Boris and Friend

Given that three new books have hit the stores and book review sections, all about the GOP’s version of Tokyo Rose, Ann Coulter, it seems an excellent time to explore just who she is and what she means. To me I have always thought of her as Natasha. That is Natasha as in Boris and, the two bumbling cartoon spies created by the immortal Jay Ward as foils for Rocky the Flying Squirrel and his dim-witted sidekick, Bullwinkle the Moose. Boris and Natasha spoke some generic foreign accent that sounded like Khruschev after too many vodkas as they hatched various ridiculous schemes to take over the world on behalf of one “Fearless Leader,” who bore a spooky resemblance to Heinrich Himmler. Boris was the Lou Costello part of the team, a chunky guy with a pencil mustache who had trouble tying his shoes. Natasha not only was the brains of the outfit, but also could get off some great one-liners that cut into someone (usually Boris) like a knife.

Ward’s brilliance lay in taking a venerable Hollywood stereotype and turning it into, well, a cartoon. The stereotype, of course, was the femme fatale whose major weapons were her mind and her tongue as much as they were her abilities to mix a potent poison or stick a gun in someone’s back at just the right time. All of us can name a long line of Hollywood stars who made fortunes (and Oscars) playing this role from Marlene Dietrich (Natasha’s voice was a parody of hers), through Bette Davis and Joan Crawford to Dynasty and even “reality” shows like Survivor. James Bond films have always have a Natasha as does just about any modern thriller or disaster film.

The idea of a woman who is pretty, smart, talks with a potty mouth and seeks to stir up trouble is an archetype that resonates with something deep in the American psyche on the same level as the barroom bully who argues about everything and will back it up with his fists. In fact just about every Western I have ever seen usually had an Ann Coulter, usually with long blond hair, breasts about to fall out of her dress as she lounged by the bar with the characteristic hand-on-hip posture that you knew sooner or later would start a fight.

That the archetypes of the Barroom Bully and the Barroom Babe should become the staple of what I term the Raucous Right is fascinating. Many years ago William F. Buckley and William Rusher were the archetypal right wing ideologues, men with impeccable manners, a vocabulary honed as sharp as a rapier, and nimble minds that could tie an unwitting victim in the fallacies of their own logic.

Today the Raucous Right has made a very conscious decision to take discourse from the salon to the saloon or even the dark alleys “outside,” as in the “you want to take this outside” taunt heard in any bar worth its neon sign. This has been a major contributor to the Era of Bad Feelings and has run in parallel with a similar development in sports talk shows. Unlike Buckley, who loved to intellectually best his opponents, these bad actors don’t care. They just keep taunting “come on draw, you yellow-bellied coward,” or “aren’t you man enough?”

It�s a Hollywood script or the WWF, not “news” or “journalism.” The words come from actors, not reporters or thoughtful commentators. The implications of this are obvious–the opponents in a political debate are worth neither the time nor the respect. Although Rush Limbaugh and company like to think of themselves as John Wayne, they are, in fact, not even Liberty Valence but more like those scruffy crooks and liars that always lingered just behind the shoulders of the man in the black hat.

Ann Coulter pushes this increasing confusion between Hollywood and information to the next extreme. I have no idea what she is like personally (Joan Crawford could be even nastier in person than on the screen according to various bios), but clearly in her books and in front of the media she is playing a role. That the media and the public should buy into this role has more to do with Coulter’s ability to play Natasha well than with anything she actually says or does. As in any Hollywood drama (Dynasty comes to mind) her appeal comes from the audience wondering how far she will go.

When Coulter appears on talk TV, she is a failure if some absolutely nasty soundbite does not come out of it and make the papers the next morning. My guess is, going in, she knows what that soundbite will be, and like any good actor, knows that timing is everything. Throw the punchline out there right away and the drama is over, wait too long and the audience gets bored. Coulter is the acknowledged master at salting her opinions with outrageous quotes, the kind of thing that ends up at the water cooler when two people say, “Did you hear what SHE said…”

If we follow this thread, we have to ask why does the Republican Counterrevolution feel compelled to hire actors to serve as its intellectual voice, to talk with everyday Americans about why they should support the Counterrevolution? To begin with, it shows they think, contrary to what they say, that most of us Americans are not very bright, that invective and twisted facts and hate speech are what we crave. An Austrian corporal thought the same thing.

We also need to ask why should the Counterrevolution feel a need to muddy the line between Hollywood and journalism? The answer to that is easy: the more that line is muddied the harder it is to determine whether the playing field is level. Everything becomes sham when all life is the equivalent of tourist Tombstone where they reenact the gunfight at the OK Corral every day with a preciseness you could set your watch by.

Finally, why is the media buying these acts? In the days of the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh would have a lost a rather hefty lawsuit (see the Supreme Court’s Red Lion decision if you don’t believe me) and any reputable publisher would have shown Coulter the door because their fact checkers would have rejected all the distortions and falsehoods in her books. Fox News maintains they are only giving the people what they want, but surveys seem to show they are merely feeding their GOP audience? Meanwhile the Republican FCC looks the other way, even though we own the airwaves.

As for Coulter/Natasha, the question is, who is her Boris? And where is Fearless Leader?

