When the Bush Administration emailed to reporters an article by Eliot Cohen that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, for me that was the final indication that their Iraq policy had reached rock bottom. Cohen, the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies wrote, “A junta of military modernizers might be the only hope of a country whose democratic culture is weak, whose politicians are either corrupt or incapable.”

In other words our problems in Iraq are ultimately not our fault, they are the fault of “a country whose democratic culture is weak.” When there is no one else left to blame, blame the victim. The hubris and racism of support for such a statement coming from an administration that this summer tried to kill this country’s own Voting Rights Act and then proceeded to force through a law suspending habeas corpus will rank as one of the most hypocritical in our history. What’s more I do not remember hearing such a statement about the struggles of the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union, or even the former fascist past of Spain, Italy and Germany.

Many people who have read my book The Strange Death of Liberal America or visited the blog assume that my definition of Liberal America is only domestic. As a first-generation American whose family fled political tyranny, I find that curious. In Strange Death I defined the main belief of Liberal America as the conviction that government exists to keep the playing field level. That principle is as important to foreign policy as it is to domestic. When this country has exercised force overseas in support of that principle it has not only been universally welcomed but lauded. As my relatives is Germany tell me, when the Cold War ended many people around the world assumed that the principle of the level playing field would become the center of what some were calling at the time the Pax Americana.

How far they were from the truth. In Iraq we have not fought to keep the playing field level, we have screwed it up so badly that every faction in the country thinks we are tilting the playing field in the direction of their enemies. This may be the first time in history that America is seen supporting no leader and no principle. In Vietnam we supported gun-twirling generals, but in Iraq nobody seems to like us.

Part of this may be because in Strange Death I noted that the level playing field depended on four cornerstones: social and economic justice, educational equity, voting rights and media fairness. In Iraq we have violated all these. Abu Ghraib, secret CIA prisons, and the deliberate murder of civilians are hardly social and economic justice. Turning education over to corrupt subcontractors is hardly educational equity. Having chaotic elections that fail to adequately protect voters or those who are elected is hardly voting rights. As for media fairness it is hard enough to find that here let alone in Iraq.

If the Bush Administration truly believes the Iraqi people are incapable of freedom, then what are we doing there? Do you think Colin Powell would have been emailing reporters with such an excuse? If it sees the very people we are supposed to be trying to help as inferior then the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their Bush Doctrine are no different then the 19th century colonialists who justified their depredations in terms of their supposed cultural and racial superiority. If George Bush is convinced that Iraq has a weak democratic culture then it is him and his neocon allies who are cutting and running on the most despicable of excuses.
To American women, many of whom have been at the forefront of the anti-war movement, the “blame the victim” excuse must seem especially appalling, considering that in many eyes around the world we have committed the equivalent of rape in Iraq. What is next, “They asked for it?”

NOTE: This post has no picture. Were I a good cartoonist I might be able to think something, but the idea is so repulsive that no stock picture could adequately portray it.

Tagged with: Abu_Ghraib • anti_war_movement • Bush • Cheney • colonialists • democratic_culture • fairness • habeas_corpus • hubris • hypocritical • Iraq_blame_the_victims • Iraq_policy • level_playing_field • political_tyranny • principle • rape • Rumsfeld • strange_death • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • voting_rights_act • Wall_Street_Journal

Josh Syrjamaki, the Minnesota Director of America Votes, was showing off the organization’s new voting technology to a Minneapolis reporter. As an example he demonstrated on his computer screen data about a Minneapolis-area suburb that had a reputation as a Republican stronghold. In former years it is an area that Democrats would have probably ignored or given only token resources to. However, the computer has found 1,800 voters that might lean Democrat. According to reporter Patricia Lopez, “Minnesota is one of five states where liberal interest groups are road-testing their own micro-targeting system that allows them to pinpoint the lone Democrat living in a suburb full of Republicans.” Perhaps the most intriguing part of this system is that the computer may give these potential voters strange sounding names like “Fast Track Families,” “Digerati,” amd “Sunset City Blues,” always in caps as if they named real people.

