Image: Chad Blake at http://www.donblake.com/

The Republican Party has long been fond of saying that their values are as American as apple pie, but I think they have their pies mixed up. It should be humble pie. Together the Republicans in Congress and the Bush Administration are rapidly reaching –if they haven’t already–a record number of scandals.

When I was younger the Republicans I knew used to preach that the problem with Democrats was that they always drew America into wars. The comeback to that is that the Republicans always seem to get us into scandals.

Think about the last 100 years. Of all the Republican presidents we have had only Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge and Eisenhower had administrations largely devoid of major scandals. It prompts the question: Is there something about the Republican Party that fertilizes this sort of activity?

It certainly appears that certain key Republican beliefs make them vulnerable to scandal. When you review the last century there have been three types of Republican scandals–fiscal and financial corruption, abuse of power and what I would term moral hypocrisy.

The first proceeds from the GOP’s market-driven, laissez faire economic philosophy that preaches that government should not intervene in the affairs of business. When it does so, goes the Party line, it only makes things worse.

As we have seen dating back to the nineteenth century, when government operates this way business gets out of control. Jack Abramoff, Enron and Halliburton are merely the heirs of the Robber Barons.

As for moral hypocrisy, there is an old saying that rigid morals provide a great hiding place for scoundrels and hypocrites. In the last three decades family values has become a Republican dogma defined by the religious right and groups such as the Moral Majority. This “new Puritanism” has resulted in an increase of the equivalent of scarlet letters being worn by Republican politicians including Mark Foley, David Vitter and Larry Craig. Nathanial Hawthorne knew this theme well, mining it for several novels and short stories.

I heard an interview on public radio in an Idaho gay bar that lent some weight to this theory. One person said that it’s really too bad Senator Craig has chosen a life and a philosophy that will not allow him to be who he is.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party has been more welcoming of gay politicians. In the Democratic Party you should not have to hide who you are for fear of that the moral ayatollahs of the right will condemn you to perdition.

With abuse of power, the standard theory is that after World War II the GOP adopted a belief in a strong presidency. George Bush’s “I am the decider” echoes Richard Nixon’s. “I am the President.” Yet this belief in a strong executive also has deeper philosophical and historical roots.

The Republicans have always been great admirers of Edmund Burke, the British conservative whose horror at the excesses of the French Revolution made him wary of popular government.

Burke looked across the Channel as the spectacle produced by Madame Guillotine drifted across the water. He believed that if given free reign the people could create as much destruction as any dictator. In Reflections on the Revolution in France he wrote:

The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be covered with the ‘all‑atoning name’ of liberty. In some people I see great liberty indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive, degrading servitude. But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Like Burke, the Republicans have a suspicion, even a fear of the common people. In the hands of today’s Republican Party, Burke’s suspicion of the average citizen has morphed into spying, paranoia and persecution. If Abramoff and Enron are the heirs of the Robber Barons, Alberto Gonzales is the heir to Joe McCarthy.

The Republican Party has never been a strong proponent of civil liberties. During the Cold War they saw a “red” under every bed. Now after 9/11 they see a terrorist in every airline passenger.

There is something deeply disturbing about the fact that the current incarnation of the Republican Party has become a party of zealots for it is in the nature of zealots to go too far.

If the Democrats are smart they will grab this theme and run with it. To attack the GOP’s corruption and hypocrisy is a no-brainer, but by tying the corruption to a larger GOP zealotry they have an answer to the Republican mantra of “tax and spend.” The current GOP is the Party of corruption and abuse.

Tagged with: Abramoff • alberto_gonzales • American_as_apple_pie • Bush_administration • david_vitter • Dean • dogma • economic_philosophy • Enron • George_Bush • GOP • humble_pie • hypocrisy • hypocrites • Jack_Abramoff • Joe_McCarthy • laissez_faire • larry_craig • Latino_voters • market_philosphy • mark_foley • nathanial_hawthorne • puritanism • reflections_on_the_revolution_in_france • Republicans • Republican_beliefs • Republican_Party • republican_politicians • Republican_presidents • Richard_Nixon • robber_barons • Saddam_Hussein • scandals • theodore_roosevelt • United_States_Supreme_Court

(Who!?) Don’t like black people
George Bush don’t like black people
George Bush don’t like black people
George Bush don’t like ‘em
–”George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People,” The Legendary K.O.

The Reconstruction period gave us the infamous New Orleans massacre in which white officials and an accompanying mob murdered African Americans and whites gathered to write a new constitution. The reconstruction after Katrina has produced the equivalent of another New Orleans massacre, this one more devastating than the first because it involves nothing less than the deliberate actions of the Bush Administration.

Images of Katrina

Hurricane came through, fucked us up round here
Government acting like it’s bad luck down here
All I know is that you better bring some trucks round here
Wonder why I got my middle finger up round here.

August 29, 2005– the day Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans remains seared into our consciences.

A crowd of African American women huddle around a slumped figure with a white sheet draped over her shoulder. A woman in a head scarf and striped t-shirt extends a hand in comfort, trying to assure the exhausted and overheated victim all will be OK. Behind her another woman holds her hands to her mouth in a mixture of shock and grief while a man near tears watches with two boys whose faces betray their anxiety and confusion. A second photograph: a large man holding a tiny baby over the shoulder of his football jersey pulls back a blanket to reveal the corpse of an old man as thin as a concentration camp victim slumped in a chaise lounge. Behind him lies the Superdome crowd that became a symbol for this disaster. To the side of the picture a woman walks towards the camera as she shouts at the photographer in frustration. There are no white faces anywhere. A third picture: an African American woman with her dress draped over her shoulder swims through water colored like a stained glass window by oil, dragging an overnight bag and bottles of water. (from The Strange Death of Liberal America)

Two years later come new images, equally devastating and equally searing. Only these images do not have us glued to the television screen. They do not have mobs of reporters asking, “How can this happen in America?” Like the people still living in their FEMA trailers, we have become emotionally numbed while those charged with the task of rebuilding New Orleans hide behind a belief that the task is too big for government, the same government that helped rebuild Europe after World War II, the same government that conquered the Great Depression.

