LUDIC LIVE

When I was young, like many idealists, I still believed that America was exceptional.  I still believe that this country is an exceptional one; there is still no nation that so fiercely enshrines the rights of man in its very foundational document and so vociferously defends them as part of its entire existence.  But age, time, and the hard, hard lesson that good does not always triumph over evil or freedom over oppression have taught me that the American people are no more free of prejudice and bigotry than those of any other country, and in some regards they are substantially worse.  From time to time, this grim fact — and the concomitant truth that democracy can be quite incompatible with freedom — makes itself explicit, and last night in North Carolina was one of them.

It wasn’t the first.  It won’t be the last.

Even today, with my country’s political system more bought and sold than ever, and with intolerance making a bold new bid for the public embrace, I try not to become a cynic.  The worst political ideas ever wrought by nations have been the work of cynics.  It is the irrational fears and ancient prejudices of the stupidly sincere that form the raw materials of votes like the one in North Carolina, but it is the cynicism and calculation of the political class that channels them into the means by which they consolidate their power, using it to choke the life out of the very people who elected them.  But it’s sorely tempting at times like this to despair about how ignorant and backward Americans have revealed themselves to be on the issue of gay rights.

The right of gay men and women to marriage equality is predictably recognized in Canada, and in Europe’s more progressive quarters, but what is more surprising is that it is becoming the law of the land in bastions of Catholicism:  Spain, Argentina, and Belgium have all legalized gay marriage, and Mexico City now allows them as well.  Civil unions are allowed almost everywhere in Europe, and increasingly in conservative South America (there is something especially disgraceful about being behind Colombia on any civil rights issue).  Same-sex marriages are even allowed in South Africa, a country that still enshrined institutional racism under the color of law as recently as the mid-1990s; perhaps it was their history of ugly racial discrimination that made them so quick to tie it to anti-homosexual bigotry.  It is not for nothing that it has been pointed out that the last time North Carolina amended its constitution was to prohibit marriage between races.

Let’s be perfectly clear on this:  those who oppose same-sex equality are on the wrong side of history.  They are being left behind in almost every corner of the globe, and they will eventually lose.  Whatever the origins of their position — the inculcated brainwashing of tradition, the baseless irrationality of religious indoctrination, or the outright bigotry of repulsion and hatred of gays — they represent what Hunter Thompson called “the forces of old and evil”.  Those at the vanguard of this regressive movement come up with all sorts of justifications that make it seem as if they are not simply indulging in the repression of a minority, but none of them hold a thimbleful of rhetorical water.  For all the talk of sacrament and tradition, marriage has always been a social construct, and thus may be defined however we agree to define it without damaging the concept.  Western society has gone through dozens of permutations of toleration of gays as well as dozens of permutations of intolerance against them.  There is simply no credible evidence whatsoever that gay marriage does measurable harm to heterosexual unions, or that the children of homosexuals are doomed to neurotic misery; what evidence there is suggests just the opposite.  And, just as with that other American bugaboo, marijuana, the harm that can be suffered from homosexuality stems almost exclusively from the fact of the bias and social and legal prejudices against it.  If there were no such thing as homophobia, the whole idea of homosexuality would not even be an issue.  Really, all you have to do to judge the moral quality of the anti-gay movement is look at the people who have sought most feverishly to eradicate homosexual behavior:  the statist paranoiacs of the Stalinist era, the indiscriminate torturers of the Catholic Inquisition, the holy terrorists of the fundamentalist Islamist fringe, and the universally reviled Nazi party, who condemned pink triangles to die alongside yellow stars.

But being wrong, being doomed to ultimate failure, does not mean being denied long-term success.  There has been bigotry against homosexuals for as long as the concept has existed ; indeed, as Gore Vidal has argued, the whole conception of homosexual identity — as opposed to the naturally occurring and entirely uncontroversial phenomenon of homosexual behavior — would never have emerged were it not for the prejudice against it.  The notion that women are human beings and deserve to be treated as something other than breeding stock or domestic implements is a relatively recent one, and has failed to catch on in many quarters; it still meets with fierce resistance even here at home.  And America continued its unbearable mistreatment of blacks far longer than any reasonable person might expect, and bears the scars of its badly healed racial wounds even today.  North Carolina has made it clear that the forces of injustice and intolerance will not easily surrender their power.

