I have a radical and original– interpretation to explain the Democrats’ turnaround and it focuses on Liberal America’s core value of the level playing field and in particular one of its four cornerstones: voting rights. There is no question the Iraq War played a role in winning back Congress, but what really turned the tide began last summer.

Of all the debates of the previous Congress, none had the impact and importance of the debate over the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. This legislation, which had been won by the blood and martyrdom of those determined to end once and for all the feudal conditions that still existed in old Dixie, had become over the years a sacred ingredient in the American experiment. People around the world could point to the Act as an affirmation of democracy.

In the four score years that had passed since its approval, millions of Americans viewed the Voting Rights Act as not only one of the crowning moments of the Civil Rights movement but also of America itself. The nation could point with pride at the Act and say the system had worked. For people of color the Act held a status as one of the most important pieces of legislation in our history.

So when the Act came up for renewal bearing the names of Corretta Scott King, Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer, it seemed unpatriotic, un-American to oppose it. Decades from now when the histories of this period are written, the battle over the Voting Rights Act will come to be seen as a major turning point in American politics.

When a large faction of Republicans banded together to oppose the Act’s renewal, it lifted the veil from the GOP Counterrevolution, revealing its true nature, which was to roll back the New Deal and its heirs and to openly oppose Liberal America’s belief in the level playing field. When they heard this, many Americans were as shocked and embarrassed as they had been when police officers beat people with night sticks, turned fire hoses on them and murdered, all in the name of inequality.

The nation that had even set aside a holiday for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. and created Black History Month– which both have celebrated the Voting Rights Act–now had a major political party openly opposing everything King had stood for. It was as though someone pulled back the bunting with which the Republican Party had sought to cloak itself and found Strom Thurmond. In the summer of 2005, America stood at a crossroads as it had in the 1960s, only this time the country would not stand for inequality.

The climactic moment in the debate came when Georgia Representative Lynn Westmoreland made the unbelievably stupid move of invoking the name of the old Civil Rights warrior, the Lion King himself, John Lewis in support of repealing the Act. Not only did this represent one of the supreme blunders in Congressional history, it showed the moral bankruptcy of the Counterrevolution. I have written in previous posts about this in detail, so I will not go into the debate here. Suffice it to say, Lewis kicked Westmoreland’s rear end back where it belonged.

To their credit enough Democrats and a few Republicans held firm and the legislation passed, but the fallout from the debate would reverberate into the November election. The fight over the Voting Rights Act energized people of color and all who believed in the level playing field like they had not been energized in years. More crucially all America could see the direction the Counterrevolution wanted to take this country and that direction was backwards into the nineteenth century.

Although few openly framed it that way, the November election revolved around the level playing field as much as it did around Iraq. Part of this came when the Republicans followed their attempt to gut the Voting Rights Act with the same despicable tactics that stretched back to the Dixiecrats and their ancestors as they openly sought to make it difficult for people of color, the poor, and others to exercise their franchise.

For people of color and Liberal America this was the last straw. The voice of Fannie Lou Hamer hovered over the November election, echoing the phrase that is on her tombstone, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Aided by groups such as America Votes, those who believed in the level playing field were both angry and determined. They knew that if the GOP remained in power or could increase its numbers what the agenda would be because the Voting Rights Act debate had revealed it.

As noted in a previous post, when the dust settled and the exit poll data analyzed, it showed people of color and union members had provided the margin of victory in crucial races. America had spoken and said they wanted no further attempts to gut voting rights or to tilt the playing field. Last November was not about “moderation;” it was about whether America will help level the playing field that has been tilted away from these people by Republicans who believe the heart of democracy lies in those who live in mansions and ride in chauffeured cars not in those every day Americans who go to work each day and just try to make ends meet.

Now it is up to the Democratic Congress to insure that what got them there is not forgotten. The New Congress has proven both determined and well-organized. The 100 Days legislation, the Iraq War timetable and its use of its investigative powers have all raised hopes that perhaps the Counterrevolution may be on the run.

In the book The Strange Death of Liberal America, I wrote that Liberal America was in intensive care. The Voting Rights debate and its impact on the November election suggest rumors of the patient’s demise may be premature. The American people had given the patient the equivalent of a transplant. Now in the months ahead we need to continue to bring Liberal America back to health.

Tagged with: civil_rights_movement • cornerstones_of_American_democracy • corretta_scott_king • Democratic_Party • Democrats • Dixiecrats • Dr._King • Fannie_Lou_Hamer • John_Lewis • level_playing_field • liberal_america • Rosa_Parks • strange_death • Strom_Thurmond • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • voting_rights • voting_rights_act

Saturday night is old movie night at our place and posting Chaplin’s Great Dictator speech, I decided to follow that with Henry Fonda’s farewell to his mother in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, one of the great moments in American film. This quote at one point was going to be on the title page of the book The Strange Death of Liberal America, but a very precise work limit forced me to eliminate it, so now it becomes part of the blog.

