Current Invective

Two years after the decision in Citizens United, the ruling is widely misrepresented and almost universally misunderstood. People who want to amend the Bill of Rights in response to the decision should read the opinion and the dissent. The law that the Supreme Court struck down would not have stemmed any of the corrupt practices seen so far in the 2012 contests, nor did it involve individual rights of any kind. People who were worried that this case would make corporations the dominant force in US politics have come a little late to the show. Constitution notwithstanding, we have cultivated a political landscape in which the rich and the commerce they control have long reigned sovereign, and the Citizens United decision didn’t change that.

The case involved a movie vilifying Hillary Clinton. The producers, a corporation, wanted to show it on cable TV during the 2008 election season, but federal law made it a felony for a corporation (or labor union) to spend money advocating the election or defeat of a candidate within a specified number of days preceding an election. The film couldn’t be shown until after the 2008 election–the government threatened criminal prosecutions if the film were aired–and so the producers sued the government. Five justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the film-makers and declared the law unconstitutional, overruling a 20-year-old precedent.

Advocates of “limits” on political expenditures have been grieving hysterically over this decision for two years. Democrats in Congress (whose main concern is the accumulation of money for re-election) have been deriding the ruling as an invitation to corruption, as if they weren’t already up to their necks in corporate money from financiers, insurance companies, and war profiteers of various descriptions. Studies show most of the members increased their personal wealth substantially while serving in Congress, and many of them have jobs waiting in the private sector the minute they leave office. Political correctness seems to demand that members defend their duly enacted laws, even illegal ones, but precious few would support a measure that actually curtailed the right of rich folks–corporate or individual–to influence public policy. Not that an act of Congress could reverse the court’s decision.

Here’s the problem: the Bill of Rights. It guarantees our right to be secure from certain kinds of intrusions on the part of the national government and it prohibits government from making laws that infringe on certain of these rights. We can say what we please, print what we please, associate with whomever we please, and enjoy our lives, liberties and properties subject to due process of law because of these ten changes to the original document.

The First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech or of the press. It doesn’t say anything about persons but applies across the board to churches, clubs, newspapers, television stations, book discussion groups and businesses, incorporated and unincorporated. The organized left, not including me, wants to amend the Constitution to limit or cut off the right of free speech for one of these categories.

Justice Kennedy, with whom I seldom agree, wrote the majority opinion and offered some hypothetical cases to illustrate the reach of the defective law and its capacity to curtail free speech. Under the law, Kennedy pointed out, the Sierra Club could be prosecuted for running an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests. The National Rifle Association could be punished for publishing a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban. The American Civil Liberties Union could face criminal penalties for creating a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech. Don’t these look a bit like the sort of activities the First Amendment is designed to protect?

The decision did not, as so many observers seem to be saying, allow corporations to pour money into political campaign treasuries, and it continues to require that political messages like the Clinton film disclose the names of the sponsors. Corporations that want to give money directly to political candidates have always been able to do so through political action committees, and this ruling doesn’t change that. The much criticized activities of the “Super Pacs” in connection with the Republican presidential primaries wouldn’t have been affected in the slightest by the law if it were still in force. The bribery of public officials by the “haves” at the expense of the “have-nots” would have continued normally with or without the provision Kennedy struck down.

The court took passing notice of the obvious fact that the speech of an aggregate of people will always be louder than the speech of an individual. When a corporation (or any other association) speaks over an individual, the individual’s right to speak is curtailed. It’s an infirmity (or a strength) of our constitution, and it requires us to band together to be heard, as is our right. We also have the right to teach ourselves and our children how to resist political advertising (along with other forms of mind-control), something we’ve never even tried to do. There’s nothing to keep us from putting a tax on big advertising expenditures, commercial and political, a levy that could well change our quality of life for the better. Of course, we should demand restoration of the 90% marginal income tax rate that served us so well in the past, so the rich won’t have so much to spend on bribery. Let’s also consider a one-time property tax on obscene wealth, and let’s remember that a corporation is just an association of people. We might want to put the responsibility for corporate misconduct where it belongs: on living, breathing, culpable human beings.