The comparison with African-American civil rights has become commonplace, but it is not lightly chosen.  There can be no decent defense of racism or homophobia; both are reducing a human being to a category and then denying them their rights based on their occupation of that category.  Both are punishing a person for being who they are.  But both enjoy widespread support that cannot be reasoned out, just as it was never reasoned in.  Both are — with a few glorious exceptions, which are among the few reasons to be hopeful for the future of mankind — so firmly stitched into the corrupted minds of their followers that they are likely to loosen their grip only with the coming of death.  And both are common enough that they are likely to stand forever in the way of a democratic consensus that blacks should have access to the same justice system as whites, and that homosexuals should have access to the same marital rights as heterosexuals.  But that, of course, is why the courts exist, and is as fine an example as anyone could want as to why the federal judiciary must be allowed to operate independent of the popular will.

When LBJ used his mastery of the senate, the political clout he had accumulated from his dealmaking with the G.O.P., and the public sympathy accompanying the death of John F. Kennedy to push the civil rights issue, he knew it would be finally determined by the Supreme Court, and saw it through despite a social climate and political hostility that are nearly unimaginable today.  Today, our Democratic president lacks such mastery, lacks such sympathy, squanders what little clout he possesses, and may not even have the will to make things happen regarding gay marriage.  He also faces an entirely different Supreme Court, one which has been stocked with reliable ideologues in the last 20 years of conservative rule.  But for now, there can be no doubt that the only way the matter of gay marriage can be settled is in the Supreme Court.  The reason that states with significant anti-gay movement have pursued their agendas through amendments to their state constitutions is because they know laws against gay marriage are de jure unconstitutional, insofar as they are universally in opposition to the Equal Protection Clause and create a specific group against which it is permissible to deny civil rights.  They also know that taking their case to the nation’s highest court poses a dangerous risk; even the likes of Scalia and Alito might not be quick to rule against anti-gay legislation, knowing it would make hash out of the Civil Rights Act and dozens of other anti-discriminatory rulings the court has made in the past.  And it is, thankfully, still pretty well unthinkable that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage would have a chance to pass.  The anti-gay movement has a legitimate reason to fear federal action on the issue, which is the reason for all the tinkering about with state constitutions — ironically, from the very same side of the political spectrum who are forever grousing about activist judges and Obama’s alleged violation of our sacred constitution.

But the death of a thousand cuts will not work here.  The homophobes and bigots need a decisive blow to behead their enemy, and each little wound they inflict only engenders more sympathy in their opponents (and, increasingly, in the younger demographic that doesn’t seem to give a shit about the issue).  One of the modern conservative movement’s founding fathers (and himself no friend of homosexualists) once described the ethos as that of a man “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’.”  This is entirely apt, and while entirely quixotic as an organizational goal, even a bit noble at times.  But today’s conservatives, especially those involved in the anti-gay marriage movement, have scaled it down to a pettier and uglier goal:  they are standing atop civilization, yelling ‘go back!’.  Alexander Hamilton wrote that the rights of man are not to be found in documents or in law, and “can never be erased or obscured by mortal power”; they are written with a sunbeam, he said, and shoot through every fiber of the human soul.  Conservatives have a chance now to stand aside and let that sunbeam through, see how its cleansing brightness illuminates and colors all corners of our society with hope and justice.  Instead, they are reaching for pots of black paint to forever obscure the very notion of equality.

So, I’m not black.

I’m able to say that I’m not white, either — ironically, through the very mechanism of white privilege.  If you’re white and you choose to reject whiteness, you are able to do so only because you’re white.  People of color can never deny their color; they carry the evidence on their faces.  So when I tell people that I’m not white, all I’m doing is calling attention to the utterly arbitrary nature of race, and try to squirm my way out of the unwanted privilege (and the oppression on which it rests) that I was born into.