To set the scene: it is late at night after a dance has been held at the humane camp presided over by a man who resembles Franklin Roosevelt. Tom Joad (Fonda) and his mother stand in the moonlight on the edge of the wooden dance floor. In the background Ford has an accordion playing his favorite tune “Red River Valley,” a song that in Ford movies is associated with the fragility of community. Joad has been identified as the man who killed a police-led vigilante squad that comes to assassinate his friend the Preacher Casey, who has been organizing farm workers. Now he must leave his family and take up Casey’s mission.
Fonda speaks:

Maybe it�s like Casey says. A fella ain�t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody. And then it don�t matter. Then I�ll be all around in the dark. I�ll be everywhere…Wherever there�s a fight so hungry people can eat, I�ll be there. Wherever there�s a cop beating up a guy, I�ll be there. I�ll be in the way guys yell when they�re mad�and I�ll be in the way kids laugh when they�re hungry and they know supper�s ready…And when our people eat the stuff they raise, and the houses they build, I�ll be there too.

Tagged with: American_film • chaplin • dictator • favorite_tune • Franklin_Roosevelt • Grapes_of_Wrath • great_moments • Henry_Fonda • John_Ford • Preacher_Casey • strange_death • Tom_Joad

In The Strange Death of Liberal America I referred to our times as The Era of Bad Feelings for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has lived through the last few years. Politics and a great deal else in our society have been imbued with a nastiness that has made vitriol the stock in trade of everyone from network commentators to bloggers. It is as if discourse and manners have become so degraded that the only way to express outrage is to be as ill-mannered as possible.

When Don Imus uttered his degrading comments about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, the degree of public outrage provided a ray of hope that perhaps the Era of Bad Feelings might finally be reaching an end. The statement from CBS when they fired Imus went beyond what I had expected. It seemed as though, they too, finally wanted to end the nastiness. In a memo sent to CBS employees announcing Mr. Imus’ dismissal, CBS chief executive, Leslie Moonves said:

This is about a lot more than Imus. As has been widely pointed out, Imus has been visited by presidents, senators, important authors and journalists from across the political spectrum. He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people. In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture, which extends far beyond the walls of our company.

But the statement blew away like a slip of paper caught in the foul winds of the Era of Bad Feelings. In a way Don Imus represented an easy target, a perfect sacrificial lamb, for unlike other purveyors of vitriol, Imus had never been rabidly partisan. He did not make a career out of debasing Democrats and liberals with the venom of a Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter.

Imus took the hit and others who had flourished in what Moonves called “a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people” walked away largely unscathed. A month before the Imus blow-up, in a March 2 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Ann Coulter told an audience peppered with reporters:

Oh, and I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot,” so I’m — so I’m kind of at an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards. So I think I’ll just conclude here and take your questions.

Media Matters noted that after the remarks nine newspapers dropped Coulter, but the response was relatively mild compared to what Imus would suffer. The Washington Post even managed to get in a not so subtle dig at the New York Times over the incident quoting Adam Nagourney, the Times� chief political correspondent, who defended his initial reluctance to report the remark:

There was a fairly high barrier, in my opinion, to make it worthy of a story, because part of what she’s about is trying to use shock language to entertain her audience and, who knows, maybe to sell books:

Coulter still makes a nice income on the lecture circuit and as a guest commentator where she feeds red meat to Neanderthals who think of themselves as the “base” of the Republican Party. As I pointed out in a post last year, Coulter is as much actress as pundit. Everyone knows her shopworn script consists of dropping bombs like the Edwards explosion.

In such a climate is it any wonder that the obvious distaste that exists between the Bush Administration and its critics continues to escalate. There seems to be a growing Gotterdammerung mentality in the White House that if they go down they will take the country with them.

The buzzword of the 2004 election was “moral values,” but that seems so long ago in the aftermath of Iraq, Katrina, the teetering housing market, $4 gas and the rapidly multiplying scandals that are well on their way to earning this administration the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt since Harding’s Teapot Dome days. Where once the Bush Administration used to evoke the American people with the zeal of Richard Nixon claiming his “silent majority,” the contempt by the White House for the American people, the wishes of the majority and even the rule of law more and more resembles Nixon�s last days.

Once George W. Bush pledged to bring us together, to end the vitriol. These days, the White House behaves like one of those road rage motorists who bullies everyone on the freeway and then flips them off with an upraised middle finger. Every time I see Dick Cheney answer a probing question I half-expect him to do just that. This is, after all, the man who told Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) to “fuck yourself.” The Washington Post humorously pointed out that the exchange occurred on the day he Senate passed legislation described as the “Defense of Decency Act” by 99 to 1.

Cheney’s recent attacks on critics of the Iraq War, which if the polls are correct include a majority of Americans, have not brought forth any four letter words, but he has used epithets every bit as nasty. This is even though no one still knows what are the administration’s objectives. When will we know we have succeeded in Iraq? In February during a trip to Australia Cheney charged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s opposition to an troop increase would “validate the al-Qaida strategy.” Pelosi may have been shaking her head after that one, since most experts question whether al-Qaida is a major threat in Iraq. But Cheney had to tie the opposition to the one group everyone in America hates, even though his comment was misleading and inflammatory.

Cheney has continued to impugn those who dare question what the administration is up to in Iraq. In an April 16 interview on CBS Face the Nation Cheney said:

Well, I think it’s important they know where we stand. And the fact of the matter is I do believe that the positions that the Democratic leaders have taken and–to a large extent now are irresponsible.