A ground level shot is dominated by purple football helmets, their distorted shapes a testimony to the storm’s fury, lying in weeds behind the limp remains of a chain-link fence the once marked a practice field. The floor of a high school gym is piled high with dun-colored rubble and thick glass crystals that resemble ice cubes scattered beneath a scoreboard and still intact US flag hanging on the wall. A row of crook-necked metal standards that once held backboards dominates a playground so overgrown that it resembles an abandoned farm field instead of a place where kids once tried out cross-overs and imagined playing in the NBA.

What is missing is people. Cameras take us down deserted streets of devastated houses and empty slabs. Photographers who showed us too many pictures of the horrors of the Superdome now drive the city searching for signs of life. Two years ago there were heroes with stories for reporters to tell. Now there are no heroes only survivors. People who returned sit holed up in reclaimed homes they guard with shotguns and the hair-trigger emotions of those who have seen Hell and don’t want to go back.

The Statistics of Katrina

People lives on the line you declining to help
Since you taking so much time we surviving ourself
Just me and my pets, and my kids, and my spouse, trapped
In my own house looking for a way out

In 2005 the statistics told the grim story. The number of lives lost. The number of homes destroyed. The number of people displaced. The number of acres under water.

As they did in 2005, the statistics of 2007 again tell a reprehensible story. The Brookings Institution notes in a special two-year anniversary report on Katrina recovery:

In the past year, progress has slowed, especially in the city, as critical public infrastructure—schools, law enforcement, and health care—remains weak.

The complete report contains some sobering data.

• Basic services-including schools, libraries, public transportation, and childcare-remain at less than half of the original capacity in New Orleans, and only two thirds of all licensed hospitals are open in the region.
• Just 45 percent of the city’s schools are now open.
• As of August 6, 2007, only 22 percent of total applicants to the Road Home program had gone to closing, and the average benefit per applicant has fallen by more than $12,000 to about $68,700
• The unemployment rate climbed back up to 5.1 percent in June 2007, above the state and national rates.

Yet the Brookings report tells only part of the story, saying little about the state of New Orleans black population. For that we need to go to additional data. Last fall, The Kaiser family Foundation conducted an extensive interview study of post-Katrina recovery sending a team of 41 interviewers into the city where they documented the physical condition of nearly 17,000 housing locations and completed interviews with 1,504 randomly chosen adults. The study found huge disparities between the condition of black and white residents. According to the report:

• More than half (55%) of blacks in the parish said that they face worse treatment and opportunities than whites as part of the rebuilding process.
• Nearly half of African Americans (47 percent) described their own personal financial situation as worse now than before August 2005, compared to a third of whites (32 percent) in the parish.
• African Americans were also three times as likely as whites – 29 percent compared to 9 percent – to have experienced some employment challenge since the storm.
• African Americans were nearly twice as likely as whites to say they lost a family member or close friend as a result of Katrina (28 percent versus 15 percent of whites).

The Realities of Katrina

If FEMA really comes through in an emergency
But nobody seem to have a sense of urgency

You have to read between the lines of these studies and do a bit more research to find the important information. For example, one story few are reporting concerns the dramatic shift in New Orleans’ population. The Census Bureau reported that in 2005 blacks made up more than two-thirds of the population of Orleans Parish (67.5%). The Kaiser survey disclosed:

Slightly more than half (53 percent) of adults in Orleans Parish were black.

In other words, a city that once had a huge black majority now has a very narrow one. This fulfills the prophecy of former Bush Administration Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson:

New Orleans is not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.

Obviously this has political implications since it provides Republicans with a better chance at capturing the city than before Katrina. Greg Palast in his new DVD, Big Easy to Big Empty, tells a grim tale of this demographic and political shift. Palast notes:

There are still 89,000 families still imprisoned in FEMA’s aluminum Guantanamo - the mobile home gulag where Katrina’s survivors remained barred from returning to the Big Easy.

In an interview with Air America’s Richard Greene Palast charged:

The Republican Party had a demographic problem which has been washed away and they ain’t letting it back.

A city which for generations was defined by a vigorous African American culture that arguably gave America some of its most distinctive intellectual and cultural flavors–what Wynton Marsalis termed “America’s Soul Kitchen,” has disappeared. What the Klan and the segregationists tried to accomplish over a century and a half has been realized in just two years.

The Smoking Guns of the Ninth Ward

Making a killing off the price of gas
He would have been up in Connecticut twice as fast
After all that we’ve been through nothing’s changed.

The real key to understanding what has happened to New Orleans since Katrina lies in the infamous Ninth Ward, a black area of the city that was one of the poorest and most heavily devastated. The Lower Ninth was also a place of great community pride where families owned their own homes and nurtured neighborhood institutions.

Time magazine’s Katrina anniversary coverage has an online interactive map that tells the story in graphic terms. Colors that give New Orleans the appearance of a patchwork quilt show the dramatic population change in the Lower Ninth Ward. A feature shows which levees gave way, illustrating why the Lower Ninth suffered the most and why some residents still believe the white elite deliberately broke the levees to save their own homes and businesses, a charge that has been given wide circulation by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.