And when I hear people tell me, when I speak of the endless and daily indignities we heap on black Americans, that I suffer from something called “white guilt”, I understand it is meant to be an insult, but I can never quite understand why.  America is not unique in being marbled to the bone with racism, but our racism is unique; our relationship with the descendants of our slaves is like nothing else in any country, because we alone developed a system of slavery that carried into the modern era and was predicated entirely upon racism against blacks.  For me to feel white guilt seems the only reasonable reaction not only to the historical crimes people like me have committed against blacks for hundreds of years, but also to being part of and benefiting from the toxic soup of prejudice, bigotry and injustice that we force black Americans to swim in every day.  When I think about the unimaginable subjection blacks have encountered in my country’s history and the fact its legacy is a near-universal assumption that we’ve done enough to make up for it and from this point forward they’re on their own; when I think about the soul-stirring beauty and grace of what they have brought to our national culture, and in what base, worthless coin we’ve paid them back — what could a reasonable person feel other than guilt and shame?

I am poor, and I am from a low family, and I have had to claw and scrape to get by as have many people whose skin defines them as “white”.  But since the day I was born, I was spared the million daily debasements and indignities that I might have suffered if I’d been born black.  No matter what I try to do to erase my own privilege, and to make people like me aware of theirs, no matter how deep my embrace of what blacks have brought to our culture, I will never be one of them; I will never fully understand what they must feel and how they must live in a world that judges them in a way that, whatever barriers are set in my path and whatever blame is directed my way, it will never judge me.

But sometimes I think about them.  Recently I have thought a lot about Trayvon Martin, and the way the public has reacted to his death.  I think about the way the leader of our country, whose skin knows some things mine never will, has reacted to his death, and I think about how a man who wants to lead the country, and who looks a lot more like I do, reacted to that reaction.  I think about the way that so many people are trying to treat this incident — the dreadfully inevitable result of a law that could not have been better designed to end with the death of young black men; this incident which could not possibly be more about race – as if it were not about race.  And I feel like I should say something, but who am I to say anything?  Other people in a much better position than I to appreciate how an innocent young man ended up dead on the ground have already said it better.  His tragedy is not my tragedy.  All I own of it is my part in sustaining a culture where blacks are under suspicion merely for being alive.

It’s still not enough, though.  I have heard endless times since the election of Barack Obama that we live in a “post-racial society”, that racism is no longer a serious problem, that the “real” racism is something called “reverse racism” and that it injures only whites, that by talking about racism I am only making it worse.  I have been told to look on the president’s race as clear evidence that racism is over, as if sexism ended when the first woman was elected to high office or poverty ended the first time unemployment dipped below 10%.  I am assured that open racism has flattened away to nothing under the weight of public disapprobation, that the victories over the blatant violence and oppression of the past are enough and the improvements that have been made mean we can now stop fighting against all the still-present prejudices and cruelties, that we have collectively transformed the world through some mysterious event horizon of multiculturalism into a world where the only true form of tyranny comes from the stalking spectre of “political correctness”.

I hear all these things and try to make sense of them, but I can’t.  Because wherever I go to read a story about Trayvon Martin — who no more deserved to die than the purest, most innocent little white blonde girl who was tormented to death by some brain-fogged maniac — I see this:

- “Anyone recall the carjacking, torture, rape and slayings of a beautiful couple Channon Christian, 21, and Christopher Newsom, 23 by 5 blacks?  MS media didn’t touch it.”

- “Jesse Jackson is a race baiting POS.  This had nothing to do with white people, so why is he bringing it up?  Because he is a shitsttarting racebaiting POS”

- “The media spin on this is amazing!  The race card is alive and well with the left.”

- “Nigger tried to front, got owned by a gun.”

- “Blacks ruin every community in the U.S.”