When reminded by Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer that a majority of Americans favor the Democrat�s position, Cheney responded with an answer that had echoes of Richard Nixon:

Well, you can also get a majority who, I think, would prefer to have us win, and the–there’s a fundamental debate going on here in terms of whether or not our objective in–in Iraq is to, quote, withdraw, or whether our objective in Iraq is to complete the mission.

A day after Cheney spoke came the shootings at Virginia Tech, one of those national tragedies that in the past have brought the nation together in a common outpouring of grief. Instead the vitriol began even as the family and friends of the victims awaited the autopsies of the dead. The blogosphere has pretty much run that one into the ground so I will leave it you and your search engine to dig up the dirt.

As the Democrats rewrote and passed their Iraq withdrawal bill, the Republicans increased the vitriol. Leading the pack, as always, was none other than Dick Cheney. On Tuesday, during a routine trip to Capitol Hill Cheney went out of his way to lash out at the Democrats. According to the Washington Post Cheney charged:

Some Democratic leaders seem to believe that blind opposition to the new strategy in Iraq is good politics…Senator Reid himself has said that the war in Iraq will bring his party more seats in the next election…It is cynical to declare that the war is lost because you believe it gives you political advantage.

Cheney’s singling out of Reid is what made the attack cross over the line of the usual partisan sparring, for it intentionally singled out a member of the Democratic leadership and by doing so blamed Reid personally for the actions of the Democrats. His attack on Reid did not stop there, he continued:

What’s most troubling about Senator Reid’s comments yesterday is his defeatism, and the timetable legislation that he is now pursuing would guarantee defeat. Maybe it is a political calculation.

That Cheney chose to attack Reid is extremely unusual. I am trying to remember the last time a sitting Vice President of the United States engaged in a personal attack on the leadership of the opposing party. The question is why would Cheney do this?

One answer is that it stems from his view of the world. Cheney at heart is an autocrat who believes leaders should control their subordinates and, by implication, their delegations with an iron fist. He seems to imply that Reid should crack the whip on the Democrats and force them to draft an acceptable bill.

This is a White House that believes it is right and takes dissent personally. Dissent is not only not wrong but not permissible. To allow dissent is equivalent to letting someone personally attack you and not respond by decking them. In short, George Bush and Dick Cheney see themselves as the personification of this country and its people, a view that at its heart is profoundly undemocratic.

It reaction to this, it has been fashionable in many blogs to quote James Madison:

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

However, I could find no source for this quote, so there is some question whether Madison ever said it. Perhaps more relevant is a speech Madison gave during the Constitutional Convention where he openly worried about executive power during war time:

In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.

With the Iraq War and the comments of Dick Cheney the head has become too large for the body. This “overgrown” executive results in a personification of every issue. In turn, opposition is personified. The personal nature of Cheney’s attack unfortunately has become all too common during the Era of Bad Feelings. It has long been the stock-in-trade of the Raucous Right of talk radio hosts who tend to personalize an issue and then follow with a string of epithets.

The growing opposition to the Iraq War by the American people is attributed to “defeatists” who have convinced the American people to “throw in the towel.” If people like Reid would only shut up the American people would come to their senses and see the wisdom of its leaders.

The common thread running through this vitriol lies in their contempt for the average American and a refusal to accept reality. There is a dark side of our times that feeds those who believe anyone who thinks differently is “irresponsible,” and deserves to be told to “fuck yourself.” The widespread culture Moonves evoked lives on the feeling that anyone not sharing its hardline beliefs is not entitled to be treated with manners and decency. That the Vice President of the United States should be part of this culture shows the moral bankruptcy of this administration. He shares this trait with playground bullies and road rage perpetrators who both believe they can get away with whatever they want because their targets are somehow defective, even subhuman.

Despite the continued nastiness, the image in my mind the past few weeks is of the Virginia Tech students holding candles. In their memorial service and the candlelight vigils held across the country people seemed to sense something had gone terribly wrong, that we need a return to decency and mutual respect.

Tagged with: Al-Qaeda • American_democracy • Ann_Coulter • bloggers • blogosphere • blogs_Virginia_Tech_killings • Bush • Bush_administration • CBS • chickenhawks • contempt_for_the_American_people • Democrats • derbyshire • Dick_Cheney • Don_Imus • Edwards • era_of_bad_feelings • face_the_nation • George_W_Bush • Iraq • Iraq_War • John_Edwards • Katrina • leslie_moonves • liberal • media_matters • michelle_malkin • moral_values • Nancy_Pelosi • national_review • New_York_Times • Richard_Nixon • rush_limbaugh • Rutgers_womens_basketball_team • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • Warren_Harding • Washington_Post

Four months into the new Congressional session seems like a good opportunity to assess how well the new Democratic Congress has performed. Now admittedly I am a Democrat–and so perhaps a bit biased–but as those who have followed my posts or read my book know, I have never pulled any punches when it comes to analyzing my own party. In fact some of my earlier posts this year were somewhat skeptical about what this Congress could accomplish.

Suffice it say, this liberal Democrat is pleasantly surprised. In fact if I had to assign this Congress a grade so far, I would give them an A-. A major reason for this has come from two areas where the Democrats� performance in the past has been marginal at best.