In the upscale Gardens area (where former plantations once were split and sold to wealthy whites) the levies held and the flooding was minor, but the Lower Ninth suffered multiple levy failures on three sides that poured water into the low-lying neighborhood. On Time’s map, the location of the Holy Cross neighborhood marks the Lower Ninth. Today the population of the Gardens, the French Quarter and much of the higher ground around the central city has rebounded close to 2005 levels. On the other hand, the Lower Ninth is swathed in a grim pallor that shows the area has become virtually deserted.

Now all the data begin to make a powerful moral statement. Let’s begin with rebuilding. Clearly the lack of population in the Lower Ninth shows that virtually none of the so-called Road Home funds whose miserable performance is singled out in the Brookings’ study have gone to that area. One reason is that most of the homeowners did not carry flood insurance or any kind of homeowner’s insurance so they don’t qualify. For many the cost was prohibitive.

A second reason people have not moved back is the lack of infrastructure cited in the Kaiser report. The few residents who have returned find themselves living in an area with little or no health care, schools, transportation and even basic necessities such as places to shop.

Most ominously, as I reported earlier this year, the breakdown of community has given New Orleans the dubious distinction of having the highest murder rate in America–even more than Murderdelphia. The Lower Ninth may be the most dangerous place to live in this country for it has become a virtual free-fire zone that rivals anything in Iraq. The Iraq analogy is essential to understanding what has happened to the Lower Ninth, for like Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the area was crippled by the lack of basic services. Unlike Iraq, few seem to care about the Lower Ninth.

Picture one of those fading towns that Hollywood and the makers of spaghetti westerns used to employ as stock settings for gun play. The winds blow through the open windows of deserted houses with yards overgrown with weeds, only instead of tumbleweeds rolling down the empty streets are stray bits of trash that still remain untouched since August 29, 2005. When darkness descends predators prowl unhindered, their wanderings punctuated not by howls but by the staccato beat of automatic weapons.

The third and least publicized reason for people not returning to the Lower Ninth is that many of them are either not able to or not being allowed to. The Louisiana Justice Institute states:

Some 250,000 people are yet displaced throughout the nation, unable to return because they have no homes, no jobs nor the financial means to rebuild.

Even more despicable has been the fate of the city’s public housing projects which were barricaded and surrounded by chain link fences with barbed wire to prevent people from returning. They still sit abandoned. There is also the bizarre “Good Neighbor” project. Common Ground Relief reports:

Thousands of residents—many of whom are elderly and disabled—are facing the possibility of having their homes taken by the City if they do not keep their lots clean and their lawns cut. “Enough is enough,” says Common Ground Director, Brandon Darby. “The so-called Good Neighbor Program is not about being neighborly. It’s about taking private property from homeowners in an unjust, unconstitutional manner.”

Now we come to the future of the Lower Ninth. The rebuilding plan issued this January by city authorities states that rebuilding priority will be given to those areas that can show substantial recovery. It’s a policy that like so much about post-Katrina New Orleans stands rational thinking and morality on its head. This is William Graham Sumner’s philosophy of don’t coddle the weak in its most inhumane extreme.

Those areas that cannot meet the criteria will be condemned by eminent domain and the land sold to the highest bidder. In the Lower Ninth and across the Internet rumors flow of plans to abandon the Lower Ninth and turn it over to developers who want to put in casinos and condos.

It was representative Barney Frank who put a label on this in January of this year:

What I believe is, at this point, you’re not talking about incompetence, you’re talking about values … when in a calculated way you refuse to do anything for well over a year after the disaster…The policy, I think, is ethnic cleansing by inaction.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin followed this with his suggestion at a dinner sponsored by the National Newspaper Publishers Association that the slow recovery is part of a plan to change the racial makeup and political leadership of his and other cities. Frank and Nagin received much criticism for their remarks, but they spoke an essential truth. Interestingly none other than Sports Illustrated employed the similar words in a story in its new issue about the aftermath of Katrina.

When city planners speak of “a smaller footprint” to be served by a drastically reduced tax base, they envision cutting loose much of the city east of the Industrial Canal — and in that many black New Orleanians hear “ethnic cleansing” or see a Trojan horse for an opportunistic landgrab.

While these are interesting charges, is what is occurring in New Orleans really “ethnic cleansing” in terms of international law? First used in the former Yugoslavia (the term is a literal translation from Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian), the term has been the subject of much discussion in the international community. Probably the most concise definition was written by Drazen Petrovic in the European journal of International Law. In “Ethnic Cleansing: An Attempt at Methodology” Petrovic proposes the following description of the goal of what he terms “ethnic cleansing policy:”

The long-term goal could be the creation of living conditions that would make the return of the displaced community impossible, and ultimately lead to the change of ethnic structure of population in the region according to the concept of territorial unity and ethnic exclusivity.

The key phrase “the creation of living conditions that would make the return of the displaced community impossible” certainly seems to describe what is currently occurring in New Orleans. Even if one disagrees, the Bush New Orleans policy also touches on various other principles governing the treatment of what the Administration itself termed “refugees.”Principle 28 of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights “Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement” states:

Competent authorities have the primary duty and responsibility to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence, or to resettle voluntarily in another part of the country.

Clearly that principle has been violated with Katrina. In fact so have several other guiding principles including Principle 7:

The authorities undertaking such displacement shall ensure, to the greatest practicable extent, that proper accommodation is provided to the displaced persons, that such displacements are effected in satisfactory conditions of safety, nutrition, health and hygiene, and that members of the same family are not separated.

Yet as the New York Times reports:

For thousands of evacuees like Ms. Cole, going home to New Orleans has become a vague and receding dream. Living in bleak circumstances, they cannot afford to go back, or have nothing to go back to. Over the two years since Hurricane Katrina hit, the shock of evacuation has hardened into the grim limbo of exile.