I knew Josh when he worked for Paul Wellstone so it doesn’t surprise me he is using this state-of-the-art system to track down potential voters. In the past, Syrjamaki said, “We wouldn’t even have bothered with a place like Carver County. We wouldn’t have known where to start.” But the question was, how did he know that if he found a pocket of ‘Digerati” they would be Democrats? He knew because those names were uncovered with a computer program that uses a statistical modeling technique known as clustering, a technique that may not necessarily tell if someone is a registered Democrat, but will tell you how they might vote on various issues. Matthew Dowd, former senior campaign strategist for President Bush and architect of the system Republicans call “Voter Vault,” explains, “We had 180 pieces of information on every person in our system. If it shows up on a commercial database, it comes into the modeling.”

The best explanation I ever heard of clustering was from a marketing person who once told me, “If I know your zip code, I know more about you than you think.” That was almost fifteen years ago. Today he would say, “If I know your address, I can probably tell you who you voted for and what issues you favor.” The simplest way to explain clustering is that it is a statistical technique for grouping people with like interests, tastes and beliefs. You know all those warranty cards you fill out, the phone surveys you answer, even the very purchases you make in virtually every store every day combine with increasingly complete and sophisticated census and other survey data to yield a picture of who buys what kind of car, who is likely to purchase a new high definition television or what kind of beer you drink.

Rather than try to explain all the details of clustering, let me refer you to a web site, that will actually give a cluster analysis of your own zip code. Claritas, one of the oldest and most respected companies in cluster analysis maintains the site which will tell you everything you want to know about your neighbors. You will notice each of these “taste groups” has a catchy title that expresses not only an image of the people who make up the cluster but tells you about what kind of car they are likely to drive and what television programs they like to watch.

In my zip one group is called the Country Squires. Their “lifestyle traits” include, “order from online retailers, go skiing, read Family Fun magazine, watch pay-per-view movies and drive a Lexus SUV.” Most big corporations that produce things for consumers subscribe to a service like Claritas, paying lots of money to get information a lot more refined and detailed than this simple example. For advertisers willing to pay the price, cluster technology has become so precise that researchers can target consumers down to city blocks and specific consumer preferences.

Politicians now are increasingly willing to pay that price, because it may make the difference between winning and losing. The Republicans, of course, were the first to discover the virtues of clustering, perhaps because of their cozy relationship with the corporations who form one part of the Counterrevolution. Karl Rove justly deserves his title as a master at using these data which he first learned while in the direct mail business. Democrats like Syrjamaki have only recently become attuned to using clustering to plan and manage campaigns. Remember the famous “soccer moms” from the Clinton years? They are a cluster group. Then it was NASCAR dads.

Cluster technology has exerted a tremendous influence on campaign management. The ads you see, the speeches you hear, the sound bites that make the news, the literature you get in the mail (or whether you get any at all), the evening phone calls all owe a considerable debt to clustering. Once strategists have identified their target clusters, the rest of us might as well be anonymous or just turned off. Fall into the wrong cluster and you might as well be invisible or as uncomfortable as a monster pickup ad on Oprah. And if you are invisible or don’t see the issues you care about discussed in any of the ads you are probably going to think about not voting. Perhaps that is why estimates for the turnout for this mid-term election are in the 30-40% range, making nonvoters now the nation’s largest party and meaning almost three-quarters of the country will not weigh in on important issues like Iraq.

If clustering is helping to lower the voting percentage, that is bad enough, but what should really have us all worried, is that not only does clustering help shape campaigns it shapes the very map of our politics. It is no coincidence that the rise of clustering parallels the rise in the number of safe seats. Clustering allows politicians to draw electoral districts favorable to their point of view with incredible precision, making it a lot easier now than it was 10 or 20 years ago to create districts you KNOW will vote not only for your party but also your programs.

The safer the seat, of course, the less the incumbent has to compromise with his or her colleagues. So the rise of clustering also parallels the rise of what I term the Era of Bad Feelings with Congressional rancor burning through the Capitol as if fed by a foul gas. Fair Vote reports in its 2005 study Dubious Democracy, “In each of the four national elections since 1996, more than 98% of incumbents have won, and more than 90% of all races have been won by non-competitive margins of more than 10%.” They go on to note, “These measurements clearly indicate that the problem of lack of voter choice is getting worse, not better.”