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord, The Strange Death of Liberal America

Tagged with: Ann_Coulter • Austrian_corporal • barroom • bette_davis • Boris_and_Natasha • contempt_for_the_American_people • counterrevolution • crooks_and_liars • FCC • fearless_leader • fox_news • GOP • Hollywood • joan_crawford • John_Wayne • Liberty_Valence • media • natasha • raucous_right • Red_Lion_decision • Republican_Party • rush_limbaugh • sound_bites • tokyo_rose • western • william_f_buckley

Did you know there is an organization that for a $50 contribution will train a future President of the United States or Senator or Congressperson? That organization is Wellstone Action. The $50 will pay for a scholarship for some possible future office holder to attend a Camp Wellstone session designed to teach them how to run for and win elective office.

As the organization’s website notes, “Founded in January 2003, Wellstone Action’s mission is to honor the legacy of Paul and Sheila Wellstone by continuing their work through training, educating, mobilizing and organizing a vast network of progressive individuals and organizations.” Led by the Wellstone’s sons, Mark and David and many old Wellstone staff members such as campaign manager Jeff Blodgett. Wellstone Action set about applying what some of us who knew Paul and Sheila call the Wellstone triad to rebuilding the progressive movement. When he was a political science professor at Carleton College and engaging in his early community organizing attempts, Paul Wellstone used to passionately talk about how politics consisted of three equally important areas which he outlined in his book The Conscience of a Liberal: “good ideas and policy, so your activism has direction; grassroots organizing so there is a constituency to fight for the change; and electoral politics, since it is one of the ways people feel most comfortable deciding about power in our country.”

These three principles guide the many activities of Wellstone Action, including engaging members in non-partisan voter mobilization efforts; lobbying Congress on behalf of mental health parity, Social Security and the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act; and training domestic violence advocates to be organizers on their issue. The centerpiece of Wellstone Action is Camp Wellstone, a unique experience that may be the best hope we liberals have of re energizing our country in terms what Paul called “the American justice tradition.”

Camp Wellstones usually last for one weekend and are divided into strands for those who wish to become candidates, those who want to become better advocates for particular issues, and those who want to manage or become active in electoral campaigns. Each track is taught by expert facilitators, some of whom are former Wellstone campaign organizers or have worked on other campaigns, led community organizing efforts or advocacy groups. Having attended one of these I can assure you that first, there is nothing else out there like it and second, it’s great time. Camp Wellstones take place in cities across the country and also on college campuses, so if you are interested in possibly attending one, check the Wellstone Action web site for dates and locations. Now here’s the best deal–unlike a lot of political trainers who charge outrageous sums of money to attend their seminars–Camp Wellstone costs $75 per person, and $35 for students and low-income participants. The materials alone that I received were worth that much.

After this fall’s election Wellstone Action announced that 78 Camp Wellstone alumni had won elections. These included several who won House seats including John Hall - NY, David Loebsack - IA, Tim Walz - MN, and Keith Ellison–MN. Fifty-nine alums won seats in state legislatures, and other victories ranged from school board to Secretary of State.

One of those winners may have been the person who received the scholarship I donated to help send someone to Camp Wellstone. And yes, maybe someday that person may be president. In my opinion right now Wellstone Action and the Camp Wellstones may be the best things the Democratic Party and Liberal Americans have going for them. We Democrats like to argue about issues, we get involved come election time, but few of us have paid much attention to the third part of the Wellstone triad–grassroots organizing.

The GOP has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade. Groups on the Religious Right such as the Christian Coalition have been running candidate training sessions since the days of Ralph Reed. If the Democratic Party is to hold on to its majority it will need more efforts like Camp Wellstone to attract candidates for the next election cycle as well as community organizers who will work for their issues an organizations on a local level and keep the heat on the White House and Congress.

I find it most interesting that the Wellstone’s legacy is named Wellstone Action not the Wellstone Institute or some other pretentious-sounding title. Both Paul and Sheila were unpretentious people, as comfortable in an Iron Range tavern as a DC diplomatic reception. But most of all they were people of action. I’m not sure I ever saw either of them stand still for very long or not be passionately advocating for an important cause. As we move into these next two years we need to remember that it is action not words that will decide what direction this nation takes. Even for those like me who are disabled we can all play a role. The coming fight will be neither easy nor fair, for the other side has been playing “take-no-prisoners” politics for quite some time and they will not yield power easily.

Tagged with: American_justice • blodgett • camp_wellstone • carleton_college • christian_coalition • community_organizing • david_loebsack • david_wellstone • domestic_violence_advocates • electoral_politics • John_Hall • keith_ellison • Mark_wellstone • mental_health_parity • Paul_Wellstone • progressive_individuals • progressive_movement • Ralph_Reed • Sheila • tim_walz • violence_against_women_act • voter_mobilization_efforts • Wellstone_Action • Wellstone_triad

“The core of our American democracy is the right to vote. Implicit in that right is the notion that that vote be private, that vote be secure, and that vote be counted as it was intended when it was cast by the voter. And I think what we’re encountering is a pivotal moment in our democracy where all of that is being called into question.”

Verified Voting Foundation

Florida again–and Katherine Harris wasn’t even in charge. Yet somehow she seems to have a way of haunting vote counts. In the contest for her vacant House seat 18,000 votes may have never been recorded in Sarasota County. This calls for a short, select history lesson the covers seven years of voting scandals.

• In 1999, officials of the the Sequoia voting machines company were indicted for bribing Louisiana elections commissioner Jerry Fowler with $8 million. In 2005, Sequoia raised a few eyebrows when it was acquired by the Venezuelan company Smartmatic.

