Current Invective

Running for public office gives me an excuse to talk to strangers, and I’m learning quite a bit from these conversations. Ordinary people seem to be discovering that our national moorings have been severed by government and they are surveying the trashed social landscape desperately for help. They’re convinced that their leaders are crooks. They sense a catastrophe ahead, with a loss of income, property, health, even the necessities of life. For the long term, they grieve silently over the society that seems to loom for their grandchildren. And they agree that government officials have acted with utmost cowardice, pretending that things are fine and in every way driving us in the direction we’ve been going, despite all pleas from us

My rhetoric is alarmist–justifiably, I contend–and I tell people that I’m running for Congress because I think our country is in the toilet and I’m willing to go in there and pull it out. Cleaning up Congress is a dirty job, I tell them, and somebody has to do it

I look for connections. If somebody is about my age and from Hartford, I ask, “Hartford High?” If you have the last name of somebody I know, I’ll ask about that, and if you have a Hungarian name, I’ll tell you I studied Hungarian in the service. I’ll ask about your service if you display any insignia that I recognize. Yesterday I got the signature of somebody I hadn’t seen for 45 years.

I talk to many people who can’t vote. If they’re too young, I ask them to read my message anyway, maybe give it to somebody who can vote. Same with felons. Most of them seem to have been cited for offenses much less serious than the spectacular crimes committed against us all every day by our leaders and their rich patrons, and I acknowledge this. Immigrants always agree with me when I remark that people who can’t vote because they’re not from here seem more interested in US politics than the natives

Not everybody talks to me. I’ve been frequenting the bus stops of downtown Hartford, offering my advertising flyer to people passing by or waiting for a bus. It’s easier to talk to a waiter than a passer, who may be pressed for time or hungry. People in twos and threes usually include at least one who wants to avoid a conversation, and so I approach people who are alone first.

The better-dressed people are more likely to be in a hurry and less likely to talk to me. Many people wear a mask of hostility, to protect themselves from intruders, I guess, but a surprising (to me) number of them are willing to relax their defenses for a political message. I’m no longer surprised when people with tatoos, nose-rings, cornrows, baggy trousers, bulging bellies, or skimpy shirts exhibit civic responsibililty and political sophistication.

Some people simply don’t trust anybody who would presume to lead them, and I always express solidarity with them and try to convert them into participants. Sometimes I get through.

I tell people that I’m out to vindicate us with our grandchildren. They will certainly piss on our graves if we don’t make big changes now. I want Reilly, Aaron, Myles, and all our grandkids to be able to say, “At least Grandpa tried. “

In the neo-democratic institutions of the 21st Century, the inalienable right of the people to opt out of debate and decision-making has created a new social order: decidership. Americans live in a decidership, and it has rather suddenly replaced the republic we have been relinquishing over the past 20 years or so.

The ruling class in a decidership names a decider and holds a sham election to confirm him. George W. Bush will be seen as the first in a line of deciders. We entrust our decider to select from the myriad policy options available to comfort the worried masses in a failing nation.

A decidership is entirely multiple-choice. Unlike dictators, who superimpose personal vision on the nations they rule, deciders have no vision but depend on others to supply it. Deciders resemble dictators only in the sense that they wield absolute power.

Decidership requires no public discussion, and it countenances none. Visionaries representing privileged political patrons present their ideas in private to subordinates of the decider, who edit out the chaff and present what’s left to the decider. The decider then presents his selections to the legislative branch for approval; approval is optional, since the decider is empowered by the sleepy populace to execute his selections with or without it.

There are courts in a decidership, but the decider decides when and in what manner court orders will be honored or enforced. Court orders adversely affecting the decider or his subordinates or patrons are routinely ignored. Standards, rules, and laws are altogether arbitrary in a decidership and can never be allowed to impede the decider or his patrons in any way. “The Constitution is a piece of paper,” said the first decider not long ago.

In a decidership, the people must have enemies, and the decider chooses them for us. They are almost always ruled by cronies of the decider or his patrons, people like Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. Deciders are licensed to kill the chosen enemies, but they usually do it through surrogates, typically decent young men who put on a military uniform every day out of a sense of duty and honor. When the decider’s soldiers kill, they get a pat on the back. When they die, they must be buried in secret. The injured ones are discarded like refuse in a decidership, but who cares?