- “Common sense dictates that when black men stop being sperm donors and instead become responsible fathers we will see the end of stories like this one.”

- “O PLEASE – tell the truth.  The neighborhood had the same problems that exist in any ‘diversified neighborhood’ The neighborhood is a Gated Ghetto NOT WHITE.”

- “Trayvon Martin was a wannabe thug, a 6 ft tall bully in school who was suspended, and wasn’t the innocent teen the media made him out to be.  don’t be brainwashed by that Reverse Racist Propaganda that the news throws at you.”

- “Because Obama is a RACIST BIGOT for all to see now!!!!!”

- “If this kid was 17, where’s a recent photo?  These pictures are clearly many years old.  All violent offenders were ‘peaceful’ until they weren’t.  So far, this is all about those who thrive on promoting racism.”

- “Hispanics are valuable people they pick the berries and keep the coon population down.”

- “The Congressional Caucus is planning on showing solidarity by having its members get teardrop tattoos and L.A. Dodger jackets with a hoodie…….wont that be nice?”

- “So now this thugs family has the colored panthers on thier side.  Good choice, call the taliban and see if they will help you also!!!”

- “Timothy johson BLACK Hoodie killed a computer store owner in Lancaster CA .north of LA, Johson was caught today wearing his NIGGER hood.  shot all BLACKS,totally worthless.”

- “The media and Obama have really taken advantage of this ‘opportunity’ to set race relations back several decades.  What a sade time to be an american!”

- “The moral to the Trayvon Martin shooting:  ’If you make it a point to walk like a duck… talke like a duck… and to look like a duck…. don’t be surprised is someone concludes you are a duck… and decides to go duck hunting…’”

- “buy stock in KFC and colt 45, monkey boys parents will be spending lots of that money they will be getting there and the local meth dealers will make a haul also”

- “just keep wondering what was he doing in a gated community?”

- “Hopefully Zimmerman has started a trend that will continue.”

I read these things, and I think about how Trayvon Martin’s family can read them too.  How they watched their son go out to buy some candy for his little brother, and the next time they saw him was cold and dead and gone forever, in the morgue with his chest blown open for the crime of being black, shot because some cop-loving motherfucker saw him put his hood up in the rain and decided he was a criminal and a drug addict; and how now the name of their dead child is on the front page of every newspaper in America, and all they have to do is scroll down a few inches and read ten thousand anonymous racist cowards salivating out pure acid about how he deserved it and worse.  And I think, I should say something.  But what can I say that will make one goddamn bit of difference to them, to their grief and pain, to their dead son whose crime was his color?

The murder of Trayvon Martin:  it seems like the only thing we should be talking about.  But it seems like there is nothing we can say.

That one finds, in the infant days of the 21st century — indeed, if certain overzealous interpreters of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar are to be credited, the very end of human civilization! — a widespread resistance to well-established facts about human behavior continues to surprise.  The world probably isn’t coming to an end, but if it does, the final expression on more than a few faces will be a wince at the thought that, here in the most highly developed nation in human history, many people still live according to a mindset that hasn’t changed much since the 14th century.

The subjugation of women, for example — physical, social, and intellectual — has literally been with us since the beginning of civilization, if we define that word as the widespread introduction of those two brutal blows to the gender, sedentism and agriculture.  The reason for it is equally indisputable; since the first caste of bosses was formed, they found it necessary to restrict the freedom of those who served them.  The question “Why should I do what you tell me to do?” is the oldest and most problematic one for members of the ruling class.  The justifications for the oppression of women (or any other minority, even when it is, in fact, a majority) have varied through the ages, as has its implementation, but the cause of this dreary effect has always been the same:  women must serve (first by childbirth, then by drudgesome agricultural tasks, then by less taxing but just as cheerless domestic chores, and — in the final stages of the pre-feminist society — the more degrading forms of capitalist labor), so women must be kept down.