• In 2001 the Civil Rights Commission Investigating the Florida Election Mess concluded:

Restrictive statutory provisions, wide-ranging errors and inadequate and unequal resources in the election process denied countless Floridians the right to vote.

• In 2002, Greg Palast investigated how the GOP conducted the purge of Florida voters, finding widespread abuse. Palast has been writing about election abuse ever since so much so that by now he must have a bad case writer’s cramp and a rather large headache that comes from no one listening even though you have identified the crooks and liars innumerable times.

• In 2002, Bev Harris, who would write Black Box Voting–one of the classics of electronic voting literature–first began writing about electronic voting fraud after she discovered that U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel had ownership in and had been CEO of the company that built the machines which counted his own votes. (The company: Election Systems & Software).

• In 2003, Harris, whom Salon.com referred to as the “Erin Brockovich of elections” (Salon.com), just weeks after a stunning electoral upset in Georgia that tipped control of the U.S. Senate, discovered 40,000 secret voting machine files — including a set of files called “rob-georgia,” containing instructions to replace Georgia’s computerized voting files before the election. The files she found contained databases with votes in them and the voting machine programs themselves. She downloaded the files on Jan. 23, 2003 and set them free on the Internet a few months later, where they were studied by scientists and security experts.

• In 2003 Stanford Scientist David Dill authored a petition for a voter-verifiable audit trail on all voting equipment which has been endorsed by thousands of people, including many of the top computer scientists in the U.S. Dill also founded the Verified Voting Foundation.

• In July 2003 Sandeep S. Atwal wrote in investigative report posted on the now defunct infernalpress.com site that the executives in some of the electronic voting machine companies had links to the Reactionary Right., �If [the] charges are true,” he wrote, “and there is little evidence to contradict their claims, George W. Bush has already won the 2004 election.�

• In July 2004, Scientific American bestowed a prestigious Technology 50 leadership award on R. Michael Alvarez and Ted Selker for seeking to reform American voting. Scientific American noted :

Alvarez and Selker recommended four major steps the Election Assistance Commission should take to minimize lost votes in the November 2004 elections. These included better voter registration processes, fixing certain ballot problems, requiring the reporting of more balloting statistics, and developing better voter complaint procedures.

• Today, November 25, 2006, the New York Times concluded, “After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation�s voting system, this month�s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.” The article went on to detail numerous problems with machines, those who operate them, and the companies that manufacture and program them.

At this point allow the author a little leeway as he cites one of the most enduring and overused cliches used by writers. On May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced to an audience at Rice University, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” On July 20, 1969–a little more than eight years after JFK’s speech–Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface in an event televised around the world. At the time Kennedy made his pledge, the best the United States had been able to do was to send Alan Shephard on a 15 minute suborbital flight.

The point of this oft-quoted example is that it has taken the Bush Administration almost as long to correct our screwed up voting procedures as it did to put someone on the moon. As long as we are knee deep in cliches, let me evoke one more obvious one–getting voting procedures right is not rocket science. So now it’s question time.

First, why have we committed to using computers in the first place? As we have seen the technology is expensive, prone to mistakes and security problems, and requires poll workers trained in how to use the machines. The entire move towards computer voting has been a boondoggle for several companies with questionable records and even more questionable ties to the GOP.

The usual argument is that if we don’t use computers we are back to peering at hanging chads through magnifying glasses. Here is my home state of Minnesota we have been successfully using paper ballots that are counted by machines ever since I first voted way back when. The cardboard ballots contain the fill-in bubbles familiar to anyone who has taken any kind of standardized test. Unless someone fills in two bubbles for the same office or totally misses a bubble, it is pretty obvious who they intended to vote for. The cardboard ballot is kept for verification after the machine tallies it. Since Minnesota has used this system there has not been, as far as I know, a single complaint about the technology. It is simple to use, relatively inexpensive and–most important–can be verified.

Second, why the delay? I could find dozens of programmers in my local phonebook who could probably write a voting machine code. In fact my wife hired one such programmer to help her with a medical research project that used a touch screen survey. It took him three months and cost probably what those contractors were charging for lunch on their expense accounts. There really are only two conclusions: the people running this program are even more incompetent than those running FEMA during Katrina and the GOP, which has never been a fan of making voting easier, has been dragging its feet.

With the Democrats now in control of Congress one of the first items on their agenda ought to be to straighten out this voting mess once and for all. Of course, somehow it failed to make the cut on that famous 100 hour agenda. That was a terrible mistake. Without a reliable system of voting everything else this Congress enacts will have little meaning, because when the next election rolls around it will be more of the same. Before we seek to plant the seed of democracy throughout the world or criticize the voting practices of other nations it would be wise if we cleaned up our own weed patch because it has become so overgrown that many Americans refuse to enter it.

The Times story quotes one voter who asked for a provisional ballot because he felt at least that way he knew his vote would be counted. When we have descended so far that the people no longer trust the system, then the system risks losing its credibility forever. As many countries can testify, when you pollute the rule of the ballot the only alternative is the rule of the bullet.

Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord, The Strange Death of Liberal America

Tagged with: alan_shepard • American_democracy • Bev_Harris • black_box_voting • bribing • Bush_administration • Chuck_Hagel • crooks_and_liars • david_dill • Democratic_Party • Democrats • election_mess • electronic_voting • erin_brockovich • ess • FEMA • Florida_election • florida_voters • GOP • Greg_Palast • jerry_fowler • JFK • Minnesota • neil_armstrong • Republican_Party • right_to_vote • R_Michael_Alvarez • sandeep_atwal • Scientific_American • sequoia • statutory_provisions • target • ted_selker • venezuelan_company • verified_voting_foundation • voting_machines

Three years ago on this day, venerable Washington columnist David Broder penned a Thanksgiving piece that dared to use a term we had not heard for over a century:

“Be thankful this Thanksgiving that no civil war looms, for the divisions are everywhere to be seen… It is clear in retrospect that even the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil were not enough to unite the nation.”

When I began writing The Strange Death of Liberal America about that time, the country seemed ready to implode on itself. I coined the term The Era of Bad Feelings to describe the atmosphere of that time as voices on the left and right egged on one another in the media and on the Internet. Nothing was out of bounds, no insult too harsh, no curse too crude. People such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter symbolized those times and often found themselves accused of fomenting the nastiness. Certainly there is no doubt they loved the attention like two professional wrestlers growling at the crowd and their opponent across the ring then pummeling their hated rival with anything at hand, all the while locked up in a cage like the animals they pretended to imitate. It resembled the Roman Circus only in this media age words could be as deadly as the tridents, swords and other weapons employed by the gladiators.

Curiously the victims of many of those ancient Roman bloodfests–Christian zealots–were one of the main forces fueling the Era of Bad Feelings making outrageous statements about 9/11 as retribution for America’s permissiveness and stirring up hatred for gay people and Muslims on a level that approached the sick anti-Jewish rhetoric of Joseph Goebbels. Anyone not “born again” was a sinner and some ministers were more than happy to paint vivid pictures of what awaited most of us when the final judgment came.

What seemed to characterize the extremes of both left and right was a little-disguised contempt for the American people. Those on the right liked to talk about “the people” and how “the majority” was on their side in their holy war against the “liberal agenda.” In Strange Death I noted one member of the Raucous Right let his guard down long enough for an Atlantic reporter to catch his true feelings:

The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been led to believe. Never forget this. And just like people are far dumber than you have been led to believe, they are also far more dishonest than anyone is seemingly willing to admit to you. Do not trust anyone unless you have some sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that leverage over them.

Those on the far left were not much different. I am sorry to say people whom I considered close friends not only hated George W. Bush with an almost irrational passion, but they blamed the American people for allowing such an imbecile in the White House. The name calling I heard from some of these people was every bit as bad as anything coming from Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh.

It seemed what the media were calling the culture wars was about to break out the live ammunition. Certainly there were minor skirmishes, the most serious of which was the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot that was organized by still unprosecuted GOP operatives to disrupt the counting of votes during the 2000 election. The fact that some of these heirs to Hitler’s brown shirts received promotions for their violent attempt to disrupt an election–even as I write this some of them are even proudly serving in the Bush White House–only added to the anger, hypocrisy, and contempt not only for manners but the rule of law that lurked behind so much of the Era of Bad Feelings.

Yet for all the contempt zealots on both sides showed for the American people, the American people came through again in the recent elections giving the Republicans–and along with them the tactics of the Era of Bad Feelings–what the president called a “thumping.” So this Thanksgiving we should perhaps remember the wisdom of this nation’s founders and celebrate the fact that our system worked.

The People had finally had enough: enough of a war with little purpose and less top level tactical leadership than since George McClellen commanded the Army of the Potomac, enough of the national embarrassment of one of the world’s great cities being leveled to the ground by a storm everyone knew was coming and no one has done anything to clean up after, enough of scandal after scandal by GOP politicians whose incompetence at corruption would have left the Sopranos shaking their heads, enough of negative ads so ridiculous that the politicians they were supposed to help found themselves disowning them, enough of a government that had tilted the playing field so far that the average American felt as though they were trying to keep from sliding down an icy mountain, enough of a media that had openly abandoned the commitment to fairness that had been the hallmark of Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and Peter Jennings, enough of an education system whose No Child Left Behind had turned learning upside down by leaving behind schools, students, teachers and parents who were having the toughest time learning, enough of electoral shenanigans that had the Republican Party actually trying to repeal one of the most important pieces of 20th Century legislation–the Voting Rights Act.

The system had been abused for six years by hypocritical Supreme Court justices that turned strict constructionism into a synonym for personal predilections, distorted and untruthful media reports that turned Swift Boat from a badge of honor into a synonym for political propaganda, and an administration that will go down as one of the worst in American history not merely because of its incompetence but because its organized efforts to undermine the system turned patriotism and defense of country into a synonym for abusing the Constitution. The American system had shown itself more stronger and robust than even those founders who had suffered through that steamy Philadelphia summer could imagine.

So thank you, people of America. You deserve this day and may all that you are now thankful for not be taken away from you and all that you wish for somehow come true.