The who-cares ethic is really at the heart of a decidership. All power flows from the vacuum that informs public morality. In a decidership, the bombing of foreign cities and kindness to animals coexist comfortably. There are warriors for Jesus and vegans with pit bulls. Cognitive dissonance is treated with drugs, mostly by prescription, or with massage or meditation.

Nobody knows how long a decidership can endure. We know that it can overcome a hardy old constitution, 50 state governments and international organizations of every kind, including the one known, anachronistically, as the United Nations. We suspect decidership will survive another election and corrupt the winner irredeemably. The people will be asleep again within a month of the inauguration, if history’s any guide. The big question is whether decidership can withstand the strains of an economy in catastrophic failure and an army in revolt, common hazards for nations that reject the duties of citizenship.

If the American people were at war, we would be marking Memorial Day not with barbecues and trips to the seashore but with remembrance and reflection. The holiday was conceived after the Civil War to remember the dead of both sides of that bloody conflict. It was not intended to celebrate conquest or militarism but to bring to mind the terrible costs of these anachronistic concerns. It’s meant to be a somber holiday, and it would be if lives were being sacrificed every day in defense of the nation.

Lives are being sacrificed, certainly, but not on the scale of war, nor are the current engagements supported by a congressional declaration. Soldiers are shooting people and getting shot, but it’s not war, just killing. Many of the fighters know this, and this knowledge would certainly intrude on the rest of us if, at home on Memorial Day, we couldn’t comfortably direct our collective gaze away from bullets spent and blood shed a world away by people we don’t know.

Memorials notwithstanding, people forget, and, in the 140 years since the first official Decoration Day, as it was called then, Americans haven’t been able to go more than a few decades without mlitary conflict. It’s not that we crave blood, but, rather, that leaders of nations (including ours) crave glory. And so instead of war, our leaders wage a conflict just intense enough to prove that kids will fight and die for them. Vanity is served, and more, as deadly diversion holds our attention while predators rob us. Modern armed conflict unfolds like a game and it’s played as a game, with young men and women deployed as playing pieces and live ammo to determine who wins. It’s a game leaders can play for years on end, with or without the cooperation of the general public.

From the combat veteran’s standpoint, it’s a lot less risky to fight for your country than to fight for your leaders. A soldier can get killed either way, but survival’s more complicated when he returns from a war the people at home didn’t want or care about. The last few crops of veterans learned this lesson the hard way. The survivors of Vietnam came home to jeers (masking shame), while the survivors of the current engagement find utter indifference (hiding behind feigned gratitude). Veterans’ morale is not much improved by Memorial Day observances.

In an atmosphere of “low-level conflict” waged without public support, Memorial Day must be anything but an occasion for remembrance. We can only pretend to grieve for the sacrifices of dead soldiers, as we are compelled to forget the rationale for their sacrifice and celebrate without reflection. And so this is a festive holiday and most assuredly not a time to remember. This holiday is a memorial in name only, and our curious way of observing it exposes our shallow commitment to soldiers and nation.

References to Sadr City on National Public Radio seldom fail to mention that it is a “Shia slum.” They don’t call it an impoverished neighborhood or its residents a disadvantaged minority. Rather, they employ a slur, as they did again today, and a particularly disparaging one at that.To call it a slum is to imply that the people who live there are inferior to those of us who don’t live in such places. In our country, we have low-rent districts to house the unemployed and underemployed. The housing tends to be run-down and poorly maintained and, when conditions in a neighborhood are bad enough, we call it a slum. Twenty-first century conventional wisdom holds that people who are down-and-out are responsible for their own misfortunes. Accordingly, we don’t grieve much for residents of our slums, many of whom escape in due course.

The state of Minnesota will put up $38 million to divide among 158 victims as compensation for losses sustained in last year’s collapse of a bridge under Interstate 35 in Minneapolis. Thirteen were killed in the accident, which was the result of structural defects.

To claim part of the award, approved by both houses of the Minnesota state assembly, the victims, many of them now pursuing civil lawsuits for negligence, will have to release the state from legal liability. The total comes out to about a quarter-million dollars per person, but a third of the money will be used to sustain victims with severe permanent injuries. Victims of the 9/11 attacks made a somewhat more lucrative settlement of potential claims against the federal government and the airlines.