First, unlike previous Democratic Congressional delegations, this group of Democrats has shown it has the spine to stand up to the White House and the Republicans. The results of last fall–which exceeded expectations–have given the Party a much-needed transfusion. You can visibly see the change on the television talk shows, where the Democrats being interviewed project confidence–even a bit of a swagger–that they seemed in danger of losing.

Meanwhile the GOP seems in disarray as it tries desperately to distance itself from an administration that unravels a little more each day. As Karl Rove and the rest of the White House crowd try to stay one step ahead of the prosecutors, the administration has lost all leverage over the GOP congressional delegation. Witness the Gonzales hearings where the Republicans were almost as hard on their own Attorney General as the Democrats. With the demise of Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, the Republican congressional leadership seems to be trying to hold its delegation together with the equivalent of duct tape.

Partially as a result of this disarray and more because of their own shrewdness, the Democrats have avoided another mistake of the past–falling into GOP traps. The Party that was trapped into supporting the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, No Child Left Behind and tax cuts for the rich, has managed to steer clear of being maneuvered into corners that left it few options when such legislation hit the floor.

Somewhere Arthur Schlesinger must be smiling because in his book The Cycles of American History, he wrote about American history as a pendulum, swinging from conservative to liberal and back again. After 2004, pundits boldly predicted a GOP ascendancy. Two years later the situation has changed considerably. To see how much, let�s review the accomplishments of this Congress.

THE 100 HOURS: This package of legislation became the first priority for the Democrats. They passed everything on their list with time to spare. These included: ethics reform, raising the minimum wage, implementing the 9/11 Commissions’ recommendations, promoting stem cell research, cutting interest rates on student loans, requiring Medicare to negotiate for lower prescription drug prices, and repealing subsidies for Big Oil. All in all, not a bad list.

More impressive perhaps than this list–and less recognized–were the functions the 100 Hours Legislation performed for the Democrats. It showed that the Party, which two years ago had trouble keeping its own members together, could act in a unified, disciplined fashion. By pushing through the legislation in the manner they did the Democrats also showed the GOP they can play power politics if they have to.

IRAQ: As most of us recognize, this probably symbolizes the Party’s rebirth more than any other legislation. The resulting conference committee bill was far from perfect, but the Democrats have managed to keep their eyes on the ball. Like some others I underestimated the stupidity and the zealotry of the White House about the Iraq War. Instead of attacking the initial bill as a spending nightmare–which the old GOP would have done–the White House kept sticking to its guns about the war.

With the so-called surge now unraveling, the American people have come to recognize that this administration has no idea what it is doing in Iraq. It has no plan, no discernible objectives, no measure of when it has succeeded. Even the most badly run corporation can tell you what its targets are for each quarter, but this administration seems unable to provide the American people with information about measurable goals in Iraq whose equivalents are in any public company�s annual report.

The Iraq timetable is important, but its real value lies in showing that the administration has no plan. The timetable has reframed the entire Iraq debate. The American people now want to know when will our mission in Iraq be accomplished? The debate isn’t so much about particular dates as it is about objectives. That the administration has no answers has revealed the bankruptcy of their policies.

INVESTIGATIVE POWERS: Whether planned or not, the scandal over the firing of federal prosecutors has proven to be the perfect opening move in what many Democrats and Americans hope will be further investigations into this corrupt administration. The fired prosecutors provided much of the initial ammunition because once again the arrogance of the White House bungled the job by being so heavy-handed that those dismissed had to fight back. The battle over Executive Privilege will lay the bait for bigger fish yet to come, for if the administration digs in on this one, it will find it harder to do so further down the road.

The White House, of course, sees the situation differently, believing it needs to dig in its heels on what appears to many as a simple issue. Their reasoning seems to be: give in on this and we’ll have trouble when the more serious investigations begin. But in truth, the more they play the executive privilege card, the weaker it becomes–as Richard Nixon found out.

So, all in all an A- seems about right for this Congress, which thus far has not committed any major blunders. It is cause for celebration. Now the question becomes can we sustain it? To understand the answer, we need to go back and explore how the Democrats came to this position. That is the subject of the next post in this series.

Tagged with: Arthur_Schlesinger • Bush_tax_cuts • democratic_culture • Democratic_Party • Democratic_senate • fired_prosecutors • future_of_the_Democratic_Party • GOP • GOP_Counterrevolution • Hillary_Rodham_Clinton • Iowa_caucuses • Iraq • Iraq_study_group • Iraq_War • Iraq_war_as_albatross • Karl_Rove • minimum_wage • No_Child_Left_Behind_Act • patriot_act • Republicans • Republican_Party • Richard_Nixon • student_loans • tax_cuts • Tom_DeLay • White_House

This weekend several mainstream media outlets picked up a story (if they’d only pick up blog feeds) highlighting the rise in infant deaths in what they referred to as the “Southeast.” The article treated this discovery as though they had found an earthshaking scoop. It wasn’t.