Crossposts: The Strange Death of Liberal America, All Things Democrat, My Left Wing, LeftWord

Tagged with: accountability • American_Constitution • Ann_Coulter • bias_in_the_media • Brooks_Brothers_riot • Bush • Bush_administration • contempt_for_the_American_people • david_broder • education_funding • era_of_bad_feelings • fairness • George_W_Bush • GOP • Hitler • hypocritical • level_playing_field • mainstream_media • media • NCLB • negative_ads • New_Orleans • peter_jennings • raucous_right • religious_right • Republican_Party • roman_circus • rush_limbaugh • strange_death • Supreme_Court • swift_boat • Thanksgiving_Day • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • voting_rights_act • walter_cronkite

Sometimes seemingly trivial events can turn out to be unusually revealing. Such was the case during President Bush’s August 7, 2006 news conference when Condi met the cricket. You may remember that conference held on Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch as the one in which the President first used the phrase “Islamic fascists.” Said Bush:

Not only do terrorists try to stop the advance of democracy through killing innocent people within the countries, they also try to shake the will of the Western world by killing innocent Westerners. They try to spread their jihadist message, a message I call - it’s totalitarian in nature - Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism. They try to spread it as well by taking the attack to those of us who love freedom.

Amidst all the analysis of this remark and the announcement by Bush and Rice that the United States finally had developed a resolution to end the hostilities in Lebanon, sharp-eyed New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg saw the cricket. Others must have also, but only Stolberg mentioned the incident. Apparently in the midst of this carefully-staged event held in the hanger that normally houses the presidential helicopter, what Ms. Stolberg refers to as “a rather large cricket” decided to share the stage with the President and Secretary of State. Here is her description:

It ambled slowly across the concrete hangar floor just as the president was declaring that “what the American people need to know is, we’ve got a strategy–a strategy for freedom in the Middle East.”

As the cricket drew ever closer to Ms. Rice’s pump-clad foot, she cast a nervous eye downward, and for a moment, there was a palpable pause in the room, as reporters wondered to themselves: Would she stomp on the cricket? Would he? Would a Secret Service agent burst in with a can of bug spray?

Alas, there was no need. The cricket kept on going.

There are cultures in this world who would take such an event quite seriously, perhaps even as an omen, after all crickets do not normally walk into Presidential press conferences. The obvious reference, of course, would be to a cricket named Jiminy who served as the conscience of a wooden-headed puppet whose nose grew every time he told a lie. The other quick reference would probably be to the famous children’s book, The Cricket in Times Square, whose hero named Chester has the ability to imitate any music he hears on the radio. Likening George W. Bush to Pinocchio in both cartoons and op ed pieces became stale even before his first term ended. As for being able to imitate a radio, perhaps the closest we can come is how the Raucous Right and the President often seem to parrot one another. Certainly Fox News seems resembles a cricket in the White House.

Curious about how other cultures of the world might regard a cricket omen I spent a fascinating afternoon exploring the web. I learned, for example, that Aesop’s famous fable about the Grasshopper and the Ants sometimes switches a cricket for the grasshopper–a morality story for those budget hawks who fear Dubya’s record deficits. A fascinating article by a Brazilian anthropologist explained how the inhabitants of the village of Pedra Branca, Bahia State, Brazil believe the singing of crickets is a sign of rain. Professor Eraldo M. Costa Neto also notes, “In the city of Caraguatatuba, S�o Paulo State, a black cricket in a room is a sign of sickness; a gray one a sign of money; and a green one a sign of hope (Lenko and Papavero 1996). In the state of Alagoas, northeast Brazil, a cricket announces death. That’s why it is killed as soon as it sings inside the house (Ara�jo 1977).” Ms. Stolberg did not tell us the color of the press conference cricket.

When it comes to crickets, no one tops the Chinese. Crickets have woven through their history for thousands of years. It is said the concubines of Tang emperors kept crickets in special gold cages and placed them by their pillows at night. Today crickets are still sold as pets in Chinese markets. There also is a Chinese tradition of fighting crickets which resulted in both a “Cricket Minister” and “Cricket Emperor” whose nicknames came from their obsession with cricket combats, which are still a popular sport.

But given that this cricket appeared in Texas, perhaps the closest omen is that of Kokopelli, the hump-backed flute player who is sometimes pictured with cricket-like antennae. You can’t travel anywhere in the Southwest without running into jewelry, paintings and other tourist souvenirs of Kokopelli. For some Indigenous People in the Southwest, Kokopelli represents an extremely important and powerful figure, a life force. He also can take on the attributes of a trickster.

I would like to think perhaps it was his apparition that walked into that press conference. Remember also, that it was Condoleeza Rice not President Bush who appeared perplexed by the cricket. The President apparently never even noticed (you can enter your own punch-line here, this one’s too easy). Imagine yourself in Rice’s shoes: this INSECT dares to crawl right up to your impeccably-clean, color-coordinated pumps. You are not a Chinese emperor or even a concubine, so that critter means nothing to you. It isn’t raining outside so this isn’t a Brazilian cricket. It’s not a stray dog or cat or even an armadillo, but a six-legged creepy, crawly thing–the kind of creature you pay illegal aliens to keep out of your house and out of your sight.

What do you do? What if Kokopelli starts to play his flute while the president is on a roll, as George W. invokes Tony Blair and the need to stand firm against the terrorists and all of a sudden there is this loud chirping? Why the hell didn’t all those security people do something? They’re supposed to protect the president against terror and they can’t even keep out a cricket? Maybe the cricket is not what it seems�a clever device hatched by the same fiendish minds who would put explosives in shoes and shampoo bottles?