Reactionaries and conservatives — I will try to stick to these terms even though I am specifically discussing Republicans in America, because this ignominy knows neither party nor country — like to date the latter-day decline of the human race to the 1960s.  This period of social upheaval — brought about, apparently, by Saul Alinsky, the Grateful Dead, and the sudden widespread availability of hallucinogens — is what they believe gave birth to such nightmarish bugaboos as civil rights, sass-mouth, the appearance of uncloseted homosexuals, and worst of all, feminism.  On this, as with almost everything else, they are wrong, due to their well-documented allergy to history and economics.  It was not the social chaos of the ’60s that led to the expansion of freedom which they believe has turned our world into a noisy parade of disobedience; it was, instead, the development of widespread industrialization and technological development — and its concomitant decline in the need for traditional divisions of society and organizations of labor — that led to a recognition that the time was right for freedom to be expanded.  Feminism did not change society for the worse; society changed and made way for feminism.

This was already recognized by anyone who had the sense to look into it as early as it began to occur; at this late date, with feminism as an idea being centuries old and women’s rights as a going concern dating back well over fifty years, acting as if it is an ugly new idea that can be extinguished, let alone resisted, has to be thought of as willful ignorance.  The notion that women, like men, should be allowed some degree of agency over their bodies, their time, and the direction of their lives is so established in almost every country on Earth that it is bewildering to hear it coming from Americans in the year 2012 — and doubly so when it comes from a body of conservatives who have of late passionately, if unconvincingly, attempted to define their primary motivation as the protection of freedom.

This style of conservative politics, the still-unnamed development of a sweaty, messy, decades-long coupling of right-libertarian economic absolutists and time-displaced religious activists, has managed through a combination of luck and money to dominate the public conversation since in early 1980s and show no signs of flagging.  They wrestle the body politic into submission in the most curious of ways, and are as oblivious in their losses as they are eliminationist in their victories.  Right now, for example, they have managed to turn an attempt to unseat an unpopular president during a massive economic downturn into one of the most comical electoral clusterfucks in recent memory; the leading candidate, a bland plutocrat of the sort that have won elections for the Republican Party for a century, is felt by these mutants to be so ideologically impure that they seem willing to scuttle the entire election by backing a pair of comically inept throwbacks rather than settle for the one guy who might actually win the election.

And so it is that today — at a time when it might be the understatement of the millenium to say that we have more important things to worry about — we find the conservatives deciding that the defining issue of the 2012 election should be birth control.  The idea that a man should not have to have a baby every time he fornicates is as settled as the island of Manhattan, and even women have largely been allowed to escape the notion that sex=child for the last 40 years or so.  But conservatives just hate it.  The notion that sex is strictly for childbearing within heterosexual marriage — and that everyone should both desire and be bound to that mind-bogglingly restrictive conception of human sexuality — is one of their favorites despite its utter removal from the way most human beings experience reality, right up there with the idea that you can keep teenagers from having sex by simply telling them not to, the idea that everyone in a capitalist system will behave both ethically and rationally provided that no one attempts to ensure that they do so, and the idea that the effect humans have on the environment doesn’t matter as long as you don’t believe it’s happening.

The problem for conservatives is that nobody likes this particular idea.  Women, even ones who openly vilify the concept, love birth control because it means they can engage in the universally-enjoyed practice of sexual intercourse without the not so widely embraced consequence of having a baby.  Men, of course, love birth control for exactly the same reason.  Even in the most established strongholds of Catholicism (with the possible exception of Africa, which white people seem determined to reduce to a continent-sized charnel ground if it’s the last thing they do), birth control and other forms of sexual liberation have gotten themselves a toehold they’re not likely to relinquish.  If gay marriage is allowed in Mexico City (and it is), and contraception is widely available in Ireland (and it is), what chance have these people of rolling back the clock in America?