The despicable infant death totals for the Old Confederacy have been occurring for some time. Pick up an old almanac or locate a source that lists infant mortality rates by state or region over time and you will find Southern states have long had shockingly high percentages of infant mortality just as they also rank at the bottom of other social indicators like education. I wrote about this in Strange Death:

Southern states typically rank near or at the bottom of surveys on education and health care, whether in measures such as student performance or infant mortality. The South�s poor performance has persisted for over a century, hanging like a millstone around the neck of America. This tilted playing field makes the climb for people of color particularly steep.

Perhaps this is the proper place to explain exactly what infant mortality measures and why many public health experts regard it as one of �if not the leading measure of a city’s, state’s, or nation’s health care system. UNICEF defines the term as follows:

[The] probability of dying between birth and exactly one year of age expressed per 1,000 live births.

Admittedly some of these deaths are due to causes that could not have been anticipated or prevented. Infant mortality is never zero, nor will it ever be. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that in the United States:

The leading causes of infant death include congenital abnormalities, pre-term/low birth weight, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), problems related to complications of pregnancy, and respiratory distress syndrome.

While some of the causes of infant mortality cannot be prevented, many can because they stem from inadequate care. In other words either before or after the baby is born, it does not receive the treatment it needs or the treatment is substandard.

Infant mortality also can come from the mother not receiving adequate care so that at birth, the infant may have significant health problems. This prenatal care may include everything from nutrition to education. Among a few Neanderthals there remains a tendency to blame the mother for an infant being born with health problems.

Certainly there are cases where a mother�s prenatal behavior harms their babies–so-called crack babies and fetal alcohol syndrome being two examples–but inadequate prenatal care is more often a systemic failure. Just as health care quality measures include whether doctors counsel diabetics and heart attack survivors about diet, exercise and smoking, health care quality also includes whether the system counsels mothers-to-be about nutrition and other measures and whether it conducted periodic checkups of the fetus’ health. The same is true for post-delivery care.

That is why infant mortality stands as such a crucial measure of the quality of a health care system. If we do not adequately provide for those at the dawn of life, we have a system in serious trouble. If we allow babies to die because of inadequate care we bankrupt the future of our country.

Typically nations that show high infant mortality rates in World Health Organization (WHO) statistics tend to be poor nations who cannot afford adequate health care systems. They have low percentages of trained doctors, nurses, and public health workers. They have fewer hospitals and birth centers and those they do have may lack adequate resources and be unsanitary. If we review WHO infant mortality statistics we find at the bottom nations such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Somalia with rates as high as 165 deaths per thousand.

On the other end of the scale we have Iceland and Singapore ranking number one with a rate of two per thousand followed by Finland, Japan, Monaco, Norway and Sweden with three per thousand. There is one glaring anomaly in WHO’s infant mortality statistics–the United States. Although this country spends more on health care than any other nation in the world, there are thirty nations ahead of us in the 2006 WHO statistics on infant mortality. Our number of six per thousand is double that of the leading countries and equal with nations such as Croatia, Cuba, and Estonia. In other words, our sworn enemy, the Cuba of Fidel Castro, has the same infant mortality rate as we do.

If we move over one column in the WHO statistics, the news becomes even grimmer. It shows the under-five mortality rate, which for the Unites States is eight per 1,000. This is worse than Croatia and Cuba (both with seven) and equal to that of Estonia and Hungary. In other words, a child under five has just as good a chance to survive to the age of six in Hungary as she or he has in this country.

These are appalling statistics. Yet I would venture that few reading this essay know of our dismal rankings. There may be no other statistics one could find that point to how this nation fails to live up to its own ideals. Infant and child mortality represent moral as well as medical measurements.

The medical literature has enough references to the causes of our miserable ranking and even more suggestions for how to cure it, to keep someone reading for a long time. But in the end all these words come down to one factor: some people in this country receive inadequate pre-and post-natal care.

WHO notes:

rural children, children of uneducated mothers and children in the poorest households continue to have higher mortality risks than better-off children–as they did ten years previously–even though overall mortality levels have declined.

In other words, the health of rich children around the world is improving, but the health of children of the poor and uneducated remains grim. In the United States these data also take on racial overtones. Reflecting on infant mortality in this country, the CDC states:

This ranking is due in large part to disparities which continue to exist among various racial and ethnic groups in this country, particularly African Americans.

The CDC goes on to say:

Infant mortality among African Americans in 2000 occurred at a rate of 14.1 deaths per 1,000 live births.

If African Americans were a country on the WHO chart their rate would put them below Bosnia, Malaysia and Sri Lanka and equal with the Ukraine.

A lesser-known–at least before the article–and publicized cause of our low ranking is how the shocking rates of the Old Confederacy pull down the nation’s overall rank. In its article on the rise of infant deaths in the South, The New York Times pointed out:

Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average.

Where infant mortality in Dixie becomes more despicable is when you look at the rates for the poor and people of color. The Times states:

In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1.

Again a review of the WHO data shows this is on a par with Jamaica, Romania, and–get this–Vietnam. To put it bluntly, poor people of color in the South have infant mortality rates equal to Third World Countries.

Now we uncover another of America�s dirty little secrets: this represents a conscious decision. What do I mean by this? Infant mortality rates in Third World Countries are high because those countries do not have the resources to provide adequate health care. American has the resources, but chooses not to distribute them equally.