New Orleans as RepublicanWorld

Come down George, c’mon come down
Come down George, c’mon come down
Come down George, c’mon come down.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is creating something I never thought I would see in this country, something that resembles an nightmare so awful that my mind wretches at the thought. New Orleans is becoming a racial Disneyworld, a tourist attraction in which those few black people allowed to stay perform for the benefit of the white tourists. They sing, they dance, they play jazz, recreating Satchmo, Buddy Bolden and Sidney Bechet the way folks at Disneyworld walk around dressed as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. They perform for Mardi Gras. And, of course they are cast in the roles Hollywood always reserved for them–cooks and domestics. In New Orleans white America seems on the verge of something that has been a hidden agenda for quite some time–the wholesale eliminate of the inner-city, the black “slums,” the “ghetto.”

But more than that the city is becoming a a theme park celebrating for how the Republicans would remake America. First there are the hefty “private sector” contracts which have gone to the usual offenders such as Halliburton. Then there is education. The Republicans have stated for years they want to replace the public education system. In New Orleans they have succeeded. Brookings noted:

Some 25 new charter schools have opened in Orleans Parish, making Orleans Parish the only city in the country with majority chartered public schools.

There always was a part of New Orleans that was a theme park for white folks to explore black culture–or a caricature of it depending on where you went in the city. Then the tourists would return to their red-lined neighborhoods and congratulate themselves on their tolerance. White culture has always had this thing about sampling black culture, something rap artists stand on its head by sampling white records.

The city as theme park seems the blueprint for the new New Orleans. Meanwhile the real culture that enriched and sustained New Orleans as one of the most diverse cities in the world will be gone. And America will have tacitly accomplished something those people tried long ago with the New Orleans Massacre. This time there will be no bullets, no blood, no bodies, only the lost souls displaced from their homes, families, friends, and neighbors forever.

What You Can Do

Call your congressional and state representatives and the White House to demand the immediate restoration and betterment of New Orleans, Gulf Port, Biloxi and the entire Gulf Coast region. The toll-free number for the congressional switchboard is: (888) 226-0627. You can also write your Representatives and Senators.

Tagged with: barney_frank • Bush_administration • cnn • ethnic_cleansing • FEMA • former_yugoslavia • Franklin_Roosevelt • George_Bush • Great_Depression • Herbert_Hoover • Iraq • Katrina • lower_ninth_ward • New_Deal • New_Orleans • Republican_Counterrevolution • the_strange_death_of_liberal_america • United_Nations • United_Nations_Principles_on_Refugees • William_Graham_Sumner

In keeping with the unconventional views that bring people to this site, I am going to differ with a great many of my colleagues on the left–people whose ideas I value–and state that I believe the effort to impeach George W. Bush is misguided. Forget for a moment issues with the Constitutional justification for such an action, forget for a moment whether the evidence warrants the undertaking and forget even the impact on an already contentious nation. Impeachment is a bad idea for tactical and moral reasons.

In a little over a year America will go to the polls to elect a new administration. Although the Republican Party has been seriously wounded by the corruption and misguided policies of the Bush Administration, it still constitutes a formidable force. There is an old backwoods truism: there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded bear–or elephant.

The Iraq War has inflicted the worst wound, but anyone who thinks they can predict what the situation in Iraq will be a year from now is a fool. Rather than being a trump card I believe it is a joker–and in this game jokers are wild.

Given the uncertainty of Iraq and the election, does it make tactical sense to expend the precious intellectual, organizational, and financial resources an impeachment effort would take–especially given the outcome is far from certain? From a purely tactical perspective those of us on the left face two difficult choices: we can devote ourselves to impeaching Bush or we can devote ourselves to replacing the Republicans in the White House. We cannot do both.

As one who has written extensively on values and the Republican Counterrevolution, I do not like this choice any better than anyone else. But like it or not it is reality. If the decision is made to proceed with impeachment, it will take months to gather evidence and hold hearings. Finally would come the actual Congressional decision.

The cases of Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson are instructive. The Judiciary Committee began its hearings to determine whether sufficient evidence existed to impeach the President in February of 1974. The last of those hearings was in early July. Richard Nixon would resign on August 8. All this was proceeded by the famous Senate Watergate Committee hearings which began on May 18, 1973. Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial began March 23, 1868 and ended with his acquittal on May 16.

The Democratic Party would need to muster all of its legal, financial and public relations resources to assure any hope of success in an impeachment effort. Those of us on the grassroots level would have to organize support for that effort. All this would take precious resources away from the campaign at a time when it can least afford to lose them.

Through the monumental efforts of Howard Dean and groups like America Votes, unions and public interest groups like Emily’s List, the Democratic Party has finally pulled off one of the most dramatic political reversals in American history–erasing two decades of the GOP’s political advantage in fund raising. An impeachment effort would wipe this out in an instant.

Why? Because the GOP’s financial base has always come from the rich and corporations. We have nullified this through the donations and work of millions of ordinary Americans who are fed up with the Counterrevolution. But with an impeachment effort, people like me will be forced to choose how to write our checks. For us it will be either/or. Corporations and the rich can afford to write two checks.

As with everything else these days, impeachment will be fought as much in the media as in the halls of Congress. You know the same people who financed the Swift Boat effort and Sinclair Broadcasting’s “mocumentary” of John Kerry will conduct a relentless media campaign, especially in swing districts.

And make no mistake, those swing districts will be the front lines. We took back Congress by winning those swing districts. An impeachment effort will ask those newly-elected men and women to spend time on impeachment and not on campaigning. The amount of pressure put on them will be like nothing we have ever seen. Given that these are swing districts, the case against Bush will have to be at least as persuasive as Watergate. With the Bush Administration playing hardball with executive privilege backed by a Supreme Court that leans in their direction, the conflict to even gather evidence promises to be intense and protracted.