Law buffs might reasonably wonder why victims of the levee collapse in New Orleans aren’t entitled to similar relief. They have received nothing except modest emergency assistance. The explanation might be that this is a much more populous class of plaintiffs. The amounts awarded to victims of lesser catastrophes, like 911, would pale by comparison, given the scale of the damage to New Orleans and its residents. The losses could run to astronomical amounts, equal to several weeks of war costs.

The flood victims’ claims are no less meritorious than those of the other plaintiffs. The negligence–if it was negligence and not deliberate malfeasance–is patent, at least as egregious as the misconduct of those who let the planes crash into the buildings and those who let the bridge shudder till it gave way. Most responsible authorities had long known that the levees couldn’t survive a severe hurricane, but nothing was done to prepare for that inevitable event. Worse, among the officials who neglected the levees were people who celebrated the displacement of New Orleans’ African-American underclass, leading many of us to believe that the flood was the result of purposeful neglect by racists.

In addition to the uncounted dead and missing (try to find reliable numbers on the flood’s toll in and around New Orleans), hundreds of thousands remain displaced in the diaspora. They had so little before the flood that the rest of us are encouraged to assess their losses as trivial. They have nothing now, and nobody is proposing that they be recompensed like the victims in New York, Washington and Minneapolis. Americans should be asking why.

The gang rape committed by the embedded mass media on Jeremiah Wright will never be acknowledged, but history will record it as a sample of 21st Century racism. Wright is the hapless victim of neobigots, paid promoters of a popular racism that proceeds not from the presumed superiority of the white race but from its presumed inferiority. Blacks hate whites, according to contemporary theory, and this puts whites, who are disadvantaged by unfair laws and inherent good nature, in mortal danger.

The modern racist believes that black hatred is expressed in talk about slavery and discrimination and disproportionate rates of poverty, incarceration, illiteracy, and unemployment. African-Americans who are preoccupied with conditions that reflect poorly on our country shouldn’t be surprised when the white folk question their patriotism. Wright has delivered some sermons on these topics over the years, and the neoracist minority, in the person of the commercial media, rose up indignant, as if a single word Wright uttered were anything but true.

The public repudiation of Jeremiah Wright was altogether a fabrication of the media. Although the Clintons introduced Wright’s politics as “an issue” (because he was her opponent’s pastor), guilt by association is never a legitimate issue, and the reporters knew that. But Wright was outspoken, and he’s very similar in skin color to Barack Obama, and innocent whites could get hurt, so the networks and newspapers made a special exception and made Obama’s association with an immoderate orator a political issue.

Enter the redeemer of journalism, Bill Moyers, with an interview that exposes Wright as a keen analyst and an altogether guileless and charitable human being. This gifted leader inspired a discouraged community to rediscover dignity and hope and he’s a credit to the Obamas and their fellow congregants. He deserves a nod of approval from all of us. Instead, the keenest of analysts in the commercial media put a stick in his eye.

I don’t know if Moyers hopes to rehabilitate his profession with this interview, but it’s pretty clear that the reporters in the quarter-million-a-year bracket are beyond redemption. The best paid people in the news industry are gossip-mongers, and they willingly cash out credibility for fame and fortune. The Moyers interview won’t go down in history as amends, but it does set the record straight.

I wait and wait for Obama to confront the toads who follow him around, but he seems to be afraid of them. I keep expecting this outburst: “That’s the stupidest question I ever heard Charlie. All this mess, and you’re asking about that?” If Obama ever stood up to these babbling idiots, I’d consider voting for him. He could start by excluding from his entourage each and every news organization that attacked Jeremiah Wright. Clinton should make the same rule for the reporters that feed at her buffet.

The document affectionately known as the “torture memorandum” is the work of one John Yoo, Law Professor, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. This 2003 tome, which Yoo presumes to refer to as a memorandum of law, is the most egregious case of legal bootstrapping since Nixon claimed: “When the President does it . . . it is not illegal. ”

The most sweeping pronouncements–for example, that Constitutional due process of law does not apply to people held captive by the military–are supported by no authority whatsoever, and a substantial proportion of the citations in the 80 pages of text are to opinions from Yoo’s own Office of Legal Counsel and not to cases that ever came before the courts.