Those babies that are dying in this country are not dying for the same reasons they are dying in Vietnam. Although the actual physical causes of death may be the same, they are dying in this country because of a POLICY DECISION. Our system has consciously chosen to not provide the same resources to African Americans that it does to whites. The National Health Care Disparities Report for 2005 states:

The single largest access problem faced by all groups, except Asians, was lack of health insurance.

The United States did not always have such a poor infant mortality ranking. Under the leadership of Liberal America and its philosophy of the level playing field, this country pioneered a variety of measures designed to reduce infant mortality such as the visiting nurse service. Eleanor Roosevelt made health care for the poor a personal priority. In November 1945, Harry Truman asked Congress to enact a national insurance program:

To assure the right to adequate medical care and protection from the economic fears of sickness.

However, the Counterrevolution’s zeal to roll back the New Deal and eliminate “big government” has reversed these attempts to level the playing field, as our infant mortality rate shows. The result is that under George W. Bush infant mortality has increased. In Strange Death I noted it rose from 6.8 in 2001 to 7.0 in 2002. I then quoted the CDC�s dismay:

This was the first significant rise in the infant mortality rate since 1958.

By cutting back on government services, the GOP has cut back on the very interventions that would lower infant mortality. To repeat, in this country, which has the highest spending in the world on health care, a high infant mortality rate results from policy decisions!

The irony of the infant mortality article appearing less than a week after the Supreme Court’s abortion decision, should provoke some interesting discussions given that the worst infant mortality rates should occur in the strongholds of Christian fundamentalists and anti-abortion crusaders. The anti-abortion zealots like to refer to abortion as murder, saying those who support abortion have blood on their hands. The same might be said for those who fail to provide for the newborn. If abortion is murder what is inadequate support for those who are born? There is blood on the hands of the Counterrevolution and like Lady Macbeth no amount of washing can remove it.

Tagged with: African_Americans • African_American_health_care • CDC • Centers_for_Disease_Control • dixie • Eleanor_Roosevelt • George_W_Bush • GOP_Counterrevolution • Harry_Truman • health_care_system • infant_mortality • level_playing_field • liberal_america • old_confederacy • Ronald_Reagan • states_rights • Strom_Thurmond • Supreme_Court • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • third_world • UNICEF • WHO • world_health_organization

Cho seung-hui, the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, the students and Virginia Tech all form a tangled thicket nourished by the American media, overgrown with too many words, too many pictures and too many answers to too many bad questions. We, the American people struggle to navigate this thicket, for during the last few weeks we have only become more confused as if we have lost our sense of direction.

You can enter any of these words in a search engine and lose all hope of finding any rationality, any thread that will lead you out. Technorati lists 152,000 blog selections for Virginia Tech, 23,000 for Cho and 4,788 for the Rutgers’ team. With new posts on all of these each day, there are enough words that it would take a person probably a year to read them all. And yet we all seek a way out of this thicket of information, a clear path, a why that puts the last few weeks all in perspective.

That the media have become such a tangled thicket rather than a clear voice represents perhaps the only generalization we can draw from these events and an indication of what has happened to America’s sources and ideas about information. During past tragedies–the Kennedy assassination, Jonestown, the space shuttle explosion–somehow the media brought us together and enabled us to not only have a common source of information but also a shared sense of perspective.

Just the opposite has occurred over the last few weeks. Instead of coming together we have thousands of information sources; instead of a shared sense of perspective we have something resembling a cubist painting crafted by a random group each with their own paints, brushes and sense of reality. Trying to come together has become an exercise in frustration, disappointment and even anger.

The equilibrium many have found may even be misleading, for it comes from linking with a group of like-minded people who share their own prejudices and views of the world. So instead of finding a way out of the thicket they only wander in circles, going round and round in the same place, but thinking they have found the true path. The gun control people, the gun nuts, the racists, each have their own sources, each of which views the events through a different set of glasses. It is as if one saw green where another saw red.

It is ironic that as the mainstream media have become more concentrated, the rest of our information sources have fragmented becoming the equivalent of those drug store magazine racks with titles and content that remain a mystery to those who are not part of whatever group to which that publication caters. We have an information system that in a metaphorical way reminds me of our increasing income gap, with a small amount at one end who have a lot and a lot at the other end who have only a small amount.

The concentration of the American media has had what systems people would call an unintended consequence, for with that concentration has come increasing distrust produced by that very concentration. When you are so concentrated and so big it is very hard to hear disparate opinions, harder to evaluate them, and all but impossible to find a insightful analysis.

That distrust in turn fuels the alternative media, for when people feel they are not listened to they turn to other sources. Those sources are most likely to be those whose web pages reflect their own minds. And because of our natural diversity, those alternative sources continue to multiply.

Other factors also are at work. One I term the American Idol myth. That show exists in part because of the first premise–that the media are so concentrated they can no longer truly connect with people and so they neglect natural talents that in another time would have been stars. But it also exists because more and more people hunger for their thirty minutes of fame in a society that gives people little personal reinforcement. Then there is the most troubling part of it all: egos that drive many to think they ARE good. You can find all these themes in Cho’s video and writings.

Now transfer the previous paragraph to the world of information rather than entertainment. Our information sources no longer connect with people. People in turn think their information or research is as good as the experts. Pretty soon information and misinformation, truth and rumor become quickly entangled. You can find these themes in coverage of the shootings.

