Current Invective

(Note: I contacted “Democracy Now!” with this complaint. They never answer my emails.)

When did “Word is . . . ” and “There are rumors . . .” become statements of fact, and when did Democracy Now begin reporting nonfactual material? I’ve been following your coverage of the Iran election, and you seem to be promoting a point of view, forcing you to avoid (and your audience to be denied) facts that are inconvenient. I expect this of CBS and NPR and the US government, but not of news sources I’ve relied on for responsible reporting.

Your guest today informed us that Basij carry knives and are scary, but he wasn’t clear about where they were in the videos you were showing of the Tehran demonstrations or what evidence he had that they killed people. He didn’t say how many knife wounds had been reported, and he didn’t mention the arsons at all, even though they were on the screen for all of us to see even as he was speaking. He left us to speculate on who was doing the burning. He said nothing on whether the election was fraudulent, conceding, rather, along with the entire media herd, that election fraud isn’t the issue now. All America now advocates the overthrow of Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah in the interest of freedom and women’s rights, and Democracy Now agrees. Do your reporters really think a majority of Iranian voters want to advance women’s rights or personal freedom?

The discussion on Democracy Now has been so one-sided as to be misleading. You presented irregularities affecting 3 million voters as a discrepancy of 3 million votes–grossly misleading–much like the mass media’s intentional mistranslations of Ahmadinejad’s words about Israel. You argue, without evidence, that the demonstrators are “reformers” who are “fighting for democracy.” Journalists shouldn’t use that sort of counterfactual metaphor, and you know your audience doesn’t feel informed by it.

Many of us believe that it’s impossible to fix a paper-ballot election without leaving evidence and that Ahmadinejad was almost certainly elected fair and square. We’re not surprised that an Iranian American filmmaker like your guest, able to enjoy a Margarita whenever he feels like having one, might want his aunts and cousins to have leaders other than the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad, but we don’t expect Democracy Now to endorse him uncritically or allow his counterfactual assertions to go unanswered.

There’s been a spectacular rush to judgment that reporters can’t cover as an event, because they’re the story, and because the story disconfirms what’s been reported so far. For example, you reported, as confirmed fact, that Basij militia killed some university students. Since then there have been conflicting accounts, but you can’t report them because you rushed to judgment. And so Democracy Now presents conjecture. Who shot the bystander? How many are dead? Who sparked the violence? Were foreign governments involved? The correct answer is, “We don’t know yet.” Your answer has been in every case a judgment without evidence.

All this puts your credibility in doubt. News-consumers start to believe you’re there not so much to inform an audience as to draw one. If you’re trying to attract supporters you’re not doing journalism but hawking a point of view, we think. It occurs to us that maybe the accomplishments of Iran’s revolution and accurate translations of Ahmadinejad’s words just don’t sell. This leads us to wonder whether your Somalia reporting or Supreme Court reporting might also be promoting a point of view.

We can’t forget that we saw you disregard a credible poll of Iranian voters with a wave and a wink. You still haven’t discussed it. In fact, today you seemed to be saying that the fairness of the election is irrelevant and that the government should be overthrown even if it received a majority of the votes. We would expect Democracy Now to be concerned about the will of the majority. Even if you don’t like the outcome, you’re supposed to endorse it. “Democracy When?” we ask.

And ask. Did it escape your notice–it didn’t escape ours–that the events in Tehran are uncannily familiar, reminding us of demonstrations in Venezuela, when antigovernment snipers shot their own protesters and blamed it on the government? With the connivance of the US media? When did you stop following such leads?

Could you have failed to notice that the Tehran police, facing vast, hostile crowds, showed more forbearance than the Twin Cities cops who roughed you up in response to a miniscule assembly of compliant political tourists? And how about the irony of the US media, so upset over an election in Iran when they endorsed two stolen elections here? Too bad you can’t discuss any of that.

The Iranian election was fixed. The word seems to have gone out in advance that the incumbent, a man notoriously hostile to the rich people of the world, was to be defeated, or else Iranians would feel the consequences. “Heed the lesson of Gaza,” the allies of Israel seemed to be saying. People of Gaza elected the wrong government, as readers may remember, and the US-Israel bloc isolated them and then crushed them. The Iranian people didn’t discern the lesson in that, and they will soon be feeling the consequences.