Some legal observers argue that we need to amend our constitution if we want to rein in the corporate state and reverse the effect of this decision (if there really has been one). They make a strong moral argument that constitutional freedoms should be reserved for those who bear legal and moral responsibility for their acts and obligations–the people–and cut off for those that accumulate vast treasuries to exploit and oppress without personal accountability. This is dangerous logic, however: cutting off First Amendment rights is fraught with risk. Why not a law that provides for capital punishment of irresponsible conduct in interstate or international commerce (corporate or not), requiring the confiscation or dissolution and liquidation of organizations whose misdeeds cause widespread human suffering? There’s no constitutional impediment to such a law, and we wouldn’t have to mess with the Bill of Rights.

It’s pretty clear by now that Iran needs either its own atomic bomb or the protection of another nuclear-armed nation to defend itself from Israel and its surrogate the United States of America. Statements coming from the two countries justify an inference that both are prepared to launch a nuclear first strike on Iran. Obama claims he is “not taking any options off the table,” and his boss Netanyahu has been even more aggressive in his rhetoric.

Any responsible person advising the Iranian government would recommend a deterrent. What we call “international law” provides no deterrent, and neither do morals or ethics. Religious fanaticism of the sort practiced by Judeochristians, now ruling Israel and the US, doesn’t recognize laws or moral strictures. Nothing short of a nuclear warhead can be assured of restraining these two rogue governments, which have proved their capacity for mass murder again and again.

Fortunately, the people of both countries are consummate cowards and not equal to a threat of nuclear retaliation. Perhaps Russia, which has a border with Iran, will pledge its deterrent. Or maybe China. But if no nation will rise in Iran’s defense, it will have to provide its own deterrent. Withholding the oil won’t do it.

That the people of the United States don’t care to get into another war–and don’t seem to care about much of anything else either–is of no consequence. In the 21st Century, as in the 20th, war is a pursuit of national leaders. The only role of the people is to supply the bodies. Wave a flag in front of us, and we Americans can be relied on to sacrifice other people’s kids to the cause of Israel and Exxon. “Thank you for your service,” we say, by way of apology.

Don’t look for a debate about any of this on the evening news. Gossip and shopping hints are the only welcome fare for most news-consumers, and customer satisfaction is the name of the game among neojournalists. Debating war and peace is boring and makes people change the channel. Instead of NBC’s Viagra ads they might tune in ABC’s Celebrex promotions.

If Americans were forced to attend to current events, they might put themselves in the place of Iranians. Imagine being threatened continually with violence from above. “Do Christians and Jews attack without warning?,” your kids might ask. “What kind of religions are these that allow the faithful to make such threats? Should we trust them not to kill us, or should we build weapons to scare them off?” Should they?

Nearly 50 years after my last exposure to a schoolroom, I’m a substitute teacher in a suburban school system in central Connecticut, and I’m less confident than ever of educators’ ability to bring the children to a reasonable level of competence in any area. I’ve had first-graders, second-graders and middle- and high-school students, and, in the course of a few short weeks, I’ve noted a deficient curriculum, a low standard of citizenship, inadequate textbooks and study materials, and a variety of time- and resource-wasting practices.

It’s not the fault of the personnel: they are willing and able; it’s the obstacles that are placed in their way. Education has been transformed into an industry, disabling it as a social institution with strict values and standards. I compare what today’s children are getting with what I got, and I worry that most of them won’t be able to express a coherent thought or do simple arithmetic. If the staff felt free to discuss the system they work in, most would probably agree that it is ineffective, as the latest statistics on educational progress in Connecticut suggest.

Today, instead of drilling in arithmetic, they play number games and count out poker chips in groups of four or five kids. They draw pictures of items to add instead of memorizing the facts. One first-grade I taught spent fifteen minutes learning from a video that the elements of a number sentence are addends, a lesson they promptly forgot. They could have been drilling. When I ask a first-grader how many are one and four, the kid shouldn’t have to count that out on his fingers. A seventh-grader asked me for help with a simple long division problem. She used a calculator to do the math. She got the answer to six decimal places. I don’t think she could have done the long division on her own, and I doubt that she has her division and subtraction facts conveniently available.