In a society without any common definitions of what is good and what is trash, what is valid and what is fantasy, it is not surprising that people should often wander over the line between them. And it should also not be a surprise that when they wander over that line they should also wander over the line between what is moral and what is hellish, what are values and what are prejudices. Don Imus, Cho, certain blogs and YouTube videos all have that in common, for their minds were in themselves tangles of their own egos, a false reality, and ultimately a lack of values.

Another factor is that the line between public and private no longer exists any more than the line between talent and trash, information and garbage. One of the most fascinating parts of both the Rutgers and Virginia Tech stories is that for the victims the media became almost as serious a problem as the perpetrators. In a story in this week’s Sports Illustrated, the Rutgers women speak of being harassed by so many microphones and cameras that they were unable to lead normal lives. They talk about having to find ways to sneak to class so the media would not catch them or trying to escape the media in various way only to find the microphones have again invaded their privacy. One picture that sticks in my mind from Virginia Tech is of a banner hanging from a dorm saying “Media Stay Away,” for those students, especially anyone with even the remotest connection to the shootings or the killer was hounded unmercifully.

Think of each of these as maps that could help lead us out of the tangle. The lines between expertise and trash, information and misinformation, public and private have blurred as if someone spilled water on the map so everything ran together. That is what we have to guide us out of that thicket.

The good news is that history tells us this information chaos is characteristic of changing times, especially times of large changes in how we understand and organize information. Marshall McLuhan saw this as driven by changes in media, so as we move from print to Internet just as we moved from oral sources to print, there is a period of unrest. Such periods, though, by their vary nature produce a flowering of creativity, some of which is not recognized until long after.

So in that thicket lie geniuses. The message, then, of chaotic times is paradoxical for it asks that instead of closing our minds and walling off alternative realities we need to remain open to them. As anyone who has been in the woods can tell you, the way out of a confusing thicket is not to keep walking circles, but to carefully mark where you are and then explore various alternatives. It would be tragic if after the last two weeks America was to become more suspicious, more rigid, more judgmental.

Credits: Original drawing by Jill Swarbrick-Banks

Tagged with: american_idol • blogs_Virginia_Tech_killings • Cho_seung-hu • Don_Imus • information_fragmentation • kennedy_assassination • mainstream_media • marshall_mcluhan • public_and_private • Rutgers_womens_basketball_team • technorati • Virginia_Tech • Virginia_Tech_shootings • YouTube

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga once again finds himself in hot water. Aside from its questionable policy of making a sizeable income from writers who receive no pay for their work, his blog DKos has always had about it the creepiness of Shirley Jackson�s famous 1948 story “The Lottery,” in which a seemingly benign community periodically gathers to stone someone to death. The story begins:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.

The Kos community also lives on public stonings. Like some NASCAR fans who flock to the races hoping for a crash, one of the perverse attractions of the Kos site has always been to see who will next face a public stoning. Some diarists almost seem to relish throwing that first stone. These “stonings” have periodically caused troubles for DKos, but only within the very narrow blog community.

However, as everyone in blogdom knows, not long ago Kos went another step beyond symbolic stonings–he conducted a purge. In essence it became a mass stoning, but not of his own people but those who were listed on his blogroll. It is instructive that after this stoning, the blogosphere largely behaved like Jackson’s community.

A few mavericks led by one Bush Kangaroo expressed some indignation and protest at this, but most blogs–even some of the protestors–still cross-posted items from Dkos, continued posting on his site and/or listed the site on their blogrolls. As Kos hoped, the affair largely blew over with little impact on his site, but unfortunately had an impact on those he purged.

It did not take long for Kos to again find himself in trouble over his bullying and his somewhat skewed perception he IS blogdom. Once again the story spread all over the net. A tech blogger named Kathy Sierra received hate mail, some of it with explicit death threats that scared her enough she felt a need to call the police and cancel public speaking arrangements. Currently she posts the following at her site:

As for the future of this blog, I know I cannot just return to business as usual — whatever absurd reasons have led to this much hatred for me (and for what I write here) will continue, so there is no reason to think the same things wouldn’t happen again . . . and probably soon. That includes anything that raises (or maintains) my visibility, so I will not be doing speaking engagements–especially at public events.

The incident ignited bloggers like gasoline on a dry prairie. Suddenly all the purges and troll ratings and nastiness became very scary. People all over the blogosphere rushed to defend Ms Sierra. The incident may have cost Ms. Sierra dearly, but it finally moved bloggers to do something I have been calling for since the beginnings of this blog: a code of conduct for bloggers.

It is the most important and positive development on the web in quite awhile. Blogger Tim O’Reilly wrote the first draft so I will let him explain:

I was quoted in a BBC article a few days ago and a San Francisco Chronicle article on Thursday calling for a “Blogger’s Code of Conduct” in response to the firestorm that has arisen as a result of Kathy Sierra’s revelation that she’s been targeted by a series of increasingly violent and disturbing anonymous comments on her blog and on a series of weblogs that appeared to have been created for the purpose of celebrating cyber-bullying.

O�Reilly’s code begins:

Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.