Think about that as we go into this election. The reason the press is focusing so intently on only as handful of seats that could go either way is because they are the only seats really in play. The others are already decided. So a recent New York Times cover story on the election listed less than two dozen seats that were competitive. Is it really an election when out of the entire House of Representatives less than two dozen incumbents face any meaningful opposition? You can bet the next time those competitive seats come up for redistricting that the party in power will do everything it can to make them less competitive. Pretty soon there may not be any real races to report. The real struggle for power will be in the state legislatures that control redistricting.

The combination of redistricting and clustering leads to some thorny dilemmas with no easy solutions. If the number of safe districts keeps rising what will happen to America? In the famous Federalist Ten, James Madison wrote about the evils of faction and of a majority riding roughshod over minorities. He could not imagine a technology like clustering which enables political parties to put together Congressional majorities based on gerrymandered voting districts of citizens so alike they might as well be clones. This is Madison turned upside down–with clustering and clever gerrymandering a minority can actually cointrol a state delegation (Texas anyone?).

Do we want America to be ruled by the “Digerati” or the “Country Squires?” Do we want voting districts to become so safe the country resembles a feudal kingdom where House seats are life-long fiefdoms? Right now no one has the answers because not many are raising the questions. As the flames lick closer the Constitution’s parchment our eyes are turned elsewhere, like those of a couch potato glued to television footage of Iraq while a blaze rages out of control in the kitchen.

Tagged with: America_Votes • Claritas • clustering • decline_in_voter_turnout • democratic_country • Democrats • disenchanted • era_of_bad_feelings • forgotten_issues • fundamentalist_churches • gerrymandering • GOP • Iraq • lack_of_compromise • marketing • policy_question • political_commercials • political_coverage • redistricting • religious_right • safe_districts • sound_bites • technology • the_Constitution • voting_rights • Wellstone

It seems that in blogdom as in real life, the big fish try to eat the little fish. If you regular readers remember, on October 3, I posted a piece that compared the passing of the new law suspending habeus corpus for “terrorists” to the Reichstag fire. Until today it was the only piece in print, blogdom or the airwaves to make that analogy. Then a HuffPo columnist decided to also use it. Although they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it does not help much here. Unfortunately, I have no legal recourse (although my college professor wife said she would be tempted to give the writer an “F” if she were her student). However, I would like to point out the difference between good journalism and whatever it is they do over at HuffPo.

When I hatched the idea, my first thought was that it was too obvious, so I did a web search of “Bush” and “Reichstag Fire.” Needless to say, it turned up several articles, but all pertained to 9/11 and were several years old. To me journalistic integrity argued that I needed to point out I had seen those articles. I even put links on them so people could judge for themselves. On the other hand, the writer at HuffPo was either too lazy, too stupid or too brazen to even do a simple web search, which, by the way, they teach you in Journalism 101. Because she writes for a much larger audience than I do, she will get credit for the idea. In fact, when I brought the subject up in a comment she called me a “pimp.” Apparently HuffPo’s policies that forbid “abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, or include ad hominem attacks” do not pertain to their columnists.

Perhaps the best thing to do is to blow off the affair, but that article is the most personal I have written. It was my grandfather who gave what has become known as the “five minutes to twelve” speech urging Germans to unite against Hitler before it was too late. The fire came four days later. A few months after that my family fled for their lives as the Nazis began rounding up opposition leaders. One HuffPo writer suggested the Nazi analogy was overblown. Jon Stewart once did a great sketch on that theme. But as one whose family actually lived through those times,what my relatives taught me is that freedom is usually not lost in one apocalyptic Hollywood moment, but fades away in increments until one morning you find yourself in the dark as my aunt did, and walk by a gallows for your father on your way home from school. Or like my uncle you finally get that coveted visa to get your mother out of hell only to find she is already on a train to it. Constant vigilance, integrity and the rule of law are all that keeps us from falling into the abyss.

FOLLOW-UP: 11/1:

A week later I have not heard from anyone at HuffPo. Apparently then their columnists are allowed to play by different rules than their readers and others.  “Abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, or include ad hominem attacks” are OK if you write for HuffPo but not for anyone else. Nice double standard.  I believe we have an administration in power that plays by similar rules.