The textbooks are an embarassment. Printed on glossy paper with an abundance of color illustrations, they are big and heavy. Every page is an arrangement of gimmicks, with varied typefaces in colored boxes, random “lessons,” bulleted lists, and other distractions. I’ve used texts for high school literature, geometry, senior math, business law and business math, and middle school social studies, “language arts,” French, and Spanish, and most of them are too big, too profusely illustrated, illogically organized, and poorly edited. I try in vain to find the point among all the colorful circles and arrows that adorn each page, features that might strike adult book- buyers as “fun” but that are useless and even confusing to the students. The kids’ rucksacks are strained to bursting by these monstrosities, and their little backs bend under the burden. Take a look at your kids’ or grandkids’ schoolbooks sometime and see whether you would be able to extract knowledge from them.

I’d like to know who came up with the idea that learning is supposed to be fun. Learning to water ski might be fun, but learning to form letters and learning to add numbers is work. We drilled and drilled in the primary grades. Flashcards with addition and subtraction facts were a staple, and there was board work for every kid. We read aloud in small groups and recited at our desks as a class, mostly stuff we’d memorized in unison. I’ve heard people criticize rote learning, but it worked. It may really be the only method that works every time. It’s boring, like much of the work that’s required to keep society functioning, but kids have to learn to deal with drudgery, don’t they?

Much of the instruction is by way of photocopied exercises. From my school days, I remember assignments written out on the blackboard that I had to copy onto the sheet of paper they gave me for written work. Today you might get three sheets of paper with printed material and spaces for answers, usually more space than text, with the imprint of the exercise’s publisher at the bottom and one side blank. Educational “packages” consisting of matched books, videos, and canned assignments for photocopying are common. Some of the books are meant to be written in, and these get discarded after one year’s use. The paper budget has to be crushing, with teachers consuming hundreds of pages every week. The exercises themselves are often of no educational value and far removed from any sort of reinforcing drill on an accompanying lesson, a defect even the kids notice.

Some kids like to work, but you can dull their motivation by not requiring much of them. If the expectation is low and there are rewards for minimal performance, you will tend to get minimal performance. There’s no profit in being outstanding, especially when nobody is allowed that status. There are banners hung in the gymnasium celebrating individual athletic accomplishment, but no conspicuous signs of academic distinction, either in primary school or secondary school. You have to guess who the scholars are. I have yet to see an honor roll posted in a homeroom. There seems to be a social elite and an athletic elite, but there’s no identifiable academic elite. Nothing takes the starch out of a gifted student like lack of recognition. Scholars were held up as models in my age group, and there was some competition for high academic status. I’m sure there’s a National Honor Society chapter at the high school where I fill in, but I haven’t seen any plaques or banners to indicate who’s in it.

I believe stifling competition for academic status is meant to stem the pressures of high achievement. I’d like to know whose idea that was, too. Elimination of the academic elite runs counter to values that have long been essential to education as a social institution. On the other hand, in the operation of education as an industry, an academic elite is an unnecessary complication, a source of resentment, pressure, feelings of inadequacy and diffuse customer dissatisfaction. An academic elite runs counter to the “you’re special” movement, which substitutes phony, commercial values for actual merit.

Customer satisfaction might also be the reason for no blackboard work. We used to line up at the blackboard and write things on it for correction by the teacher. I guess that turned out to be too stressful for the kids, having to do arithmetic or practice penmanship in front of everybody. Now they do it at their desks on paper, tons of paper. Only the teacher writes on the board, which is white and doesn’t take chalk but a chemical marking pen. The absence of board work is another example of lack of public recognition for high achievement.

In primary school, by the way, working at your desk means facing each other in groups of four or five. The least obedient kid leads the discussion in every group. Here, too, there’s no profit in conscientious effort. If a kid wants to work, there’s always somebody there to interfere, and the workers learn early that the interferers control the show. By seventh grade, most of the kids–and nearly all the boys–are firm in the conviction that school is no place for ambitious academic effort.

Two months into the school year, the primary school kids are split down the middle between the ones that learn to read and to add without much effort and the ones who must work hard to learn. They’re all together in mixed groups, and the ones who have to work command most of the attention. Their standard, relaxed to accommodate their needs, becomes the standard of the group. By seventh grade, there are two distinct strata of kids. The ones who find the work too easy and are bored by it and the majority, most of whom can’t pass standard reading and math tests.