All this pales behind the moral argument. Impeachment advocates believe this is the strongest part of their case. After all, in their view we must impeach a President who has lied to the American people and caused the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, Iraqis, and others. Yet I would argue a moral position I believe trumps this: the increasing and deliberate tilt of the playing field. In short there are many times more people dying because the same immoral administration is killing more people at home than in Iraq.

The number of murders in Philadelphia alone approaches the number of American soldiers killed in Baghdad so far this year. America risks losing an entire generation of young black men and women who once they are lost, we cannot bring them back.

Native Americans, Hispanics and rural Americans also are facing a crisis. When young people died in Red Lake, Minnesota a few years ago it served as a symbol for those who were dying in others ways. Latinos are now under siege by an ugly nativist movement determined to make them the scapegoats for our nation’s problems. Meanwhile rural towns are dying as surely as if someone had dropped a bomb on them.

On top of this, add the deaths of people who have perished because of inadequate health care. The World Health Organization reports that this country now has an infant mortality rate worse than Cuba or Croatia. It is difficult to compile statistics of those adults who died because of inadequate care, but WHO also keeps statistics on adult mortality. They rank us behind all industrialized countries and almost the same as Panama. Then there are those lives that could have been saved had this administration not taken a hardline on stem cell research and cutback on overall medical research.

Ethicists I know dislike intensely having to differentiate between types and numbers of unnecessary deaths. But at some point scale must enter the argument. Impeaching Bush might atone for Iraq, but retaking the White House might save more lives through improved health care and social programs. It might just save a generation of African Americans and Indigenous people. It would reinvigorate medical research that might find a cure for cancer or AIDS or prevent a pandemic caused by bioterrorism.

An ethicist I talked with the other day also brought up a point I had not thought of: what she termed the interpersonal dimension of George Bush’s impact. Her main case for this was the Supreme Court. The Democrats HAVE to win this election to prevent this Court from turning even further to the right. If Rowe v. Wade is overturned, we can expect that women will have a tougher time getting abortions which will mean a possible return of the deaths, mutilations and suffering women faced in the days of so-called “back-alley abortions.”

George Bush will have to answer for his actions whether he is in the White House or not. With a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress that investigation can take place anyway. More pointedly, George Bush represents one head of a multi-headed monster. Cutting off one head won’t even worry the monster, but winning the White House would deal a deep wound.

As I watch the Philadelphia murder rate increase all too rapidly on the meter on Field Negro’s page, I think of the bright, creative people whose energies now are spent on impeachment who could be helping to prevent that meter from climbing further. The thought of it increasing unsettles me. It is like watching a crowd chase after a suspected criminal while a fifty-story building full of families burns out of control.

Tagged with: abortion • adult_mortality • African_Americans • aids • Andrew_Johnson • Bush_administration • Democratic_Party • Democratic_presidential_campaign • Emilys_List • George_Bush • George_W_Bush • health_care_rankings • health_care_system • health_insurance • Howard_Dean • impeachment • infant_mortality • Iraq • Iraq_War • John_Kerry • Latinos • Native_Americans • Philadelphia_murder_rate • Republican_Counterrevolution • Republican_Party • Richard_Nixon • rowe_v_wade • stem_cell_research • Supreme_Court • swift_boat • White_House

Citizen Kane (1941) routinely tops the polls as the greatest film ever made. The still above may well be one of the most copied in film history. In the myth of Citizen Kane, the 25-year-old Orson Welles is celebrated as a boy genius who in his first time as a director revolutionized the use of the camera and as an actor played a role the required him to age through a lifetime.

Rather than a work of one man, Kane is in fact the greatest collaboration in film history for it brought together a team led by cinematographer Gregg Toland, who had as much or more to do with the film’s appearance as Welles, and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, whose brilliant script made “Rosebud” a household word. Welles’ acting is either brilliant or over-the-top depending on your perspective. The scene where he demolishes an entire room when his wife leaves him is one of the most terrifying displays of anger ever caught on film.

Last week we ran the film version of Abraham Lincoln’s debate with Stephen Douglas, so it seems appropriate to follow that with a campaign speech from the greatest movie ever made. The character of Kane is modeled after newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Hearst created a publishing empire that at one time consisted of so many newspapers that one in four Americans got their news from Hearst. This media concentration gave him incredible power, which he did not hesitate to use. Hearst himself actually was elected to the House in 1902 and ran for governor of New York in 1906. One of the great what-ifs in American history is what might have happened had Hearst won. It is not hard to imagine Hearst doing what two of his successors would do–run for President.

In the film, Kane also runs for governor. His opponent is the corrupt Jim Gettys who is given the nickname boss for melodramatic impact. As you read the speech, you will note one very unusual word–”liberal.” In the movie Kane is introduced as “the fighting liberal” not only with no apologies but as if the phrase was the greatest thing someone could say about a politician.

Can you imagine that happening today? That none of today’s candidates would embrace the description or even the platform Kane espouses tells how much this nation has lost. In some ways the plot of the film is a metaphor for the fate of Liberal America, for Kane would lose to the corrupt Getty’s who traps Kane with his mistress. Liberal America would not lose so melodramatically, but it does not take much to substitute Bill Clinton for Kane and Monica Lewinsky for the mistress.

We have to remember that Franklin Roosevelt was in his third term in the White House when this film was released. In fact you might notice some similarities between Kane’s speech and Roosevelt’s “Forgotten Man” speech. Here is Kane’s speech attacking Gettys:

Campaigner: There is only one man who can rid the politics of this State of the evil domination of Boss Jim Gettys. I am speaking of Charles Foster Kane, the fighting liberal, the friend of the working man, the next Governor of this State, who entered upon this campaign –

Kane: with one purpose only: to point out and make public the dishonesty, the downright villainy, of Boss Jim W. Gettys’ political machine — now in complete control of the government of this State! I made no campaign promises, because until a few weeks ago I had no hope of being elected.