And so it is that Rush Limbaugh, who, despite his self-definition as a rarefied form of entertainer/performance artist is and has always been the spokesperson for this curious band of moralistic libertarians, came to call a perfectly decent law school student a slut in front of the entire nation.  The Pied Piper of Petulance has taken some heat for his comments, even from a handful of the softer sort of conservative, and a surprisingly widespread pressure campaign against his advertisers has led some to suggest that he may have finally crossed a Rubicon of asininity from which it will be impossible to return.  This ignores the fact that not only has Rush proven absolutely unkillable in the past — serial fabrication, extramarital whoring, and bullying his domestic staff into enabling his pill addiction have done nothing to tarnish him — and that the vast majority of his fans and followers agree with him, with many even going as far to criticize him for offering even the flaccid apology he mustered when things got a little too heavy.

The curious thing about this approach isn’t its weird persistence into an era when it has become ludicrous.  As noted, the existence of certain types of elitist societies — even ones whose time has long past — is not merely eased by, but is absolutely dependent upon, the subjugation of women.   And, as they say in in the Navy, there’s always some son of a bitch who doesn’t get the word.  So “bitch, down!” remains the clarion call for everyone who thinks that the decline of western civilization began with the First Amendment and culminated with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe.  What’s so funny about it — what’s so fucking funny — is that these people wrap up their slut-shaming and gut-punching in the fancy hatbox of happiness and the festive ribbon of freedom.  If women pretend that they think birth control is an important part of their overall health and well-being, well, it’s certainly not because contraception is real medicine, like hair loss creams and boner pills, and it’s definitely not because they should be able to decide whether or not they have a baby every time they have sex (a freedom only available to men).  It’s because, after all, they are dirty, dirty whores, and requiring an insurance plan to offer contraception as part of its coverage is not only, somehow, an affront to religious freedom (as if religious organizations, just like everyone else, do not routinely have to follow all sorts of legislation that may not coincide with their morals), but also a green light by our liberal overlords for women to slut it up all over town.

If there were any doubt about the sincerity of this hambone attempt to further the cause of gender oppression under the guise of freedom and contentment, it can easily be dispelled by reading this not atypical eructation from the flirtini-stained teeth and tongue of Pamela Geller.  It makes all the usual assertions — as always, unaccompanied by any questioning of women other than the one who made them — that women were all happier before those nasty ol’ feminist bull-daggers came along and ruined the game for everybody.  (It’s especially bizarre coming from women, of course.  Crazy Pammy condemns Fluke as a “full-fledged activist” — I know she is, but what are you? — and speaks fondly of a time when she surely would have been publicly shamed for being a loudmouthed, half-educated, drunken termagant, regardless of how much her line of noisy horseshit flattered the bosses.)  The killer yap comes in the very beginning of the piece, before Pam starts fawningly quoting herself.  After accusing Sandra Fluke of being a “pig” who lowers herself to “meat status” and teaches children to “debase themselves”, she reveals her own counter-construct of the role of women:

I explain it to young girls this way. Go into any Wal-Mart or Target. There are hundreds of black handbags for sale in bins, hung on display walls, all cheap or moderately priced, and they can’t give them away.

Now  go into Hermes. There is one black, gorgeous, impossible to get, crocodile Birkin bag. There are waiting lists for this bag. No one can get that bag. It costs a fortune and still everyone wants that bag.

Be that bag.

There you have it, ladies:  rather than be a “pig” who revels in your status as “meat” by suggesting that you be allowed to speak in favor of controlling your own reproductive choices, better than you imagine yourselves as a Hermès bag:  ludicrously overpriced, existing solely as a means of conspicuously flaunting your wealth and power, and most of all, beautifully, perfectly, eternally inanimate.  A pig, for all its filth and foulness, is at least a living thing that might behave in unexpected or even — gasp! — self-interested ways; it is thus unthinkable for students of the Bitchdowne School to respect a woman who fits such a definition.  Instead, ladies, see yourself as something motionless, brainless, pretty and pricey, with no more volition than a stone.  Be that bag.

Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money.