The provocation of the Iranian government seems to be a joint venture of the US government and mass media. The minute the anti-western returns began to come in, the media/government combine began churning out rumor and speculation to cast doubt on the election process. Their immediate reaction was that the count, showing a big majority for Ahmadinejad, was fabricated. Biden expressed suspicion on national television. One Brookings scholar said on NPR that it’s simply impossible that the incumbent could have got so many votes, and a former editor of the Jerusalem Post noted that Ahmadinejad outpolled every one of his opponents in their home towns, and wasn’t that obvious proof of election fraud?

Never mind that the turnout, big by any measure, was swelled by poor people, whose lot has been improved by the present government and who far outnumber the well-to-do. Never mind that the anti-government constituency consists mainly of city-dwelling bourgeoisie, who have done less well under Ahmadinejad and who make up the bulk of the “reform movement.” Don’t pay any attention to polls conducted by the Washington Post three weeks ago (but suppressed till now) showing roughly the same proportion of voters supporting the incumbent as in the official vote.

Fanning flames ignited in the course of a national election is a time-honored means of provoking violence, and this media-fueled unrest could serve as a pretext for armed attack. Israel and the American media have been wanting to teach Iranians the Palestine lesson for years, and this could provide the opportunity. People who allow their leaders to question the legitimacy of the Jewish state get killed in the 21st Century, and let’s not forget that. The media see this as a win-win process for Americans. If you think of the current wars as a board-game–as most Americans do–Iran completes the chain from Iraq to Pakistan and beyond.

There’s no free lunch in USA-land, and there’s no free election either. Where America rules–which is everywhere–you better elect our guy. Or die.

We are participants in a national downgrade. Social institutions are failing–education, government, industry, religion–because values have been degraded. Greed and predation became virtues, and war became a sporting event. Liberty became a matter of privilege. Knowledge was discredited. How did this happen? How did this happen so suddenly?

If we look at history, we see that such failures have occurred again and again, here and in other lands. Bad ideas—especially the idea of superiority and the prospect of conquest—are usually at fault. When people go through failure, including catastrophic failure of institutional proportions, they really ought to examine their policies and practices for bad ideas.

Money

Money may be a bad idea. It’s just paper, and we don’t get to decide what it’s worth. Without money, we’d have to trade things of actual value, and that would be inconvenient and it would slow down the economic engine, but that might not be a bad thing. The trouble with money is not having any. Money is for those that have it. The more they have, the more they can get. For the rest of us, it comes in and goes out, and it seems like the harder we work to get it, the more of it we owe to the people who have it. Our debts are all down on paper somewhere, and somebody else gets to say how much our assets are worth. By my reckoning, most of the actual things I own will eventually belong to the people who have all the money, and I’ll have little or nothing.

As bad an idea as money may be, there will always be money. As long as people can read and do math and record their transactions, money—bills of debt—will circulate. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what the money is worth, and so you might have to unload your house or your labor at a rate below value, and sometimes everybody loses confidence in the value of money, but debtors have to keep it coming in or starve.

There have been attempts to regulate lending and borrowing so that we can depend on our money—after the crash of 1929, for instance—but the people with money invariably sabotage such efforts and the rest of us have to surrender our property when the balloon deflates. We should understand that money is debt, bringing it into conflict with basic personal and institutional values. It may simply be a bad idea to let it proliferate without limit.

Israel

Israel was a spectacularly bad idea. Yes, it was the duty of mankind in recovering from world war to establish a sanctuary for the displaced peoples of the world, for the surviving victims of would-be conquerors. Mankind should have put it in Arizona or Florida, however, not in Palestine. The world, with the no-establishment-of-religion USA in the lead, created a European religious state smack in the middle of an ancient, mostly peaceful, reasonably prosperous eastern-Mediterranean culture of diverse lineage. Could people in their right mind have thought such an implant could take? It’s been a festering sore ever since, and it seems as if it couldn’t have turned out any other way.