You could, of course, just squish the little devil, but not only might that mess up your pumps but also it might make an embarrassing crunch just as your boss got to the punch line or worse found himself in one of those awkward silences he sometimes has when he is searching the brush in the back forty of his brain for something to say. You might get away with it if you tried during that silly moment when all those reporters wave their recorders and shout out “Mr. President.” But what if they saw you do it? Worse, what if the cameras caught you? “Rice stomps cricket,” would make the headlines and provide yet more fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

On the other hand, what would Rush, Ollie and Bill say? There were already whisperings that you were squeamish about power, and now you can’t even take out a cricket. Newk Iran, the talk show call-ins rant, give those ayatollahs all the martyrdom they can handle. As for Iraq, let the Israelis take care of it like they did Hezbollah. And Jerry and Pat? This was a holy war. Israel needs to return to its original form to signal the last days. Sinners and unbelievers were worse than insects.

Interpreting omens can be a tricky business. We still can’t agree on what 9/11 foretold, so how can we figure out a cricket? Maybe Kokopelli was trying to tell us something more simple and yet more profound, something like how most of the people in the world feel that living with the United States bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the situation of that cricket sitting next to its president and secretary of state? You could be ignored or loathed or crushed and never have a say in the process, like an Iraqi family just sitting down to dinner when a stray rocket happens to hit across the street or next door.

It has become a cliche that we live in a new world where America is the dominant power, and yet for all our power we have never seemed so vulnerable, not just because of 9/11 but because it is taking us almost as long to subdue Iraq as it did the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. What is more, like Condi and the cricket, stomping out problems does not seem a viable option anymore, as much as some would like us to do so.

Nor does merely ignoring the problem and hope it goes away seem viable in our interconnected global society, the way Condi, the President, his aides and the press tried to ignore the cricket. In a half-century or so when historians write the histories of this administration, it may be known more for what it avoided than for the messes it got itself into. We could recite a long list here, starting with Darfur, but actually it is easier to just go by continent. Start with Africa and South America, which seem to be off this administration’s radar screen. With the exceptions of China and trying to keep the Taliban out of Pakistan, we can add Asia to the list–and, by the way, that includes North Korea’s nukes and also Japan, which has become almost a foreign policy afterthought. As for Europe, other than our cozy relationship with the United Kingdom�s shaky lapdog Prime Minister, we have ignored it to the point that our approval ratings in many European countries are at the lowest in recent history. Of course there was that brief period of national insanity when we tried to stomp out any reference to things French from our language.

Unfortunately since Colin Powell bailed out, this administration seems to see foreign policy only in two ways: we crush or we ignore. What is interesting is that no one thought to merely pick up the cricket and return it to the wild–to see the cricket as neither, threat, intrusion, or loathsome critter, but to take it for what it was and thereby give it its freedom. Those kinds of policy options never seem to be on the table with this administration, yet if we are to survive in this world we need to learn to empathize more and to find solutions that allow other peoples to find their own destiny. After all, if it is good enough for a cricket should it not be good enough for humanity? Are you paying attention, Condi?

Tagged with: aesop • ask_a_question • Bush • Bush_administration • chinese_crickets • colin_powell • Condoleeza_Rice • cricket • Darfur • Donald_Rumsfeld • fox_news • George_W_Bush • GOP • Iran • Iraq • Iraq_policy • Iraq_War • islamic_fascists • jiminy_cricket • Jon_Stewart • kokopelli • lebanon • North_Korea • record_deficits • rush_limbaugh • Tony_Blair

Fannie Lou Hamer

I was going to post on something else tonight–even had it done–but the recent flap about James Carville’s calling out Howard Dean has me outraged, especially because I think Carville was obviously carrying someone else’s water. The reason I say that is because on election night the channel I watched most was CNN, on which Carville appeared as a guest commentator. Now I can’t claim to have watched every minute of the telecast, so I need to be careful with my facts, but at no time did I hear Carville say a word criticizing Dean’s strategy, not even during the early moments of the evening before the Democratic win became obvious. So if he disagreed with the Dean why didn’t he say it then? You will also remember one of my five election night predictions was that the Dean-Emanuel feud would continue until the Democrats reached some consensus on strategy.

Posts about Carville’s remarks have been appearing all over blogdom, so in keeping with this blog’s position “off the beaten path,” I will give you what I hope will be a slightly different take that–like the election night predictions–you won’t see anywhere else. That take involves three essential points: 1) Carville was a bit out of bounds, 2) he needs to read Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline and 3) he needs to read the story of a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer and the history of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Starting with number one: James Carville has a well-justified reputation for counting numbers. If there was a genius behind Bill Clinton’s infamous triangulation strategy it was Carville who helped keep Clinton triangulated and frankly deserves more credit than he has received for the achievements of the Clinton years. So it surprised me that a person for whom numbers represent the main weapons of a well-stocked arsenal should come out shooting without any ammunition other than remarks from some anonymous Republicans (his wife, maybe). After comparing Dean to Donald Rumsfeld (as low a blow as one Democrat can make against another), Carville pointed out,

“There was a missed opportunity here,” he said. “I’ve sat down with Republican pollsters to discuss this race: They believe we left 10 to 20 seats on the table.”

Now in corporations, in medical experiments, courtrooms, even in college seminars one does not make what we used to call BSS (Broad Sweeping Statements) without any data other than Republican hearsay. It’s as if a Nobel Prize winning economist said, “Bush is doing a lousy job running the economy because I heard some Democratic business leaders say he was.” If we are going to have a meaningful discussion as opposed to a feud, then both sides owe it to each other to be very clear about their data. How does he know the Democrats left 10-20 seats on the table? Which seats? Why? More pointedly why didn’t the mainstream media ask these questions? Why did Carville get a free pass? Whose water was he carrying? (We’ll let other bloggers deal with that.)