Tagged with: ad_hominem • blog • Bush • Germans • Hitler • Hollywood • huffpo • imitation_is_the_sincerest_form_of_flattery • Jon_Stewart • journalism • journalistic_integrity • little_fish • Nazis • reichstag_fire

Charcoal Drawing by John Martinek

This fall I traveled across rural Iowa which next year will be ground zero in the presidential campaign, passing miles of fence rows enclosing withered brown corn stalks whose leathery leaves register even the gentlest breeze with a papery rustle. In the distance you can see the faded gray towers of the grain elevators that mark small towns the way medieval castles hovered over European fields half a millennium ago.

In many of these towns live people who are becoming as much a symbol of a lost way of life as those grain elevators and castles. One of these is a short, frenetic character who goes by the nickname of Johnny Ballgame. He got that nickname some time ago for his ability to broadcast the high school and occasional small college games that have served as more than mere evening entertainment in many a rural living room. They still represent a secular worship service that preaches powerful sermons using the life stories and evening rituals of hundreds of kids, coaches, parents, and their communities. Johnny is especially renowned for his ability to somehow keep straight the frenetic games of the nation’s highest scoring team, Grinnell College, which rotates in groups of five every minute or so just like a hockey team as they pile up 120 points a game. To introduce each group as they come in and keep their names straight all the while keeping listeners abreast of the action on the court would tax any of the big names that earn more per game than probably the combined daily salaries of the small towns in the area.

But if the FCC and the Republican Counterrevolution have their way Johnny and others like him will soon be as archaic as a knight in armor. This month the FCC has been holding hearings about changes in the media ownership rules that could change the American landscape forever. My guess is that those of you reading this post have not heard anything about these hearings in the mainstream media nor in the world of the blogcasters. The day I wrote this post Huffpo, Kos, Firedoglake, Crooks and Liars were all silent on this important issue. Reminiscent of the Magical Mystery Tour that took place in 2003, these hearings may not have registered on the networks or blogdom, but they did with lots of other folks. One has already been held in Los Angeles; five more will be held in sites yet to be announced. The Writers Guild, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, the Congressional Black Caucus and the American Federation of Television & Radio Artists (AFTRA) are a few who turned out on an early October day in L.A. to decry America’s increasing media concentration. AFTRA threatened to turn out 25,000 people, people who “have experienced first-hand the devastating effects of media consolidation,” according to AFTRA president John Connolly.

Those effects should be apparent to anyone who listens to music, watches film or television or reads. The independent media are drying up, making the Johnny Ballgames of the world endangered species. Louis Armstrong, Elvis and Johnny Cash would also have trouble making it in today’s world of media concentration, for all of them got their start with small independent recording studios and small radio stations that were willing to play their music. The Cohen Brothers caught this spirit in O Brother, Where Art Thou, when the four heroes wander into a country radio station in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, in September Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Cal), announced that a source at the FCC told her that the agency had ordered the destruction of a study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage. Two economists in the FCC’s Media Bureau, analyzed a database of 4,078 individual news stories broadcast in 1998. According to MSNBC, the study showed “local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of ‘on-location’ news.”

The lost study has spurred a growth industry among various groups that oppose further media concentration. This past Thursday the Media & Democracy Coalition announced it would dump 700-800 pages of studies on the desks of the FCC. Broadcasting and Cable noted Mark Cooper, of the Consumer Federation of America, said that a study of 36 markets–state capitals, biggest city and small markets–showed that all were concentrated and that virtually all the smaller markets were highly concentrated. Another study by the University of Wisconsin’s NewsLab researched the local nightly news on 36 stations in nine top Midwestern television markets. The stations averaged 36 seconds of election coverage per night with almost three times as many stories on campaign strategy as on substantive issues. The study also showed that 1/3 of news time was devoted to commercials. Considering that at this time of year local news stations are inundated with campaign commercials, it is a safe bet that viewers in those markets spent far more time watching political ads than they did viewing actual election coverage!