Most of the problem is that the sanctuary given to the victims was transformed into a claim of manifest destiny by their vengeful, sanctimonious issue, now terrorizing the grandchildren of those displaced to make room for the Europeans sixty years ago. Do these arrogant upstarts really believe God gave them land? Do they think I believe it? It’s not just Judaism, but all religion that is discredited by the continuation of this assault on essential values of peace, justice, and equity. Our institutions are at risk until we cut Israel loose and demand that the Jewish state and its conquests be demilitarized and subjected to confederation under international supervision.

The Presidency

The founders didn’t contemplate a world order with the US president at the head of it. Their writings suggest that they envisioned a government controlled by the people acting through Congress. The president would supervise the officers and departments created by Congress to administer the government, always according to rules acceptable to the people, expressed as the will of Congress.

Observers around the world claimed to be startled when the first president George Washington vacated his office in favor of his successor at the expiration of his second four-year term, but locals knew that Washington wouldn’t have dared to assume authority not granted by the Constitution. Neither would Congress ever have permitted such a usurpation.

Right up through Dwight Eisenhower, presidents have been held fairly closely to the rules. Franklin Roosevelt had to wait for Japan to attack before he could join World War II. Truman had to call the Korean War a “police action” to keep it legal, and the courts kept him from taking over private industry. From Kennedy on, there’s been no such delicacy, as successive chief executives simply seized power, putting the country through war, debt and discontent as a result.

Not that presidents before Kennedy did much better. Most presidents have been vain, ingratiating crackpots who have done more harm than good. Our presidents have proved that the ability to get votes is by no means a qualification to govern. We ought to have three presidents–the people’s top three choices–with equal authority, acting by majority. They would check and balance each other and guard against the neo-dictatorial regime we tolerate now, one that conflicts starkly with the fundamental values of republican government.

Three ideas, interacting with each other in a way that destroys our values and threatens our way of life. If you look at conditions and events closely and with an open mind, you discover that It’s not human nature, but bad ideas that have brought us to the brink of ruin. We should be engaged in a critical analysis of all the ideas that govern us and replace the ones that undermine our values.

The commitment to nonviolence puts peaceful people at risk in any conflict. Take the case of George Tiller, MD, shot to death by an assassin during a church service in Kansas last week. The doctor, who treated women only and whose services included abortion, had been shot before and took due precautions, but to no avail. Tiller was determined to persevere in his practice, and his murderer, driven by faith in Christ and unrestrained by principle or conscience, seized the advantage.

How might things have turned out if decent people–who support Dr. Tiller and a woman’s right to control her own body–were similarly unrestrained? Suppose that the forces of good could unleash people as violent as those who kill abortion doctors. What might happen if suddenly abortion-protesters’ houses and cars started going up in flames or if Randall Terry got locked in his trunk or Bill O’Reilly got his ear nicked off in the barber’s chair or if somebody put up a couple of hundred bucks to buy a jailhouse beating for Tiller’s killer? The antiabortion movement might evaporate, its members suddenly less interested in terrorizing pregnant women. Tiller might not have had to die.

George Tiller’s medical practice had for years been plagued by threats of violence and patient-harassing abortion protesters. Like all personnel at all abortion clinics nationwide, he knew he was in danger and he knew that the people who were threatening him were capable of great violence. And he must have heard the incitements to violence broadcast by right-wing demagogues like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Dr. Tiller, a man of nonviolent conviction, would have balked at the idea of a pre-emptive strike on the domestic terrorists that eventually took his life, but with his death, we survivors might not be inclined to such tolerance.

I don’t know any non-Fascists who openly advocate violence to forestall violence, but that may be mere political correctness. Satanic figures like Limbaugh drive us to desperation, and even pacifists can turn nasty when friends and family are endangered. Dr. Tiller may not have been family to most of us, but he was one of us, and his murder weighs on all of us. The punishment of his assassin by due process of law might not suffice.

It’s not unreasonable to feel this way. The law-enforcement people charged with protecting Tiller and his clinic can’t be relied on for protection against Christian gangs, whose absurd claim of a license to kill for Jesus seems to hold sway with the authorities. In fact, the police and FBI had a crack at Tiller’s assassin only a day before the murder, after he was caught on videotape vandalizing a clinic in Kansas City. The cops passed up the opportunity to haul him in, and he stalked and shot Dr. Tiller a day later.