Now, however, I have something more than a hope. And Jim Gettys — Jim Gettys has something less than a chance. Every straw vote, every independent poll shows that I’ll be elected. Now I can afford to make some promises!

The working man — The working man and the slum child know they can expect my best efforts in their interests. The decent, ordinary citizens know that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed!

Well, I’d make my promises now if I weren’t too busy arranging to keep them.

Here’s one promise I’ll make, and boss Jim Gettys knows I’ll keep it: My first official act as Governor of this State will be to appoint a Special District Attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of Boss Jim W. Gettys!

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Currently every state in the union is rushing to see if they can be the first to schedule their presidential primaries after those in New Hampshire and Iowa. Somehow in this mad rush, those two states have managed to maintain their places at the head of the line, even though they control only a small number of nominating convention votes.

Behind Iowa and New Hampshire the pushing and shoving has become rough. There seems little doubt we are headed for that day some dread and others welcome–a national primary. I have never supported a national primary because it all but ends the importance of the smaller states and also diminishes the impact of people of color and groups that have innovative or even radical ideas. Imagine the election as a giant Neilsen ratings contest or American Idol for candidates. In fact the way American Idol chooses its winner actually has more to be said for it than a national primary. A national primary is probably one of the scenarios the framers of the Constitution would have feared the most.

Primaries by their very nature dilute the impact of any group that may be in the minority. Unlike a caucus which requires that the delegates selected for district, state and national conventions represent racial and gender diversity, a primary just chooses the winner. People of color may have an impact in states where they have a high percentage of voters such as Latinos in the Southwest or African Americans in states with big cities, but elsewhere they are ignored in primaries. Ditto for the poor and the disabled.

Primaries also can be misleading in that it is not unusual for people from the rival party to “cross over” and try to gum up the works by voting for someone they hope will lose the presidential campaign. They also favor intense single-issue advocates who face none of the scrutiny that comes with a caucus where you have to state and defend your beliefs. Finally because elections have come to be dominated by television advertising primaries obviously favor candidates with more money because quite simply they can pay for more creative ads and buy more placements for them.

The prime motivation for this scramble to have the earliest primary seems to be similar to a crowd fighting for tickets to a Bob Dylan concert or the Super Bowl. The states feel that being first in line guarantees them better seats. If they wait until the end, the event is liable to be over before they ever get in. For caucus states like my own state of Minnesota, that becomes a critical factor because if the nomination is all but decided it significantly lowers caucus turnout which has a direct impact on state and local candidates who depend on the caucuses to drum up support.

In 2004, the cramming together of state primaries produced a rush to judgment that handed John Kerry the nomination. As many of us recognized, that was a huge mistake. Kerry never underwent a true trial by fire that had him dealing with hard questions. There seems little question a more competitive race for the nomination would have made him a better candidate. Who knows how things might have turned out had Kerry been forced to defend his waffling, his lack of leadership in the Senate, and his failure to create much memorable legislation. Without much real scrutiny Kerry became an easy target for the GOP to chuck its knives into him and then twist them slowly.

In Minnesota when caucus time arrived we were all but ordered to vote for Kerry by the Party big wigs. I knew then what is was like to deal with Tammany Hall. If we vote for someone other than Kerry, said the big wigs, it will weaken his candidacy. Even more, they argued, if Minnesota does not support Kerry and he becomes President we will pay a price for our “disloyalty.” I argued in caucus that Kerry could not win. I even predicted the Swift Boat fiasco. But the bigwigs held the strings and the puppets danced to their tune.

This year I believe we have a dramatically different situation. Quite honestly this may be the strongest group of contenders the Democrats have fielded since 1960. They are articulate, smart, and all have important ideas about how to turn this country around. Because of the ridiculous format for the current debates, what we don’t know is how they will perform when under fire by the likes of Karl Rove.

The equivalent of a national primary will not only stifle important debate among these candidates but also provide an unfair advantage to those who have the most money, but not necessarily the best ideas. Clearly all Democrats want a candidate who can win and winning will mean someone who can fight back against the attack ads and dirty tricks that will make the coming campaign one of the meanest in quite some time. If people thought 2000 and 2004 were bad, wait until 2008.

Behind the scenes, I see another Dean-Emmanuel battle. Emmanuel the centrist would like to see everything over early and also tilt toward those who have the most money. Dean, on the other hand, has made it clear he wants the Democrats to compete at the local level in all 50 states. A national primary would discourage this because the impact would be not unlike that I experienced in the 2004 Minnesota caucuses.

Yet, unless there is a Kerry-like stampede, I don’t think one candidate will dominate the primaries. The press will be handicapping the field as if they were a bunch of horses prepping for the Kentucky Derby, because candidates will place second in one state and fourth in another. At this stage of the game, I see no one winning all the primaries and no one sewing up the nomination early.

Clinton, Obama and Edwards have the funds to sustain a long campaign. If one of the others finishes high in Iowa or New Hampshire it could make for an interesting race. If the polls in Iowa are any indication, voters are volatile and undecided, having not yet settled on anyone or even any three. To push them into making an early decision will only cripple the candidates and the Party.

So I would argue that in 2008 the states going LAST may have more of an impact than those going first. If the race is as close as I think it will be, the states at the end may be the critical ones that provide a winning margin (although this contest could go right to the convention floor).

Forget the pushing and shoving to get to the head of the line. If the states play their cards right and wait until the end, they may be the ones where the final, deciding battles over who will be our next President are fought. As the old saying goes, “Good things come to those who wait.”