Despite all my grieving, I enjoy this work. It’s actually a little easier if you don’t insist on learning. I have to admit that understressed kids are more congenial company than hard-driving toilers. I’m not the guy to introduce them to harsh discipline, and so I’m popular. I’m a little put out that they’re not learning much and don’t care to, but I’m no teacher. I’m only just beginning to learn how to get anything resembling compliance, much less respect. I’m sure I’ll be pursuing that quest for as long as I’m allowed to continue in this career.

I’m no teacher, but I am a learner. A reluctant one, like the kids I teach, and a successful one, a kid who overcame an aversion to hard work. I give my teachers the credit for this, but it really belongs to the educational institution that nurtured them and paid their meager wages. It was strict, it was demanding, and it was stressful for us tykes, but it produced universal literacy and revolutionary scientific and literary accomplishments. The school industry as it exists today–catering to the whims and politics of its many and varied customers–can’t produce such results and could bring us into a new dark age.

All this what-do-they-want gas issuing from the embedded mass media is meant to distract from the Occupy movement’s clear mandate: take from the rich. The stewardship of the owners has been a demonstrable failure for everyone but them, so let’s put an end to it. So compelling is the logic behind this demand that the media can’t bring themselves to articulate it.

 There may be some disagreement among protesters over how much to take and what to do with the proceeds, but all agree that the time has come to separate rich people from their assets.  Most seem to follow Robin Hood: take from the rich to give to the poor. Some would rather put the money into public works. Others would like to distribute the proceeds to stressed homeowners. Many would settle for universal Medicare, and a few want to take from the rich simply to decrease their influence over public policy.  Any way you parse it, the message is confiscation.

Rich people and their minions seem to be the only force in opposition to the huge majority on this issue, and it’s a rich irony that as they consolidate their holdings and their political power in fewer and fewer hands, they make themselves that much more vulnerable and confront an ever less resistable tide. They seem oblivious to the hazard they’ve created for themselves. You may have noticed, if you watch interviews with movie stars, sports figures, and other multimillionaire celebrities, that they’re never asked what they do with all the money they make or whether they really think they deserve it. That sort of discussion might veer toward the problem rich people would rather not face, much less talk about: the huge number of ordinary people with no prospect of material comfort and little assurance of economic security. If these masses ever turned their dissatisfaction on those who control all the capital, it would be a sad day for the rich.

It’s common knowledge that most of us have food to eat and a roof over our heads only so long as we agree to the demands of our “creditors.” Creditors. we understand, are people who have more money than they need, so much that they can transfer their surpluses to those of us who don’t have enough, with the expectation of getting their money back, plus some extra as payment for sharing their excess The greater the need for money, workers know, the more the creditors charge you for it. The needy end up paying extra for what they need, and the creditors end up with all that extra, along with the surplus they started with. It’s not difficult to imagine the feelings this sort of arrangement elicits in the participants. Combine a high level of discontent with the inevitable demographic consequences of this scheme–the larger and more desperate the population of debtors, the smaller and less secure must be the class of creditors–and critical mass could come any day.

Nobody is surprised that the media are allied with the rich in this clash of classes. Like all our social institutions–including government at every level–the mass media are controlled and largely owned by the rich, and the “values” they promote are altogether commercial. The inexpressible worry of rich people is that the rest of us will grasp that our numbers–growing by the hour, as security gives way to servitude in household after household–give us strength. The mass media have been delegated to keep that knowledge from us. It’s not working.

In spite of the stream of disinformation, Workers are beginning to understand that only a tiny fraction of rich people’s surplus money is put out to improve the lot of humanity, and nearly all is distributed for the purpose of increasing the creditors’ holdings. Ordinary people are not persuaded that this sort of commerce is good for them, and they’re beginning to recognize the deficiencies in the system. So far, their obligations to creditors have kept them from doing anything to change it, but the appeal of the Occupy movement tells us that there is consensus on one point: for the good of humanity, rich people must be divested of their wealth.

