff at the idea that they even inhabited the same moral universe as "the plebs". Instead of one dictator, Rome had several dozen. And they called themselves the Senate. And too many chefs spoiled the stew.
Since the Senate was not remotely democratic or representative, the question becomes: was the oligarchy of the Senate preferable to dictatorship? In my mind, No.
Caesar's ultimate insult to the Senate was to ignore them and go directly to the plebs, the people. And this the oligarchs could not abide.
But Caesar and his successor, Augustus Octavian, accomplished more than the oligarchy of the Senate ever could have, and several of their actions benefited the plebs more than the Senate's ever had. Whether this was cynical demagoguery on the part of the Caesars was surely entirely irrelevant to the plebs.
Consider our current attempt to reform heath care. The people know what they want. The president knows what he wants. So, if this were a direct democracy or a dictatorship, we would have our reforms. But since this is an oligarchy, we will not.
President Obama's shepherding of the health care debate has been a dispiriting experience, albeit an educational one. Obama's combination of sober intelligence and timidity is the mirror image of President Bush's combination of utter incuriosity and single-minded focus. If only we could merge the strengths of these two men....
But instead, we are left to debate which combination is worse.
We all know that President Obama would prefer for America to have a single-payer health insurance system along the lines of European nations. Whether that is a good idea is irrelevant to these observations. Let us just keep in mind that we know what Obama wants.
But consider his approach: before this debate even started, he excluded his own preference as a possibility, convinced that it would never pass. He may have been right, but now we'll never know, will we? And what sort of poker player flips over his trump card in the first hand?
Obama's fall-back position, his last defensible battle line, his final stand, was the so-called public option. But by surrendering single payer without a fight, the public option was thrust to the front line for the inevitable battering from the Congress.
So, instead of a watered-down single payer system, the best Obama can hope for is a watered-down public option, and even that now seems out of reach.
Again, this is not about whether Obama's proposals make sense; personally I have concluded that this issue is too complex for me to even have an educated position on. This is about Obama's leadership , or lack thereof.
The conventional wisdom had been that Obama had to avoid the mistakes of Clinton's health care proposals at all costs. But that misunderstands the mood of the country. This is not 1994.
Firstly, President Clinton was elected with 42% of the popular vote in a three way race. Indeed, President Clinton came in third in several states of the nation he now led. He had a very tenuous mandate. Obama won in a clear landslide, a good old-fashioned passionate ass-whippin', to quote Eminem.
Secondly, Americans weren't angry in 1994 about health care. Now, with costs having doubled for those with insurance in just the last 7 years, people are ready for radical solutions. But you wouldn't know that by watching Obama. It's as if he doesn't understand the power he has, as if he is shying from actually executing his own authority and powers of persuasion.
Let's compare this vacillation with President Bush's style. Again, this is not about whether Bush was right or wrong (he was right, very occasionally); it's about his ability to lead. For better or for worse, President Bush largely got what he wanted until Hurricane Katrina. And how did he pull that off? Well, he knew he was president, and he acted accordingly.
The war in Iraq is surely the best (or worst) example of Bush's leadership style, of his mixture of incuriosity and single-minded focus. All Bush knew was that he wanted to invade Iraq. Why or how was so secondary as to be immaterial. Bush's only focus was on making it happen, and he did.
He did not exclude any options under the logic that they "would never pass"; he simply took something that never
I'll put it this way; if, after 9/11, President Bush had decided that we needed single-payer health care or a coast-to-coast monorail, it would have happened. And this from a man who "won" on 49% of the vote in a two-way race in 2000.
Bush's audacity, of course, did not serve us very well, as he lacked Obama's depth and intellectual vigor. But Obama's depth and intellectual vigor are the Biblical lamps beneath the table without a little of Bush's audacity.