When there are citations to actual cases, these are steeped in deception, with only a pretense of responsible legal reasoning. The overall presentation seems intended to obfuscate rather than illuminate. Yoo relies principally on a 1942 case that was unprecedented at the time (wartime, officially, pursuant to a congressional declaration) and that hasn’t ever been followed by the Supreme Court. He cites a work from 1612 for the proposition that people who don’t obey laws aren’t entitled to their protection, and he cites opinions from the Israeli Supreme Court laying out what is and isn’t cruel and unusual punishment.

Among the most outrageous legal claims made by Yoo:

• The Justice Department has no authority to prosecute crimes committed in the course of military activities (citing Justice Department opinions)
• Congress has no authority to regulate the military, and criminal laws that explicitly cover government employees are to be interpreted to exclude the president and his military subordinates
• Torture during the interrogation of military “detainees” is exempt from criminal laws
• the President can suspend or terminate any treaty or provision of a treaty

Yoo employs the word “detain” (detention is temporary, by definition) when he means “imprison,” and this exemplifies his dishonest use of language throughout. Phrases without legal meaning, such as “unlawful combatant” and “Commander-in-chief power,” are used to justify vast areas of unlawful conduct. Coinages and neologisms have no place in legal writing, but they are a staple of this author.

Taken in sum, Yoo’s arguments, which are without legal merit, amount to a prescription for tyranny. Although the memo has since been “withdrawn,” it served as legal justification for uncounted acts of torture and kidnapping, atrocities for which Yoo is personally responsible.

Yoo includes a ten-page discourse on the definition of assault, concluding that torture in the course of interrogation doesn’t qualify. A third of the opinion is devoted to the Convention against Torture, which the US ratified and which Yoo sifts for loopholes. It turns out this treaty is all but unenforceable against the U. S. president. There’s no legal scholarship behind Yoo’s finding on these points, just a lot of miscellaneous musings, almost as if the opinion were bulked up to compensate for the weakness of its logic.

Yoo must have been very confident that this memo would remain forever secret, because the arguments expose the author as an anti-lawyer and an enemy of the rule of law. Or maybe he’s just confident of his own immunity to accountability. He can be fairly certain that there will be no searching legal analysis of his arguments by any major news-monger. This memo has already been critiqued and tossed aside by the people who tell us what to believe, as if the document itself were something less than a crime against humanity and an assault on the Constitution.

The House Judiciary Committee has invited Yoo to testify about the memo. Committee staffers are presumably taking the memo apart now piece-by-piece, and we can only hope that they take the miscreant to task for his grievous breach of professional responsibility. Yoo ought to be disbarred for this.

A fact is a piece of language, a statement about reality. It’s a very particular kind of statement. “I wonder who’s kissing her now,” isn’t a fact, and neither is “I want you to do me a favor.” Although there’s nothing tangible about a fact, it often refers to something tangible.

Roses are red. Is that a fact? Depends on how we interpret the language. It’s a fact that some roses are red, but it’s also a fact that some roses aren’t red. We’ll go along with a child who tells us that roses are red, and maybe let the child know that roses come in other colors, too, but we woudn’t take the statement as fact from a grown-up.

We make judgments when people tell us things that aren’t facts. If we know that the statement is untrue, we might deduce that the teller doesn’t know what he’s talking about or has constructed her own personal reality, or we might notice that it’s April 1. If we don’t know whether the statement is a fact or not, our judgment of the person might lead us to believe what we’re told, or to disbelieve it.

News is factual. By definition, if it’s not factual, it’s not news. When we hear a report from someone we recognize as a reporter of news, we take it for fact. But is it a fact that news is factual? Let’s test a typical news report for truth or falsity. This is from the CBS News website today:

“A U.S. helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at gunmen attacking ground forces early Tuesday, killing six militants in Baghdad’s Shiite stronghold of Sadr City. However, Iraqi police said three unarmed men were killed and six people wounded, including two children.”

Notice that the first statement, about the firing of the missile on “gunmen,” killing “militants,” is said with no attribution, but the second statement, that unarmed men were killed and children were wounded, is attibuted to Iraqi police. What sort of editorial decisions could have produced such a sentence? Did the reporter actually see the attack, but only hear about the casualties? That’s the implication, unlikely as it is, and the construction of the sentence seems to accord the first statement greater credibility than the second one. Is it really more factual?