“The trial for the Veterans-for-Peace-led civil resistance in front of the White House on March 19, the 8th anniversary of our illegal invasion of Iraq, concluded this past Friday,” writes Richard Duffee of Stamford, Connecticut, one of the defendants in the case.

“One hundred thirteen were arrested,” he continues. “Nineteen of us declined to pay $100 (or later $35) to close the matter without record. One pled guilty; 13 of us represented ourselves pro se while 5 were represented by attorneys Ann Wilcox, Deborah Anderson, and Mark Goldstone for paltry fees–and in Deborah’s case, gratis. Ann Wilcox and Elliott Adams, President of Veterans for Peace, did the primary organizing of the group, which was a huge task over 7 months involving hundreds of emails, scores of phone calls, and research and writing on detailed and obscure legal issues.

“William Blum, David Swanson, and Ray McGovern agreed to testify as expert witnesses on how the US government plans for, creates, rationalizes, and enters wars, but the judge ruled their testimony ‘would not have probative value.’ Two pro se defendants gave opening arguments, four gave testimony, two cross-examined witnesses, one argued a motion, two gave closing arguments, and each of the 18 gave statements before sentencing.

“It is hard for me to express how valuable this experience was for me. The testimony was riveting. Several times the majority of people in the court room were in tears. Judge Canan ruled against us repeatedly, but we understood that the repressive legislation he had to enforce was at fault. We knew he was honest and respectful, that he listened and understood what we said and meant. Every one of the defendants was earnest, considerate, and compassionate.  VFP’s press release follows:

‘The D.C. Superior Court ruled today that potential pedestrian convenience was more important than the US Constitution or than stopping wars. The 18 defendants (including 8 members of Veterans For Peace) were found guilty by Judge Canan of “failure to obey” and “blocking/incommoding” after being arrested at the White House on March 19, 2011.

‘The defendants argued for their 1st Amendment right to petition their government for redress of grievances. They called on the US Government to obey the law, to obey international law, and to stop the crimes against peace, the war crimes, and the crimes against humanity. The government argued that protecting Constitutional rights and ending war crimes were less important than assuring that a potential pedestrian would not be delayed by a few seconds passing in front of the White House.

‘During the 4day trial Richard Duffee, who had worked under Benjamin Ferencz (the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor), submitted a motion for international law experts to be allowed in the court. The US Constitution makes the Geneva conventions and other elements of international law the supreme law of the land and enforceable in every court. But the Judge denied the motion. Duffee later said, “For the last thirty years, the United States has been reneging on the basic commitment it made after WWII to develop international legal institutions, because we want to be the judge in our own case.”

‘The defendants maintained a focus on the US Constitution, that international law is enforceable in every court, and that the costs of war far exceed any benefit. The court heard personal stories from several vets. Chuck Heyn, a Vietnam veteran, said “When I left Vietnam I pledged to the guys I served with who did not come back that I would speak out against my country when ever my country decided to commit our troops to war based on lies”

‘It was a pro se defense (the defendants acted as their own lawyers) ably assisted by attorney-advisors Ann Wilcox, Deborah Anderson, and Mark Goldstone.

‘Judge Russell F. Canan, Jr., Associate Judge of the DC Superior Court, found the defendants guilty on both charges, fining them $50 plus $100 court fees. Defendant Bev Rice chose to go to jail rather than pay a fine for an unjust law. The case will be appealed.’”

Duffee continues: “I’ve done this sort of thing 3 times before, but was found not guilty or given an adjournment contemplating dismissal each of those times, and the hearings were relatively short and lacked written motions. This is the first time I’ve done civil resistance since going to law school, the first time I’ve acquired a criminal record for it, and the first time I’ve jeopardized my ability to practice law.

“What I’m trying to convey is how utterly worthwhile the whole thing feels to me. I’m so glad I did this I don’t care even if the ultimate result is that I lose the privilege of practicing law. Only a few times in my life have I ever felt that I was exactly where I belonged, that I trusted an entire group completely, and that I’d do it all over again gladly any number of times.