I was was going to try to actually run the data on Carville’s comments to see if his generalization is justified, but you cannot do that in a day. I am hoping some political science professor might do it, if not I’ll see what I can do over the weekend. However, I will comment on one race that I can assure you was in that list: the Wetterling-Bachmann contest in my home district here in Minnesota. Patty Wetterling ran a strong campaign and she had a tremendous amount of grass roots support but she lost by a larger margin than many of us thought against what can only be described as a Republican so far to the right she said she spent days praying to God about whether or not to run and God said, “Yes.”

I believe what cost Patty Wetterling was that she had an uphill fight from the beginning because the GOP gerrymandered our district in such a way that it brought in large numbers of rural Minnesota conservatives, the kind who post huge signs on the side of the Interstate 94 saying abortion is murder. To her credit Wetterling also did not go as negative as she could have against a woman whose church believes the Pope is the Antichrist.

If the data supporting either the Dean or Emanuel positions is murky, one thing is clear: it is time to stop the BSS. If we are going to have a reasoned discussion of the Dean strategy then let it be with real data not with hearsay. If we are going to truly become a majority party we do not need to engage in name-calling against the head of the Democratic National Committee. We need to talk to one another with mutual respect not like a bunch of seventh graders in the hallway. There is a famous Republican commandment: Thou Shall Not Speak Ill of Another Republican. It has worked pretty well for them over the last 20 years.

Point two: read Peter Senge’s book. I know Peter and before I became disabled and a writer and blogger, I worked extensively with systems thinking and a process called system dynamics modeling. Were Carville to read Peter’s book, he would learn that a major issue in modeling is that you need to define the system. If as Emanual wants to do, you define the system as less than the entire country, so be it. But I did not think that that was what American democracy was about.

The second principle you learn is that you never, never do modeling predictions based on short-term data. Modeling is about behavior over time. Howard Dean is trying to create a strategy where every state can be in play in an election, so that when the right candidates emerge in those states the infrastructure is in place to support them. This strategy is not a short-term strategy–it bets that over the long term the Democratic Party again will become a national force.

In The Strange Death of Liberal America, I wrote that for too long the Democratic Party has been chasing its tail. By that I meant that the party has lacked a unified national strategy based on a shared set of values. Instead it has gone after this race and that race like a bunch of circus clowns trying to put out a fire. In systems terms they have been doing what I used to call in speeches I gave “chasing the problem.” In black and white terms if you keep chasing problems you always get to the problem too late and allow a new problem to crop up. I believe Senator McCain in speaking about our Iraq strategy called this the whack-a-mole strategy. As Bill Murray found out in Caddyshack the mole (in his case the gopher) usually wins.

Curiously in systems terms Caddyshack is a great metaphor for why the chasing the problem strategy never works. Like Murray chasing his gopher, the problem never stays still. It changes with time and even begins to “catch on” to what you are trying to do (you think the Republicans are stupid–if we throw in more money you think they will just sit still?). So you escalate your attacks, until in Murray’s case he is trying to blow up the mole with so much dynamite it destroys the entire golf course. This is one writer who does not want to blow up the Democratic Party.

There is also another systems principle that every engineer, every software code writer, every corporate CEO, anyone who works with anything knows about: the importance of redundancy. When I worked as a carpenter it was the famous “measure twice, cut once” principle. When I built models we built them so that their functioning did not depend on or flow through only one part of the structure. Redundancy is built into everything from electric power grids to computer networks because you cannot anticipate when a crisis will occur or where it will come from. A national election strategy is important because it creates exactly the kind of redundancy that allows systems to survive unexpected crises. I am going to go out on a limb here and say, contrary to Carville’s BSS, I have a suspicion that Dean’s strategy put some races in play that would not have been had we followed the Emanuel/Carville strategy. In essence Dean made the GOP play whack-a-mole.

This leads to the third and most important point of all: you never know where that next political genius is going to come from. This morning on the radio I heard a commentator talking about Barack Obama, who three years ago was an unknown state representative in Illinois. Now he may be our next president. My favorite illustration of this is a woman whom I consider a secular saint: Fannie Lou Hamer. Every time I researched her life as I was writing Strange Death chills would literally run up and down my spine, for this was a woman of extraordinary genius and even more extraordinary courage who by some miracle combined these qualities with a singular rhetorical eloquence.

The story of Fannie Lou Hamer is directly relevant to the current discussion and shows how the truth about the old saw about those who forget history. Hamer was one of many Mississippi African Americans who helped to organize and maintain the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the early-mid 1960s. The story is told in more detail in Strange Death, but its moral is that the regular Democratic Party not only ignored the Freedom Democrats, but tried to suppress them. Yet one of the great what-ifs in American history is what if the Democrats had supported Hamer and her colleagues? Dean’s strategy might have allowed that to happen.

I hope you will forgive me this indulgence, but let me quote you something from the book that the Carvilles and Emanuels of this world need to remember:

Her true strength lay in rejecting the easy answers and false compromises that as she pointed out over and over, were not real solutions. That this genius came from a woman who tutored herself like many others have been forced to do, demonstrates a fundamental liberal principle: a level playing field will produce uncommon people, because you never know when someone like Hamer will seize the tattered threads they have been given and weave them into something singular. We should also remember that Hamer was not alone. The names of other courageous African Americans, some forgotten, some remembered, lie in the Sovereignty Commission files of those who made Freedom Summer possible. All of them taught us that with each generation, each community, and, yes, each insignificant-seeming election, Fannie Lou Hamer’s question must be asked again and again and that only one answer is possible.