The reporter doesn’t tell us the source of the first statement, and so we have no way of assessing it for truth or falsity. If the information came from whoever ordered the helicopter to fire, it is self-serving, and the lack of attribution makes the statement incomplete and not factual. And yet we are meant to believe it. We are meant to believe that the targets were “gunmen” and the victims were “militants”–epithets with no precise meaning–and we are meant to be skeptical of the report that children were wounded and unarmed men were killed.

The editorial decisions that produced this non-factual sentence were corrupt and intended to deceive rather than to inform. And yet it comes to us as news and we take it as news, except for one thing: we don’t believe it. In a poll released a couple of months ago by Sacred Heart University (and reported almost nowhere), only one in five Americans believe all or most of what’s reported in the news, and almost one in four believe little or none of it.

So it’s news, but we we’re not sure it’s fact. Since news is, by definition, fact, we seem to be left with this: consumers of news no longer believe in facts or even in truth or falsity. We’re content with self-serving statements–at least CBS News thinks we are–without regard to truth. We would like to believe that our soldiers fired at militants, thinks the CBS editor, so he allows us to, but we don’t want to believe that our soldiers are killing children, so the editor raises doubt, even when there is none. And that’s supposed to make us happier and, really, better off.

The day may come when we’ll need a fact or two. Unfortunately, because of the destruction of facts by our embedded mass media, we won’t know facts when we see them. We’ll be slogging through disinformation like the innocuous-looking CBS report, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not, while our republic collapses around us.

There are two kinds of censorship. There’s black-out censorship, of the sort you see in redacted documents, with words and sentences blacked out so you can’t read them. You might come across this form of censorship in government documents that make reference to secret information and also in letters from prison inmates. And then there’s blackout censorship, in which you’re kept in the dark without explanation.

Take the current news coverage of Iraq. There isn’t any. Last we heard two days ago a couple of people in the so-called Green Zone got killed, but they didn’t have names, and they still don’t.  (That report has since been revised without explanation to ”at least two,”  as of 4/1).  We saw smoke rising from the U.S. compound, but no reporter told us what was burning or even why they weren’t telling us what was burning. We know that there was an announcement to embassy personnel to stay under cover, but that was days ago.

There were some bombing raids in the south, we learned, and there’s about five minutes of film from Basra, which all the news media seem to be sharing. The websites for CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN combined have less than a half-hour of video from Iraq, much of it two and three days old. You can’t tell how old a piece of film is, because the networks don’t date their video dispatches, allowing them to show clips over and over, as if they were news. The CNN site has something called “Hot Topics.” Iraq isn’t one of them. None of the networks is treating the renewed conflict as a top story, even though hundreds of people have been killed and the American compound has been under attack.

The Sunday interview shows had next to nothing on Iraq. Tim Russert asked the Director of Central Intelligence whether he knew in advance that the Iraq government was about to launch an offensive, but he didn’t insist on an answer and he didn’t get one. The main topic of conversation everywhere in today’s news was who’s ahead between Obama and Clinton.

All signs point to a total news blackout from Iraq, and it’s the most pernicious form of censorship. Not only are we not permitted to know what the reporters in Iraq are seeing, we’re also not allowed to hear why they’re not talking. I’m sure the silent journalists could recite a list of “security” reasons for their reticence, but they know what they’ve become–whores for a corrupt military regime–and they’re not expressing any reservations about that.

I wonder if al Sadr watches American TV. If so, he must be frustrated at the news coverage. He’d probably like to know how many people have to die to get the attention of the American media. He’s not alone there.

Soldiers and former soldiers watch TV and read newspapers. Put yourself in the place of a 24-year-old vet whose unit is still deployed. He’d like to know what’s happening to his friends, and he may be in touch by email with some of them, but there’s no big picture for him, no substantive reporting, and this has to be frustrating. I got my discharge almost 40 years ago, and I’m worried for my young comrades.

You hear less talk these days among journalists about freedom of the press and its role in maintaining the republic, and no wonder. Unable to report what they see, they must be experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance. Hope they gag on it.

“Bush’s War,” which aired on “Frontline” this week, was positively Shakespearean in its portrayal of the internecine struggles that gave rise to the nation’s current military adventures.