“Elliott Adams led the group. He testified to having shot a woman in a free-fire zone in Vietnam because instead of asking whether the US military had the right to order people to leave their homes on pain of death, he asked whether she might have been raising crops for the Vietcong. The whole courtroom was crying. So infrequently do I have any impulse to follow that I cannot remember ever feeling before, “That is a person I’d follow anywhere.” Art Laffin is a full-time volunteer for the Catholic Worker. He testified that he decided to go with the group because he’d read of the death of a seven-year-old Iraqi boy, whom he named, and who reminded him of his own eight-year-old son. Again we were in tears. Through four days of trial I had the honor of sitting between these two men. I felt, “This is the meaning of my life, to be here with these people, sharing some of their fate.”

“To have that opportunity I had to be willing to risk getting a criminal record. I’ve concluded that US elite has now made US law so repressive that it is impossible to lead a moral life while conforming to every whim of the law–that is, of the elite. I am so glad I took the risk and stuck with it. I recommend civil resistance with Veterans for Peace to anyone. You can trust those vets with your life.

“For the first time in my life I have some appreciation of the virtues of authentic military leadership. Some military leaders really do care for their troops. It’s a palpable feeling. You KNOW it. When an honest soldier decides to oppose an immoral government and defend peace, the result is something that before now I could not understand. For instance, in 1948 Jose Figueres led a military coup that overthrew the government of Costa Rica. He took power and abolished the military. He must have been a man like Elliott Adams.

“Veterans for Peace are the true leaders of this country. I hope the country will realize this in time to prevent the death of civilization and the planet.”

I’m a little worried. This American our president ordered incinerated in Yemen seems to have been guilty of harsh invective. I’m also guilty of harsh invective, and so I’m wondering whether I should be expecting to get “taken out” some time soon. 

I’m not sure what exactly Anwar Al-Awlaki has been saying–I wouldn’t believe anybody who claimed to know–but if he’s been accusing the leaders of our country of mass murder, I’ve done that. If he’s been saying that we–being participants in a democratic republic–are all complicit in the killing, I’ve said that. If he’s argued that there are no innocent grown-up Americans, I’ve made that argument. If he’s claimed that the crimes of 9/11 were trivial by comparison with the subsequent misconduct of the United States government, I’ve made that claim. I’ve even gone so far as to contend that our nation’s actions over the past ten years prove that the USA deserved what happened to it on 9/11.

As a veteran of the armed forces and a comrade of the GI’s that serve today, I can’t bring myself to say that they should be attacked wherever in the world they wage war, but I can’t say I don’t believe that. If that’s what the dead man was saying, I can certainly understand his reasoning.

I don’t think I should die for opposing the USA. On the contrary, I’m altogether certain that justice will eventually be visited on us, and that the sooner we clean up our act, the better. Writing invective is my part of that mission. I’m out to save the nation. I’d rather have the retribution now, against us who deserve it, than to have the consequences of our murderous conduct spoil the lives of my grandchildren. Awlaki should have been heeded, not killed. If he was demonstrating the utter amorality of the USA and hollering that a nation run at the pleasure of fat, pill-popping violence buffs should be put out of business by any means possible, he was a truth-teller, and his death puts our rehabilitation further out of reach. You might want to ask Obama not to kill me for saying so.

Bullying was the subject of a half-hour training session for substitute teachers that I attended a few days ago. School employees must report instances of repeated abuse, whether physical or verbal. It’s not just pushing, shoving and hitting that concern policy-makers, but also mocking and insulting misconduct.

I didn’t ask any questions at the training session, but I had to wonder whether my own repeated humiliations in gym class–I was last-picked in every sport except spelling bee–made me a victim of bullying. It wasn’t that my peers didn’t like me or respect me; they just didn’t like depending on me to catch a ball or crash into an opponent, and they let me know. Likewise, the gym teacher.

I didn’t ask whether the casting of aspersions like “yer mama” or “moron” might be bullying or how freedom of speech might affect the bullying policy. I think kids still have the right to say “I don’t like you,” but they might risk punishment if they post that sentiment on your Facebook wall. “Four-eyes,” “sissy,” and a host of racial and ethnic epithets are out, but “know-it-all” and “dummy” may still be OK. I’m not sure about that, however, and I’m not sure I want to be.