This was enough to send Kos over the edge. He began his post by ridiculing the code, calling it “stupid.” But what else could someone who lives by NOT following the code say? Then he went after Sierra, impugning her honesty and throwing in a few choice epithets such as �crying.�

The “crying” crack in particular lit a fuse under feminist bloggers and should, like Don Imus’ remarks light a fuse under all of us. Many bloggers have gone on to open a door not unlike C. Vivian Stringer opened when Don Imus insulted her and the Rutgers women’s basketball team. They detailed the ugly realities faced by women writing on the Net. Melissa McEwan did her usual through job of uncovering these facts. No stranger to attacks on female bloggers (McEwan endured a right wing hate campaign after it was announced she would work with the Edwards campaign), she wrote:

When it comes to harassers targeting people online, there�s no equality of the sexes: Simply having a recognizably female user name makes one far more likely to receive malicious messages online. So common are online threats made against women that cyberstalking has been incorporated into Violence Against Women legislation, and a 2001 Department of Justice report to Congress on Stalking and Domestic Violence made clear the issue must be taken seriously, even when it does not meet the criminal standard for stalking.

What people forget is that this is not the first time Kos has blown off women. By now Kos hopes you have forgotten the 2005 mess he got himself with the “Gilligan�s Island” parody ad he ran for TBS in 2005. That prompted a storm of protest not unlike the current one.

Kos answered his critics with his usual arrogance:

Apparently, having two women throw pies at each other, wrestle each other in a sexy, lesbianic manner, then having water splashed on their ample, fake bosoms is degrading to women. Or something like that.

Whatever. Feel free to be offended. I find such humorless, knee-jerk reactions, to be tedious at best, sanctimonious and arrogant at worst. I don’t care for such sanctimony from Joe Lieberman, I don’t care for it from anyone else. Some people find such content offensive. Some people find it arousing. Some people find it funny. To each his or her own.

Melissa McEwan didn’t like that answer either:

Asking why the most influential liberal blogger is running an ad promoting something that is generally anathema to liberal women is not the same as being a culture-vulture like Joe Lieberman. There�s a big difference between seeking to ban content, and questioning whether that content is in alignment with the objectives of those who profit from it. This distinction seems patently clear to me, but apparently it was easier for Kos to assume to sanctimonious and arrogant tone of which he was accusing women of having in order to scold them for gettin� uppity, rather than address the actual issue�whether he had chosen to either overtly or covertly condone the exploitation of women.

The outrage over Kos’ remarks resulted in the founding of the blog Women Kossaks, which is still hanging in there two years after the protest. But DKos weathered the storm and many who had blasted him were sucking up to him after memories faded.

As for Kos himself, he learned the wrong lesson from that one and he may learn the wrong one from this one. The controversy over the ad INCREASED traffic to his blog. My guess is that this latest one has done the same. Could there be method to this madness? To spell it out: does Kos like to use sexism and misogyny to stir up controversy and increase traffic to his blog?

I don’t normally publish words from Kos, but the language of the 1995 post troubles me. Notice the phrase “ample, fake bosoms.” It could come from a porn site. Or the even more bizarre “sexy, lesbianic manner.” What is one to make of that? I find this extremely discomforting, especially in a blog that is supposed to be about political ideas. What goes on in the back regions of his strange mind?

Despite this, Kos continues to prosper. The undercurrent of many comments on the remarks by Kos is that a lot of bloggers are afraid of him and his Kossaks because they wield power and can threaten you with the blog equivalent of a pogrom. Lord Acton had it right when he said:

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

As I have said many times, “It�s about values.” Those bloggers who continue to support DKos explicitly support those values. As long as you list, crosspost or otherwise support his site you are part of the problem, not the solution. Will the same media sources who give Kos excessive coverage see fit to treat him like Imus the next time he derides women? Will his advertisers turn off the spigots that feed him? Kos lives off his ads. Perhaps bloggers, especially female bloggers, ought to direct their outrage at those sponsors just as they did with Imus.

In Shirley Jackson’s story when someone announces a nearby village is thinking of ending the lottery, an old man says:

Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live hat way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There’s always been a lottery.

Maybe one reason Jackson’s story is considered one a classic is that she captured a side of human nature that lies just below the surface, waiting for the right demons to summon it. Curiously, Kathy Sierra wrote about this in a post on her site before the controversy began:

Can any of us honestly say we haven’t experienced emotional contagion? Even if we ourselves haven’t felt our energy drain from being around a perpetually negative person, we’ve watched it happen to someone we care about. We’ve noticed a change in ourselves or our loved ones based on who we/they spend time with. We’ve all known at least one person who really did seem able to “light up the room with their smile,” or another who could “kill the mood” without saying a word. We’ve all found ourselves drawn to some people and not others, based on how we felt around them, in ways we weren’t able to articulate.

It is both an eerie and instructive post. Neither she nor Shirley Jackson would not have written of the demon Sierra calls “emotional contagion” had they not sought to warn us of it. We ought to listen.

Tagged with: blog • bloggers • bloggers_code_of_conduct • blogosphere • Blogroll • blog_wars • cyberstalking • daily_kos • kathy_sierra • kos • lord_acton • Melissa_McEwan • shirley_jackson • the_lottery • tim_oreilly