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Michelson Inferometer Photograph

A bewitching mirror splits an intense light beam into incandescent tubes that careen off more mirrors only to merge with an eerie, almost ghost-like transcendence that captures the wonder of this primitive-looking device that changed the world. Captured in a century-old black-and-white photograph is nothing less than the calibration for the speed of light.

Built by the University of Chicago’s Albert Michelson, this array of mirrors first confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity. The two-pages devoted to that picture in the coffee-table book American Science and Invention still enthralls me as it did when I first saw it as a child. Einstein imagined riding on that beam of light. Today we have radically different dreams. Like those beams split by Michelson’s inferometer those two dreams present stark contrasts between our times and Michelson’s.

The trigger for this came from a comment by about my post on CAFE standards. pbm60 wrote:

When I was a kid it used to be said that the Japanese were great refiners of technology but that they weren’t very good at inventing it. Toyota and Honda have viable hybrids, Nissan has a decent Continuously Variable Transmission. Other than GM accidentally letting the EV-1 out of the bag for a couple of years I can’t think of a single innovation from the American Big-Three.

In short, pbm60 asks, “Whatever happened to good old American ingenuity?”

There was a time when coffee-table sized books like American Science and Invention celebrated this country’s creative spirit. That two-page wide picture all but asked, “Where else but in American could someone capture the speed of light?” The flurry of invention that burst from this nation in the second half of the nineteenth century literally remade the world. Half a century later innovation would win World War II for America, for make no mistake it was inventions such as breaking the Japanese code with the first primitive computer that turned the tide.

Later, startled out of our complacency by Sputnik, Laika and the first man in space, we again harnessed our ingenuity to put the first man on the moon. At about the same time came the beginnings of the computer revolution which grew directly from work done in World War II. America made the biggest, fastest, most sophisticated super-computers in the world. And after them came Microsoft, Netscape, Google.

Yet even as Silicon Valley sprouted microchips, America was losing its overall lead. People saw it coming as they watched the metamorphosis taking place on store shelves. Yet at the same time we did not want to believe it, clinging to the faith that just as we had withstood Sputnik we would gather ourselves together and retake the lead.

Today you can walk into one of those big box electronics stores that loom over malls across the country and stroll the aisles, carefully noting the names of the manufacturers. Too many products no longer bear an American name, come from America or were engineered by Americans. Perhaps the biggest wake-up slap came this summer when Toyota became the world’s leading auto manufacturer. This may prove even more devastating than if the Russians had reached the moon first.

A confirmation of our shrinking innovation lies in the rows of files lining the United States Patent Office. A paper by Michael McAleer, Felix Chana and Dora Marinova on patterns in patents held by Americans and those by foreigners tells an important and over-looked story: we are losing our innovation edge. The authors note:

Previous studies have indicated that, during the 1980s and 1990s, the number of patents by foreign countries in the USA surged at an unprecedented rate (see, for example, Patel and Pavitt, 1995; Kortum and Lerner, 1999; Arundel and Kabla, 1998)

The graph below shows the growth in Japanese-held American patents:

Of course, we all know who was president then and over the past week have seen graphs that show a decline in our infrastructure spending to a precipitous rise in mortgage foreclosures coinciding with the onset of the Reagan administration. Apparently those tax cuts and other breaks to American business appear to have stifled innovation rather than nurtured it. Corporations have been on such a binge of mergers and acquisitions they have forgotten what drives economic success.

In his best-selling book The Flight of the Creative Class, Richard Florida maintains the situation is actually worse. He reports:

According to my research…the United States ranks fourteenth out of fifteen in growth rate for patented innovation compared to European nations. (p. 141)

Florida also glumly points out:

Foreign-owned companies and foreign-born inventors account today for nearly half (47.2%) of all the patents granted in the United States. (p. 141)

He believes:

Our country–for generations known around the world as the land of opportunity and innovation–may well be on the verge of losing its competitive edge. (p. 3)

The truly frightening part of this story sears through this country like one of Michelson’s light sabers. We aren’t just losing our innovative spirit in the patent office, we are losing it in offices across the country. We live in times that seem characterized by problems rather than solutions.

Take our schools. The alert about the decline of our schools first came two decades ago with A Nation At Risk. A quarter century later, the situation seems to have become worse, a monument to our lack of innovation.

Then come those social policy issues we have tried to cure since the 1950s when social scientists dreamed of being able to solve everything from violent crime to the break-up of families. After billions of dollars in grants, thousands of studies and countless programs and projects, our prisons have become so overcrowded we are actually renting space for prisoners. Meanwhile the situation for other social problems seems no better.

Finally there is the most obvious failure of all: Iraq. The war represents more than an absurdly stupid policy decision, it represents a failure of imagination, for only people with closed minds and narrow viewpoints make such serious miscalculations. Pick which ever analogy from history you wish, all of them stem from societies that became afflicted with cultural and intellectual Alzheimers.

More than one commentator has compared America to the erosion of Great Britain or even the fall of the Roman Empire. All of them raise a collective why that reverberates through the empty factories of Detroit, the police-patrolled hallways of New York schools and the boarded-up farmhouses and deserted downtowns of the Dakotas.

An answer to that question lies in something as common as books once were–little silver frisbees that reflect light like one of Michelson’s mirrors. Think for a moment what has happened to American popular music, entertainment, the arts? The last truly imaginative movement in popular music was rap which is now three decades old–and still not accepted by the mainstream. Hollywood has become so creatively bankrupt that its most popular tactics are to continue making sequels, recycle old television shows, or even make movies of comic books and video games.

And what of American art, fiction, classical music? The general public gave up on much of it a generation ago, which has pushed artists and critics to decry the stupidity of the American public. When you think about it, this is the defense of every failed scribbler who claims to have written the fabled Great American novel.