I made no mention of the teacher’s role as bully. I had an English teacher in high school who made us read J. Edgar Hoover as literature. I didn’t do it, and the guy mocked me at every opportunity. Unpatriotic. Is it bullying to call a kid unpatriotic or lacking in school spirit or even unmotivated? Teachers do that all the time. They think it’s part of their job, and maybe it is. I gained strength from scrapes with the hyperathletic gym teacher and the fascist English teacher.

I didn’t ask whether I should discuss the bullying policy with kids. What an emabarassment it would be to have to juxtapose our nation’s military adventures or the value system of Hollywood to our school’s bullying policies. Where does torture fit in? Isn’t it OK to bully a bad guy? Isn’t that what Schwarzenegger and Stallone do in every movie they ever made? “If it’s not wrong for them, why is it wrong for me?” a child might ask. I’m not sure school is the appropriate place to discuss such things.

The world media acted yesterday as accomplice to an international ransom plot. The point was to convince the leader of Libya that his children had been captured by armed resistance forces. Every source from Democracy Now to the Wall Street Journal reported that two of Gaddafi’s sons were in the custody of armed rebels and that Tripoli was taken. The reports were false. As proof, one of the brothers appeared personally at the hotel where most reporters stay in Tripoli.

There seems to be a tacit agreement among news-mongers to unseat the government of Libya. To do this, reporters had to endorse an armed rebellion. Unlike the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, spurned by the media for weeks, this one was steeped in violence, and the rebels became the darlings of celebrity reporters just about everywhere but in Africa, where Libya actually is.

You would think news people would know by now not to take sides in a civil war, but no. Not only do they take sides, they spread disinformation and false intelligence to affect outcomes. They cause death.

Libya is just a continuation of the corrupt process that has turned journalists into drivers of events and not mere chroniclers. News people egged our leaders on in Afghanistan and Iraq. They got people to accept continuous surveillance. A few Augusts ago, they goaded residents not to evacuate New Orleans after the hurricane and then scared people with false reports of violence in flooded areas, delaying help for days and days.

Of all the nefarious forces that threaten us–predatory business, violent Christianity, militarism, advertising–the most injurious over the past generation has been journalism. The corruption of the media has brought us violence, pollution, antiliteracy, superstition, and the abandonment of values. The life and work of the two Murdochs and their newsrooms give us a glimpse of what passes for journalism these days: gossip gathered and dispensed by unprincipled, conscience-less thugs.

In the news business, conviction and ethics are baggage, and they interfere with the peformance of the job. That’s why reporters can talk calmly about the bombing of Libyans by our government, as if 7,000 bombing missions weren’t a bit much.

And there’s so much that reporters can’t tell you. They can’t tell you that they’re under orders not to refer to the “Libyan army.” They have to say, “forces loyal to Gaddafi” because the government isn’t recognized by the US. They now print “Nato” is if it were a word and not an abbreviation. They don’t want to remind us that it’s really N.A.T.O., the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We might ask how a treaty meant to maintain peace in the North Atlantic can be used to drop bombs on people in the South Mediterranean.

The media offer no apologies for their part in the plot against Libya. This latest tactic, threatening targeted people with harm to family members, is both illegal and immoral, but it’s tolerated in the West now (not forgetting Israel), as necessary to protect the prosperous people of the world from the depredations of the needy and desperate majority. The news media are definitely on board for this mission. Under the new system, it’s vigilance or bust. Do unto others, and do it first. Nonviolence? Infantile.

It worries the media not at all that we have had to trash most of our value system to tolerate projects like the destruction of Libya and oil drilling in the Arctic. The stream of disinformation is so relentless that it’s hard to cull the news reports from the food, drug and cosmetic ads that pay the reporters’ salaries. They’ve got us to replace the genuine values that got us here with the ersatz values of sitcom and soap-opera characters. Under their new and improved ethic, liberated from values, we ’re OK with hair-trigger violence, justified as indispensable to the preservation of our consumer way of life from intrusion by the world’s poor and unwashed. This is ironic, because, as news-mongers won’t tell you, the abandonment of values makes us that much more vulnerable to retribution, and more deserving, too.

If you watch old movies, you’ve run across the expression “That’s white of you.” It’s meant to be a compliment from one caucasian to another, acknowledging the obvious connection between virtue and skin color. It’s fallen into disuse except as sarcasm. Maybe it ought to be rehabilitated.