Eventually, peace-loving people may begin to look for other recourse, above and beyond anything the law–or absence of law–can offer in these disordered times. The tactics of the anti-abortion terrorists, including assassination, must be reckoned effective, since they keep many frightened women from exercising their rights and make women’s clinics a dangerous place to work. In the natural progression of conflict, the terrorists’ violent tactics, effective as they are, might eventually be applied to the just defense of the clinics and women they terrorize.

As many as one in five adult Americans may now be taking antidepressant drugs. The most popular of these medications alter brain chemistry in a way that makes life seem generally more pleasant. Prozac and a half-dozen related formulations, called SSRI’s, are so effective in the relief of psychological misery that their introduction in the 1990’s was heralded as a revolution. Today, these drugs, nearly as addictive as narcotics, remove some or all of the pain of every day living for a huge proportion of the medically insured population, but the revolution that comes with mass medication may extend beyond mental hygiene.

We’ve all wondered how a nation of seemingly well-functioning citizens could have gotten itself into such a mess in so short a time. During the years of the Prozac revolution, we’ve lived out a delusion that we could grow without limit, pollute without interruption, and win any war, and we’ve injured the nation and made the rich much richer and ourselves much poorer in the process. Could it be that the apathy and laziness of thought that allowed us to get sheared and plucked in this way are simply the natural political consequence of drug-induced contentment?

Those who still depend on non-wonderdrugs for mood enhancement have been surprised by the complacency of the vast majority of our neighbors. Faced with military disaster, national humiliation, the constant threat of unemployment, and the collapse of culture, they don’t seem to be upset. How did “I’m not going to take it anymore!” get transformed into “What, me worry?” Maybe it was the Prozac revolution.

There are several rare conditions that leave people unable to experience pain. They are very destructive conditions. If you ever bit your cheek after a dental procedure, you know how much damage you can inflict under anesthetic, without even knowing it. Pain keeps you from harming yourself, and people with chronic loss of feeling typically break bones, sustain wounds, and die young. That might be what’s happening to us.

We may have dulled our collective capacity to feel psychological pain. That would be lethal for self-government, which depends on the acute sensitivity of citizens to the social and political climate that surrounds them. When we become unable to make the critical decisions that determine our fate, others will make them for us, and, exploiting our stupor, they’ll loot our belongings while they’re at it.

We may have made ourselves numb to the pain that ought to accompany the stranding of soldiers in dangerous places, the incessant blare of advertising, the bombing of children, the failure of the world economy, the imprisonment and torture of innocents, and the desperation of so many families near and far, not to mention the high probability of an environmental catastrophe not long after most of us are due to expire.

Antidepressants make it possible for us to continue as if things were fine. Ensuring that things will get worse. But that’s OK.

Democrats in the US Senate have announced that there will be no closure of the extralegal torture center at Guantanamo until the President finds a place to put the inmates. The senators are emphatic that the prisoners are welcome in none of the 50 states represented by their august body.

It’s not that the prisoners are guilty of anything. On the contrary, it is because they are innocent that the government is obliged to release them. The problem is not anything the prisoners did–most were taken by Afghan bounty-hunters on trumped-up evidence–but what we as a nation did to them. A couple of hundred men wandering among us after years of illegal confinement and torture at the hands our government is a situation our leaders would rather not confront. Until we can ship these guys someplace where they won’t be a constant reminder of the moral bankruptcy of Americans, we’ll just have to keep them locked up.

The men themselves–whose stories remain untold by the mass media–were mostly kids when they were captured. For the first several years of the their imprisonment, they had no names at all, and the media and the people were content with that. Eventually, judges forced the government to provide them with lawyers, and it is through their lawyers that a few of us have come to learn that nearly all of them are innocent of wrongdoing. The rest of us still believe they are terrorists, mainly because our media refuse to tell us the truth about them.