As the station executives like to say, here is the bottom line: media concentration is making it harder for independent voices to be heard. With this concentration has come an aversion to serious political discussion so that now our chief media information about local candidates comes from their commercials! Liberal America and American democracy are built on the idea of a level playing field, with media concentration and the dearth of coverage of political campaigns the playing field has become severely tilted. Yet have you heard any candidates for any office in any state mention the FCC hearings? Where has the Democratic Party been throughout this battle for the future of America? If, as FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein has noted, we become a nation of Citizen Kanes then we will no longer be a true democracy because citizens will no longer have access to multiple sources of information. Instead our country will have only one loud voice that drones on like one of those tapes in a supermarket. And what if that voice spoke in the tones of Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh?

How close we are to that nightmare comes from a sobering report by Program of International Policy (PIP) which researched viewing and listening habits and compared them with views of the Iraq War. The 2003 study, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War” (open link and search study name) focused on three statements that had been exposed as false: that Saddam Hussein was a major Al Qaeda supporter, that Iraq had deployable or had deployed weapons of mass destruction and that most of the world supported America�s invasion. Only 23% of those who relied on National Public Radio or Public Broadcasting for information about public affairs believed one or more of the propositions as compared with 80% of those who watched Fox News. Even more interesting is that 54% of Republican Fox viewers held misperceptions versus 32% of Republicans who mainly received news from PBS or NPR. In essence, Fox plays a role in reinforcing the Republican Party line.

Meanwhile in Iowa Johnny Ballgame’s voice still can be heard on KGRN in Grinnell, Iowa. The day it is silenced by a buyout by someone like Clear Channel, which does not even have local “talent” but uses automated tapes, few people across America will even hear about it. Something, however, will have gone along with Johnny–his community and its voices. Without local voices towns like Grinnell will become media ghost towns. As local voices are picked off one-by-one we may find ourselves listening to the equivalent of what passes for the mass media in some tin-horn dictatorship.

Tagged with: Adelstein • Adolf_Hitler • AFTRA • Al-Qaeda • Al-Queda • Ann_Coulter • Barbara_Boxer • bias_in_the_media • blog • central_values • Citizen_Kane • cohen_brothers • cornerstones • Democrats • Elvis • fairness • FCC • fox_news • GOP • grassroots_level • grinnell_college • huffpo • Iowa • Iraq • jesse_jackson • Johnny_Cash • kos • mainstream_media • media_and_democracy_coalition • media_concentration • msnbc • NPR • PBS • political_commercials • political_coverage • rush_limbaugh • university_of_wisconsin • wmds_in_Iraq

Several people have asked about the resources section on the right side of the blog. Some have confused it with a blogroll, which it is not. The resources section was originally intended as a place to put some of the major resources from the book. As some of you know, all the twenty-some pages of citations in the book have URLs because I wanted people to be able to see the original source. My plan was to put all the resources on a companion CD–which I still think will be the wave of the future–but as my publisher pointed out, right now obtaining the rights to do that is an expensive and time-consuming process. Instead, I compromised and put on the blog a list of organizations and sources that had been most important to me.

Now that the book has become a blog, the purpose of the resources section also needs to be reviewed. What I want this to be is a place people can go for further information. It is NOT a blogroll (although a few sites are blogs). If you are like me you read blogs for opinion. So the resources section has now been renamed “Primary Sources” By this I mean a primary source for information just like they taught you in high school. Many of these sites are nonprofits that do exist to forward a cause, but if they are listed here you can trust their information and go to them to find out that organization may have to offer about a policy question. From time to time I may add a subsection that lists primary sources on a particular issue or problem. The first one will be information about voting, coming soon.

Each week I will also recognize one site in the blog posts, so you might know a bit more about it. The site of the week for this week is United Professionals. UP is the brainchild of one of my favorite writers, Barbara Ehrenreich and several of her friends and colleagues. After writing Bait and Switch, Barbara saw the need for an organization that would needs of the professional workers she saw being ripped off by callous corporations and ripoff recruiting services, seminars, and head-hunters (for once a term that aptly characterizes a group of people). As one of the few writers I know that walks her talk, Barbara Ehrenreich put together a blue-ribbon board to run UP.