In the value system of the new millennium, it’s a challenge to name a single virtue exhibited by any variety of human, but it’s especially hard to find virtue among white people. Richer by orders of magnitude than their more numerous, dark-skinned brethren, they use their advantage to oppress and enslave the less fortunate. White people are armed to the teeth, reserving most of their bombs and bullets for dark-complected folks. They kill children with as little thought as they exterminate pests. For most of the last millennium and all of this one, they’ve kept busy displacing dark-skinned people to make room for themselves and their polluting activities.

White people are preoccupied with violence. Their favorite subject seems to be killing, which forms the theme of most of their fiction. So many murders are dramatized for their amusement that most white people now think they risk death whenever they venture out of doors.

Their favorite pastimes are car racing, featuring high-speed collisions that are occasionally lethal, and “professional” wrestling, an exhibition of simulated violence that would, if it were genuine, kill or maim the athletes. They bring their preferences to politics, keeping the world in a permanent state of war. They’re consummate cowards, waging armed aggression these days with proxies from the poorest segments of their population and with robots and remote controlled missiles.

White people consume like vermin, and their waste piles are mountain-high in some places. They’re forever deodorizing and disinfecting. Their skin is ugly and difficult to maintain, and so white folks must keep a selection of cosmetics with them at all times.

Most non-white people privately think white people should be ground up and fed to their pets, but their various moral codes don’t allow them to express this desire. White people, by contrast, have no obligatory moral code and are known for leaving the dead bodies of non-whites to litter the streets of places like Gaza and New Orleans for scavengers to pick at.

Barack Obama’s skin is a bit dark for him to be considered white, but he was raised by white people and seems to have picked up most of their ways. He’s in the process now of withdrawing help from poor people in this country–including nearly all the non-whites among us–to buy bullets to kill brown people in Afghanistan and black people in Somalia and Libya. Mighty white of you, Barry.

Anders Breivik, the mad Norwegian, fancies himself a soldier. Like his nation and ours, he chose to engage in an armed attack against innocent people for no other reason than to make some sort of point. We can’t say yet whether Breivik was making the same point as Norway and the USA are making in Asia and Africa, but there’s little doubt that lethal aggression by nations cheapens life and inspires would-be warriors like him to follow their governors’ lead.

In the first hours of the violence, when we were certain that the killer was dark-skinned, we could rest assured that the bloodshed was politically motivated, but now that we know he’s white and claims to be a Christian, his motives are more difficult to pin down. We understand that when Christians kill people, it’s for humanitarian reasons, and so his actions create a bit of cognitive dissonance. We’d like to think he went berserk.

We claim to be shocked by what Breivik did, but we’re not shocked when our president evaporates a Pakistani family with a missile launched from a remote-controlled aircraft. The destruction of innocent people in Pakistan might also create some cognitive dissonance if we Americans thought about it, and so we don’t.

The embedded mass media don’t seem disposed to apologize for reporting, almost universally, that the mayhem was caused by “radical Islam.” They probably don’t want to acknowledge that the Judeo- Christian ethic they subscribe to might be defective in some way. Christians and Jews in the homeland–God bless it!–seem to have a taste for violent entertainment, violent athletics and violent politics. This presents a challenge for anyone trying to understand their moral code, which also tolerates greed, hatred and vengeance. Maybe the problem with Islam is that it’s an improvement on its ancient predecessors.

Obama offered his sympathy, but the armies he commands belie his sincerity, furnishing role models and a manual of brutality guys like Breivik can embrace enthusiastically. Lining up behind our boys and girls in Afghanistan and Iraq, the blue-eyed rifleman thinks he was doing the world a favor.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the terrorists would focus on the guilty for a change? Start with the leadership of the US government and a few of their sponsors in finance and the arms trade and maybe work their way down to the British, French and Italian jet set. Justice won’t be catching up with these people any time soon, and, if they were to get what they deserve, they’d be riding tumbrels to the guillotine. If they’re allowed to continue in power, then we, like the hapless Norwegian campers, will be the ones that pay for their atrocities. What goes around comes around.