Suppressing the truth about them is meant to help us all deny the truth about us. The plight of our captives exposes us as a people without principle, without moral strength, without ethics, without common decency, without a sense of justice, without values. If the fathers of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Doug Feith, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, Alberto Gonzalez, Bill Clinton and the rest of my age-mates were members of the best generation, we ourselves are part of the worst generation. As the brave men and women who fought and won a world war die off, and as their misbegotten issue squander whatever legacy their elders left behind, the nation descends into a pit of corruption, violence, and poverty. It’s as if we had set about to prove that we deserved 9/11. Now we seem to be headed for much worse, and terrorism is the least of our worries.

The prisoners (”detainees,” as we like to call them in the degraded language we receive from our embedded mass media) are living, walking witnesses to our misconduct. If we could kill them, we would. If we could cut out their tongues and eyes, we’d do that. Our courts say we can’t keep them imprisoned, but a lawless senate disagrees, and so the men continue to rot by the hundreds in darkness and isolation. There is no asylum for them. Years of injustice and brutality have made them men without a country.

If the prisoners are men without a country, we are men without a nation. We, the worst generation, have trashed the last tattered remnants of the republic bequeathed us by the best generation. To distinguish ourselves from the reluctant warriors that spawned and nurtured us, we made war for profit and political advantage, and now we’re reaping a harvest of shame and degradation. The nation turned out not to be a “homeland” but a set of principles and values that we’ve long since abandoned. If we let the victims of our crimes loose among us, their silent rebuke will only augment our shame.

“Capitulation” is a term used on Wall Street (but not much heard these days) to describe panic selling in the stock market. In military parlance, it means surrender, and, by either definition, it’s a fit metaphor to illustrate the condition that seems to be afflicting so many of us as we try to cope with failed social institutions.

Capitulation is not so much an abandonment of hope as an abandonment of effort. Once it becomes clear that your best efforts can’t bring peace, justice, prosperity or security, you start to wonder whether you ought to expend any more energy struggling for these things. It seems such a waste of effort, when you could be making jelly or watching your grandchildren play sandbox. Obviously, the forces of decency are too weak ever to prevail, and the public interest can never be more than mere words, and any contribution one person might make will be more than offset by the apathy, complacency and abject fear that govern the great majority of us.

All forces seem arrayed to bring us to capitulation. The future of people who work for a paycheck is bleak, and the outlook for small business is just as bad. Even with the recent devaluation of real estate, home ownership remains out of reach for most wage-earners, and there’s no prospect of upward mobility on the horizon. Public opinion polls say people want these conditions to change, but government seems determined to bail out financiers and not workers. With so much upset, you would think the movement for economic justice would be growing, but it isn’t. In fact, it limps forward with fewer and fewer people every day, as labor and progressive pressure groups contract and disappear.

If you get sick, you could be forced to capitulate, because you could quickly find yourself on the road to bankruptcy. And there’s not much chance that that will change. Ever. Health care is something we all require, and this makes it very profitable for those who know how to extract profit from it. The public can demand government health insurance till the end of time, but we’ll never get it. Our leaders would quickly find themselves ousted from office if they could no longer purchase elections with money from health care profiteers. There’s a lot to be said for giving up that struggle, a string of thrashings stretching back 15 years.

And the republic doesn’t seem to be in any better shape than the citizenry. Here’s a nation that lost two wars to sixth-rate powers and has a quarter of a million men stranded in distant parts. Nobody’s about to bring them home, and it makes no difference what I might do or think. Torturers, murderers and kidnapers walk our streets, and that’s not going to change either, no matter what I might do or think. Citibank’s too big to fail, but social security, Medicare, and the rule of law, not so much. In so many ways, we take the capitulation of the republic for granted. Capitulation is definitely going around, and nobody wants to be the last holdout.

What the holdouts keep looking for is some sign of life in the populace. Some trace of conviction. Some residue of the values that got us all here. Backs seem to be turned all the way around. Generations can’t talk to each other. There seems to be no logic or rationality in public policy or in the new value system it reflects. Most of us seem now to accept that our kids will not do as well as we did, that violence will always be with us, that ignorance will proliferate, that government is irredeemably corrupt, and that justice is unattainable. That’s capitulation.