What all these cries of creative shrinkage share can be summed up in one word: concentration. Innovation in America, whether in automobiles or popular music has usually not come from giant corporations. Back in the nineteenth century a generation of garage mechanics built the first airplanes, telegraphs, electric lights. Later a generation of garage geeks essentially reprogrammed the world.

Now, Silicon Valley has tightened up. Creative popular musicians find the only way they can be heard is on the Internet. Ah, the Internet. I can remember giving speeches as recently as five years ago about the potential of the Internet to give American innovation a much-needed jolt. Those times are passing quickly.

What Skippy the Bush Kangaroo has christened blogtopia has become blogdom. In his must-read article “New Establishment Rising? The End of the Flat Blogosphere,” Chris Bowers notes the 1% of all progressive blogs receive 95% of the traffic. He goes on to note that the entry costs to this “short head” of the national, progressive, political blogosphere have become so high:

That it has become a near impossibility for a new independent, individual actor to join the elite ranks of the national, progressive political blogosphere.

Bigness is not necessarily badness, unless it is also accompanied by policies that discourage innovation. pbm60’s example of the SUV could serve as a symbol for why innovation has been stifled in this country. From auto manufacturers to record and book companies to foundation grants and government programs the predominant policy relies on putting lots of money into large, high-profile, safe projects.

Book and record companies, for example, spend huge amounts on producing and promoting best-sellers from well-known names and “safe” formats instead of discovering new talent. Foundations have their own version of this. The Gates Foundation spent millions on a program creating smaller high schools without any systemic data about or from these schools which is a bit like testing a new drug by trying it out a group of people without gathering any in-depth information about them. Another foundation tactic also parallels the record companies with a small inner circle deciding ahead of time what intervention to fund and even which group will get the money the way record companies decide ahead of time which types of music and artists to back. As for government, ask science and medical researchers how easy it is to get innovative projects funded.

If you don’t buy any of this drive down the main street of any American town. First, there is the likelihood that Main Street is probably deserted because everyone is at the mall outside of town. Second notice the absence of any local businesses. What I term the strip mall syndrome afflicts this country like a cancer so you can drive down a street anywhere and find the same chain restaurants, electronics, building supply, furniture and clothing stores, all, of course, sporting exactly the same architecture to better promote corporate “branding.”

But the brand is seared into us. The role of Wal-Mart in destroying rural downtowns has been much-discussed, but less commented-on is the monoculture that has spread itself over all of America, like those pods in the 1950s horror movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The equivalent of those pods lie everywhere today quite openly, acculturating our society to desire the safe, the expected. We patronize the pizza chains over the local pizza maker because we know what to expect–bland, but safe food that is the equivalent of a Britney Spears record, a Scott Turow thriller, another Spiderman sequel.

The chance that a new idea, a new voice, a new policy will emerge amidst this concentration and emphasis on the large and the safe is unlikely. We have become an intellectually gated community where the gatekeepers are CEOs, marketing nerds, accounting bean counters who get rewards not for taking risks or for pioneering new paths but for sticking to the middle of the road. And what would be the fate today of a Michelson and his miraculous device?

In Strange Death I wrote:

[If] concentration had prevailed over the life of this country it is a good bet neither Elvis Presley nor Louis Armstrong would have ever become some of America’s most influential artists, since early in their careers both were ignored by the major media outlets of their time. Armstrong and many other early African American jazz artists recorded for what were then called “race records.” As for Presley, his story is an American legend of how a poor truck driver with a high school education scraped up enough cash to record a demo record with a visionary named Sam Phillips, who realized that he had a diamond in the rough when he heard the slick-haired teenager sing.

When I wrote about the despicable murder rate in Philadelphia it generated lots of mail asking whys and suggesting answers. To me, Murderdelphia represents the proverbial canary in the mine shaft. Murder and violent crime testify to a failure of imagination. By that I don’t mean a lack of solutions but something a great deal more troubling.

As many hop hop artists affirm, the common thread running through the gunshots is lack of alternatives. Young men with guns not only see no future, they see a society with no cultural or intellectual creativity.

Standing on street corners on stifling streets, living in stifling neighborhoods, facing stifling city law enforcement and government who in turn are stifled by corporate and government forces, life comes to resemble the infamous box used to discipline prisoners . The future must seem like a life sentence.

In “Hip-Hop Is Dead” Nas raps:

Everybody sound the same, commercialize the game
Reminiscin’ when it wasn’t all business
It forgot where it started
From turntables to MP3’s
to commercials on Mickey D’s

But we fool ourselves if we think this is confined to one place or even one race. While the burden may fall unfairly on people of color, you can find the same stares Field Negro calls “the look” in rural America where meth not crack is the drug of choice and black donuts spiraling on remote country roads testify to a lack of imagination and alternatives.

It is, of course, a venerable American tradition to write jeremiads bemoaning the nation’s lack of innovation. For example, every high school student knows of Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”–or, on second thought, maybe they don’t.

Yet there is something particularly troubling about today’s situation in that the pattern seems to stretch across so many areas of our society, the frustration seems particularly acute and in the present global economy, the stakes are extremely high.

The optimist in me hopes we will pull out of this like we did with Sputnik, but in order to do so will require changes in our corporate, government and nonprofit cultures (some believe they are all synonymous) that are unprecedented in our history. History has stories of whole nation’s reinventing themselves–China and Japan, to cite two recent ones. However, many of those changes were made by top-down dictates.

In Michelson’s device the beams of light ultimately merge, producing an amorphous glow, which researchers refer to as an interference pattern. These inferometer images can be stunningly beautiful, symbols of the diversity that can be produced even when a simple beam of light is split apart.

Our challenge is to somehow manage to produce a cultural equivalent of those images. It’s not too soon to start.

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