UP is for “people who bought the American dream that education and credentials could lead to a secure middle class life, but now find their lives disrupted by forces beyond their control.” In other words, most of us. For just ten cents a day you can join an organization that is moving toward offering insurance, job assistance, legal advice, and other services. Because UP is less than a month old many of these services are still in the planning stages, but as the site points out the more members, the more leverage they have to build these services. UP is also building local chapters.

Take a look. What these folks are trying to do is unprecedented and much-needed. In a world full of ripoffs and snake oil, this one looks to be the real deal.

Tagged with: AARP • bait_and_switch • Barbara_Ehrenreich • blog • Blogroll • head_hunters • health_insurance • job_assistance • legal_advice • nonprofits • policy_question • primary_source • professional_workers • wave_of_the_future

As a systems person one of the first things I learned was something called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In essence it says something may happen in the system that you think is good, but in fact it turns out to be exactly the opposite. I thought about that the other day as I read a piece about how the Republicans are worried that part of their Counterrevolutionary Coalition may desert them at the polls. This particular piece was written before the Event That Has Spawned Too Many Posts. The gist of the argument was that the Religious Right had become disenchanted with the Bush Administration and also the Republican Congress for failing to advance the so-called “social agenda.” The author of the article pointed out that one reason the GOP did so well in the previous election was that the party had managed to get issues guaranteed to bring out the Religious Right on the ballot such as gay marriage and abortion. That has not happened this time.

One could also add the McCain factor. McCain currently appears to be the front runner for the GOP presidential nomination, but even with his recent cozying up to Jerry Falwell, the Religious Right is suspicious of him. So the conventional wisdom seems to be the Religious Right is losing power and the Counterrevolutionary Coalition is splintering.

Yet one unintended consequence of the Event That Has Spawned Too Many Posts may not to drive away the Religious Right but bring them back. While Falwell and company have been noticeably quiet throughout this campaign, word at the grassroots level seems to suggest that fundamentalist churches are as active as ever. One can almost imagine what they must be using to energize the faithful now, preaching that they need to be even MORE active so they keep their party pure and free of ungodly influences.

Yet at the national level where two years ago every other word was values, the Administration has been relatively quiet. Part of this may be due to the diminished influence of Karl Rove, who was a master at turning out the fundamentalist vote. Yet there is also an uneasiness about the quiet, that is reminiscent of a stealth campaign.

To determine the mood of the Religious Right I spent some time visiting some of the website of the Religious Right. On the surface they do seem to have lost some of their fire and brimstone. Even Gary Bauer was lamenting that things looked bleak for the GOP. On the other side those trying to rally the troops sounded a bit like coaches giving half-time locker room speeches to a team that was behind. In the Agape Press, cited at Falwell’s website, one writer wrote:

Which brings us to a last good reason to vote your evangelical convictions based on Scripture: to rebuff those who are trying to intimidate, embarrass, and dismiss the voting population that still believes ardently in God, Bible, noble American values, and a future that doesn’t belong to the shrill, the ethics of Hollywood, and the unrighteous indignation of the cultural elite.

Voting — it is one of the things you can do while blessing and annoying at the same time. Election day is just around the corner. Let’s get ready to roll.

Perhaps, the Religious Right does find itself in a corner, but it seems that every time we underestimate them it comes back to haunt us.

Tagged with: conventional_wisdom • disenchanted • energize • fundamentalist_churches • gay_marriage • gist • GOP • grassroots_level • Jerry_Falwell • law_of_unintended_consequences • McCain • presidential_nomination • religious_right • Republican_congress • social_agenda • time_one • unintended_consequence

On this cool autumn night, the slow, steady drizzle steams in halos around luminous globes mounted high on telephone poles. The rain casts an almost iridescent glow on the field so that I cannot help but think of the words of Psalm 23, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” The two teams line the edge of the field, the gleam on their maroon and red helmets reflecting the inner pride and passion of these boy-men who their headgear like Roman centurions. The hair cheerleaders carefully labored over so each strand held transcendental meaning is already plastered to their heads, held in place only by ribbons matching their school colors. In the metal bleachers, whole families in rain jackets, slickers and wool hunting coats all face the flag at the end of the field which can only weakly flutter as it soaks up the falling drops. When the first notes of the Star-Spangled Banner cut through the air hands involuntarily move to chests with the only salute I know that projects a truly democratic fealty and loyalty.