There’s something Americans should know about bombing civilians. If you can’t count them, they don’t count. That’s the rule being applied this week by the U.S. media, working in tandem with the Marine Corps, and it ’s the reason you may not have heard that Marine pilots bombed houses in Afghanistan a couple of days ago. International Red Cross observers say U.S. aircraft operating in the western province of Farah killed dozens of civilians, including many women an d children. Eyewitness accounts tell of truckloads of bodies carted away for burial. Nobody counted them, and they’re all in the ground now.

The U. S. media, suppressing most of the story, seem to be reluctant to report on the massacre because they’re not sure there are enough dead babies to make it worthwhile. Lately they’ve been spewing the Pentagon line (on no evidence whatsoever) that the hapless Afghan women and children were killed by something other than the bombs that fell on them or that they were herded into harm’s way by America’s enemies. The truth that the media can’t report is that America is the enemy. You and I are the enemy. Rich and poor. Black, white and brown. Mother and brother. We are aggressive enemies of peace, unattainable in the presence of an occupying army of tens of thousands of heavily armed American soldiers. We are enthusiastic enemies of self-determination, impossible in a country under foreign occupation. We are unabashed enemies of the rule of law, which forbids armed incursions of all kinds, except in self-defense. We are unrepentant enemies of life itself, so little concern do we show for the children of farmers and herdsmen, blown to bits by our soldiers.

Up till a few months ago, we could chalk it all up to rogue government in Washington. That rationalization evaporated in November, when we had a chance to oust the crooks in charge. We didn’t do it. In fact, our esteemed current president promised explicitly to keep the mayhem going, and we seem to have voted for that. He’s delivering. It’s dead babies by the truckload, and he claims to be proud of the boys and girls we send over there to keep the blood flowing.

The soldiers know that they are not heroic, not brave, but cowardly, with their body armor, their pilotless bombers, and their shoot-first rules of engagement. They know that they are not so much soldiers as terrorists, roaring through town and village with guns at the ready. They know that they are dishonored by what the rest of us so foolishly refer to as service. And they know that the civilians at home neither understand nor care about their shame and sadness.

Military commanders feign surprise at the number of soldiers killing themselves. They should acknowledge that this is the price of cowardice. Of brutality. Of lawlessness. Of dishonor. These are the hallmarks of 21st Century warfare, American-style, and there’s no cure for dishonor except self-destruction. Some drink themselves to death. Some end up on the street. Some buy a dozen roses for Mom and then put a gun to their heads.

Some of us are joiners. We believe that a group of people working together toward a common goal is more likely to achieve it than the same people working individually. And since we’re social creatures anyway and like to be around one another, we might as well make good use of our affiliations and cooperate to produce big things. I’ve always found this logic compelling, and my parents encouraged me to join others in group efforts. School band, scouts, sandlot sports, and as an adult, Air Force, choir, politics, and parent groups. I’ve always been a joiner.

Some of us are skeptics. We believe that plans, policies, ideas and other bits of wisdom need to be tested regularly, even beliefs of long standing, held by great numbers of people. Skeptics raise objections. Skeptics dissent from the majority view and habitually take positions against accepted ideas. Some skeptics have doubts about the existence of God. Some see no future in democratic government or free enterprise. Some even question the intrinsic value of human life. Skeptics are like snowflakes. No two have the same doubts. But most of them share serious doubts about the effectiveness of groups and the motives of the people that join them. And so skeptics tend not to be joiners. When they do join, they question everything. I’ve always considered myself a skeptic.

Skeptics who join are activists. Activists turn out for picket lines and public meetings and protest demonstrations. Activists think of themselves as representing others. When an activist turns out to protest the closing of a public library, he’s out there for the multitudes at home who share his convictions but couldn’t show up for one reason or another. The skeptic that lives in every activist has doubts about the constituency at home. Bitter experience has taught activists that a demonstration consisting only of activists is an event the news media and the general public can easily ignore. I am an activist, and I can attest to this.