In the book I associated that question with voting rights, but in order to have voting rights that allow EVERY American that proverbial chance to be president there must be political organizations that fight for those rights and they must not fight for those rights just where they want to, they must fight for them everywhere, in rural small town and inner city public housing, in North and South and with everyone regardless of the color of their skin, the color of their collar or the color of their diploma.

As Fannie Lou Hamer would recognize, Howard Dean is not just fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party, he is fighting for much bigger stakes: the soul of American democracy.

Tagged with: 2004_presidential_election • Abramoff • American_Political_Science_Association • Barack_Obama • Bill_Clinton • Bill_Murray • blog • blue_collar • Bush_administration • caddyshack • Carville • central_values • civil_rights_movement • Dean • Democratic_Party • Democrats • Donald_Rumsfeld • election_night • exit_poll_data • Fannie_Lou_Hamer • George_W_Bush • gerrymandering • GOP • grass_roots • Howard_Dean • Latino_voters • mainstream_media • McCain • Minnesota • Peter_Senge • polls • Rahm_Emanuel • redundancy • Saddam_Hussein • systems_thinking • system_dynamics • the_fifth_discipline • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • United_States_Supreme_Court • values • voting_rights • wetterling • whack-a-mole

One of the things we Democrats have never done very well is to celebrate our successes. Sometimes it seems we are better at arguing with each other than collaborating. I must include myself as one of the guilty parties. I think this tendency comes not from a bad place but from a good one: if you believe in equity, in improving the lives of all people, and if you believe in the basic goodness of human nature sometimes you have a tendency to set your expectations too high. I think by nature Republicans are pessimists–just look at the way they handle voting rights. They think people will try to cheat and manipulate the system. Ditto for welfare or other social programs. Negative ads are not merely a tactic for them, they are a reflection of their basic view of the American people. I think negative ads are harder for Democrats to do and they don’t do them well unless something really ethical or moral is at stake as it was when they ran against Newt Gingrich.

Yet this fall we have much to celebrate. I have already alluded in this blog to some of the groups that helped to make victory possible, but I have yet to mention one of the most important aspects of our victory: we flat-out out organized the GOP on the ground. I think Karl Rove thought that it would be enough to again turn out his usual myrmidons, but we Democrats learned from both 2000 and 2004 that if we are going to win elections we need to have solid grass roots organizing. In 2006 I believe the true heroines and heroes of the election are the millions of Democrats who manned phones, passed out literature, knocked on doors, drove people to the polls, and stood at the polls to make sure there were none of the voting shenanigans that we saw in 2004.

My personal anonymous hero was a gentleman I saw holding a huge sign for Democratic House candidate Patty Wetterling on a bridge over an interstate highway near where I live. Election day here in Minnesota was a gray day when rain threatened and it was windy and cool, so it was no easy task to stand there for hours holding a sign that must have been about four by six. Now we’ve all seen people holding signs for this or that and most of them resemble zombies who would rather be somewhere else, but this guy was smiling, waving to people driving by, getting them to give him a thumbs up or a honk on the horn. I thought this guy was going to win the election for Patty all by himself. Patty lost, but it was not because of lack of effort on the part of people like that man with the sign.

This happened all over the country. If you watched the news coverage of election day throughout the day you could sense something truly extraordinary was happening because Democrats with signs seemed to be everywhere. I even got a phone call from Bill Clinton. It was, of course, a tape but it was well-done and a tribute to both Clinton’s willingness to do anything to help Democrats win and the sophistication of their get-out-the-vote drive.

For eight years we have watched polls indicating that a majority of the public agreed with Democrats on everything from the Iraq War, to abortion, to cleaning up the environment, to better health care coverage. The polls also showed a majority of the people did not favor Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. But somehow, Republicans kept winning elections. There’s that old saw about best let sleeping dogs lie, and in some ways we Democrats may have been like that sleeping dog. But 2004 was a well-directed kick from none other than Karl Rove and the conduct of what is being revealed as not only one of the most corrupt but hypocritical political parties we have had in a long time finally sent a lot of people over the edge.

The GOP likes to blame their loss on “unexpected scandals,” but most of those scandals were anything but unexpected. The shady operations of what was known as Delay Inc. were written about in the Texas Monthly years ago and an open secret on Capitol Hill. Jack Abramoff didn’t just wander in from some remote location, he has a deep and long association with such big time Republicans as Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed. Then there was Ralph Reed himself, the former Christian Coalition head, who got caught in some most un-Christian positions. Essentially what had been the party of “values” in 2004 was shown to be nothing more than a bunch of hypocrites and there is nothing the American people dislike more than a hyocrite.

There is a new energy in this country. All those people who made 2006 possible will never be the same again. They have learned how to organize, tasted victory, and once you taste victory you will want more of it.

Tagged with: Abramoff • Bill_Clinton • Dean • Democratic_Party • Democrats • grass_roots • health_care • heroes • heroines • human_nature • Karl_Rove • Latino_voters • negative_ads • Newt_Gingrich • political_organizing • polls • Ralph_Reed • Saddam_Hussein • the_environment • Tom_DeLay • United_States_Supreme_Court • victory • voting_rights