It is Friday night across America’s heartland, these fields of dreams shattered and fulfilled, each blade of grass the keeper of memories that lie in trophy cases, leather sleeved jackets still hanging in closets, and the stories that have woven through barbershops, cafes, and bars for generations. These fuel the night’s anticipation as the last chords of the anthem drift across the darkness. Everyone believes this night will be one to add to the legends that are the Iliads and Odysseys of so many small towns.

But this Friday night is woven of fragile, even tattered threads. Football, which many see as a metaphor for America has a story to tell beyond touchdown passes, kickoff returns and tackles that crack in the night like gunshots. The story it tells is one about two Americas: one that lives as much on television screens as it does in reality; another that is struggling just stay in the game. Football is an expensive sport from the uniforms and practice equipment like blocking sleds to maintaining the field to the ever-increasing cost of insurance. Some school boards are whispering the unthinkable or combining their programs with communities that used to be arch rivals. In some inner city schools, there is no more football to speak of.

But at newly built suburban megaschools and elite private schools unbound by eligibility rules, the football program is an all-to-visible badge of their elite status. Every state has such programs with state-or-the-art weight rooms, sideline headphones and laptop computers that have crunched every possible number about the opposing team complete with film illustrations. There is little to distinguish these teams from bowl-bound college powerhouses–in fact a few actually offer more perks than an NCAA investigator would permit. Some elite high school teams don’t even lower themselves to play former in-state rivals but put together schedules that have them traveling the country along with Texas, Ohio State and USC. In Sports Illustrated I saw a photograph of a high school weight room in Plano, Texas that rivals that of my local Big Ten powerhouse. A perennial state power near where I live sports a domed practice field, while another used its booster club’s six figure fund to help hire one of the winningest coaches in the state with an offer he could not refuse. The same district also hired a speech teacher who had filled his school’s trophy case with prize-winning plays and musicals and even sent students to Broadway.

When I was head of a national school reform group I was treated to tours of some of these facilities and soon learned to gauge a school’s financial health by the state of its football program. Big time football schools also had state of the art recording studios and computer labs many colleges would envy. I had lunch with a school technology specialist in Washington state who had moved directly from Renton and brought with them a version of Windows NT that many corporations had not seen. At another school I stood in the middle of a training lab that resembled nothing so much as the deck of the Starship Enterprise. In Vermont I helped to put together the first online school board meeting. Yet in the rural, inner city and tribal schools I visited it is fair to say the entire budgets of those schools probably were less than the extracurricular budgets of the elite.

Football is a symbol for American education, but not the way many like to think of it. It quite visibly testifies to the ever-growing resource gap between the haves and the have-nots. Parents who can see this vote with their feet, leaving the poorer districts in even more dire straights. Those inequities have only grown during the Counterrevolution with its budget cuts and mandatory testing, all fueled by parents who have abandoned their dreams but now project them on their kids who claw over one another for that Division One athletic scholarship or the full ride to the Ivy League.

American education now is two cultures forming a fork in the road leading in entirely different directions. If educational equity is one of democracy’s cornerstones, it is in danger of becoming extinct. The Counterrevolution has buried it under a concerted effort to bleed public education as it has bled so many other social programs. In the future the GOP promises vouchers that fund the Ayatollah Academies of the likes of Jerry Falwell. Imagine Jesus Camp for twelve years.

While the bloggers rant about the war, education is being cut off at the knees. Maybe the children of these limousine liberals will buy their way into Harvard, but for my kid and your kid the options are narrowing every day. This country could be dead in the water not because some fool with a head full of drugs and dreams of martyrdom flies a plane into a skyscraper, but because our growing educational inequity will destroy us from within.

And so saying a prayer while looking on a football game this Friday night does not seem so far-fetched. For some students, like some teams, that is all they have.

Technorati Tags: high school football, Education, Republican, Iliad, Republican Counterrevolution, Eduction Inequities, unequal education, Football as metaphor, Ohio State, Psalm 23, A Football Prayer