Meetings of activists are to be dreaded. Turnout is always disappointing. Arguments on trivial matters can take hours to resolve. Skeptics are there to point out deficiencies of every kind. See how much progress is made in a group of people who are quick to notice deficiencies. Often, dissent leads to conflict, and constant conflict can scare new recruits and hinder organizing. Turnouts at meetings tend to get sparser and sparser. Big groups break up into smaller, more insular ones with a narrower focus. The major objectives everyone rallied around become elusive. And so policies with broad support among the general public–tax-funded universal health care, for example–make no headway whatsoever because activists are splintered and disorganized.

It may be that activists are on a fool’s errand. Consider the situation of war protesters in America. They question the generally accepted idea that the U.S. is privileged to use armed force to advance national interests. They find considerable support among people on the street for their opposition to war but little or no appetite for public protest. And so they try to organize, and if they’re lucky, they overcome some of the internal divisions that alienate activists from one another, and they announce a public event. And when they turn out for the demonstration or conference, their numbers are embarrassingly small. Instead of making their point–that most Americans don’t like war–the pathetic turnout seems to confirm the opposite: that a tiny minority don’t like war, and everybody else is OK with it. The activists who show up, especially the younger, less experienced ones, feel foolish and ineffectual and are less likely to turn out next time.

This seems to be the story of the peace movement, the environmental movement, and all the other movements. Nobody has yet come up with a way out of this frustrating cycle, which can discourage and finally disable the individuals caught up in it. Activists are said to “burn out.” They don’t. They just quit fighting, defeated. They never stop burning, and they can flare up at any time.

Alan Bersin is being presented to the public as “Border Czar,” and the press seems to be feeding on his picturesque job title to the exclusion of all other fare. Wherever you turn—network TV, NPR, Time Magazine—you get this convenient metaphor—Czar—with no explanation of the actual bureaucrat’s actual authority or responsibility, much less his actual job title. One Public Radio reporter even referred to Mexican “Drug Czars,” who would apparently compete with the Border Czar for primacy at the frontier.

The metaphor is ridiculous, of course, and it’s journalistic bottom-feeding of the crassest kind. The term “Czar” is the Russian equivalent of “Caesar,” referring to the Emperor of ancient Rome. The Czar (pronounced “Tsar’ in Russian) was the emperor of Russia. There was only one. There weren’t various Czars for various functions. There weren’t competing Czars. The Czar had the power of life and death over every subject, and there was no limit to his authority.

It’s a gross overstatement, and very misleading, to refer to an executive official of the US government as a Czar. The press should not have accepted the use of this title uncritically. Especially, it shouldn’t have presented the title as sufficient explanation of the fellow’s responsibilities.

This indulgence in metaphorical shorthand is typical of 21st Century news reporting. Take “Homeland Security,” another bit of meaningless terminology imported into the language by the media. “Homeland” is a metaphor. We live in a nation, not a homeland. It’s a republic that covers half a continent and that encompasses homelands without number. Or consider “War on Terror. ” By definition, if it isn’t between nations, it isn’t a war. A war on anything except a nation is not a war but merely mass murder. Like “Czar” and “Homeland,” “War” is a metaphor that conveys no precise meaning but only an impression. Neojournalists maintain a ready inventory of colorful terms like “Economic Meltdown,” “Bank Bailout” and “Insurgent,” all so imprecise as to be misleading and almost always offered without further explanation.

Why reporters use metaphor is no mystery. The effort to attract an audience means striking a familiar chord. Trite metaphors are just thing, and if they don’t convey much in the way of meaning, they do get a response, and they can save a reporter considerable hard digging and careful writing. The use of metaphorical shorthand in news-reporting is a form of intellectual prostitution, and it’s easy work for those who can do it.

A responsible editor might profitably point out that the reporter is not doing the news-consumer any favors by cloaking facts in metaphor. Metaphor is meant to elicit images that convey, not fact, but ambiguity. Metaphor is a tool of the poet and dramatist, used to illustrate or illuminate a fact by reference to some other, unrelated idea. It’s a literary diversion, not a means of informing.

If the reporter’s job is to inform, metaphor gets in the way, and there’s no place for it in news-reporting. In gossip, maybe. In sports and opinion, most certainly. But not in news.