All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing we have built our entire culture and values system around.  Some of these are merely amusing, such as the curious dramatic trope of writing amounts of money on a piece of paper rather than saying them out loud, just like no one has ever actually done.  Others are ham-handed attempts at workplace dominance disguised as behavioral niceties, such as the bogus stricture that one must never reveal one’s salary to one’s co-workers; money (and class, money’s social signifier) is often invoked as something not to be discussed in polite company along with religion and politics, no doubt accounting for the is-it-raining-where-you-are banality of conversation with strangers.  Lying about money is practically the national pastime of the United States; poor people lie about it to avoid shame and disgrace, rich people lie about it to deflect envy and outrage, and the hilariously named financial services industry lies about it to make more of it.

Part of the problem, of course, lies in definitions.  What we talk about when we talk about money depends on who we’re talking to, and who might be listening.  The late Neil Postman once astutely observed that we are used to thinking of “big words” as being complicated and daunting, when in fact the opposite is true:  polysyllabic mouthfuls like ‘participle’ or ‘centrifugal’ have very specific fixed meanings upon which everyone agrees, while defining seemingly simple words like ‘true’ or ‘good’ leads us into an inescapable rat’s nest of contentious debate.  So, too, is the case whenever we discuss dollars and cents:  the meaning of simple terms becomes frustratingly thorny, often by design.

Take, for example, the notion of ‘debt’.  We have been trained to think of the national debt as resembling a household debt; indeed, there is a popular internet meme, endlessly re-posted by partisans of both the left and the right, that makes this comparison explicit.  But wiser heads have reminded us that in fact, the national debt is nothing at all like a family budget, and to conceive it as such is to make a profound error in understanding our national financial priorities.  The national debt is more an obligation of which we must be mindful than an actual number with the kind of meaning we affix to overdrafts on our checking accounts.  ’Earn’ is another word that’s hard to pin down; conservatives often claim that people receiving social services did not ‘earn’ that money, even if they’ve fallen on hard times after decades of paying money into the system.  But those same conservatives also support things like the extension of intellectual property laws, and the repeal of inheritance taxes; it’s hard to conceive of a person who did less to ‘earn’ their riches than one who was just born into a wealthy family.

Budgets, too, are something we are encouraged to think of in very different ways depending on who is asking us to think about them and to what end.  The financial conservatives, when they are in the mood for belt-tightening, always sell austerity measures in terms of budget expenditures that we as a nation can simply no longer afford.  This rarely applies to military and security spending, however; the vast quantities of cash we shovel into national defense is almost always justified with the claim that they are used to protect our freedoms.  Another prickly word, though, that ‘freedom’:  some folks would argue that there’s little use in protecting one’s freedom when one has no money and the only freedom offered is the freedom to starve.  Even that strain of ultra-conservative fiscal hawk that will allow for cuts to the military budget will not touch such secretive — and staggeringly expensive — allowances as the national security budget and the Pentagon’s so-called ‘black budget’, the literally uncountable billions that go to projects, almost all developed by private industry, the results of which we will never know and the details of which we are not allowed to ask.  Few households could function if one of their members were allowed to set aside gigantic piles of money for secret projects about which no one was ever allowed to inquire.  And, too, any poor family will tell you that the greatest expenditures go towards events that cannot be predicted, and, therefore, cannot be budgeted:  health crises, car repairs, natural disasters, and the like.  Our government, conversely, has begun to to place in the realm of the unbudgeted voluntary boondoggles like the Iraq War, which is best visualized as a huge bonfire into which we continually threw money every single minute for eight years.

Speaking of visualizations, the amounts of money we spend on this or that item are often presented in terms of a stack of bills that reaches to (insert distant object here), as if people were having trouble with the physical size of the money rather than its value.  ”Rich” is another one of those short words that is almost impossible to define, except insofar as almost everyone, rich or poor, defines it as “someone who has more money than I do”; and so the question of how much money constitutes a lot of money becomes a lot more difficult than it needs to be.  Two such disparate characters as Sam Spade and Casper Gutman were once able to agree that a million dollars is a lot of dough, but nowadays, all we hear is how a million dollars isn’t what it used to be.  Loretta Lynn once sang about how her father raised eight kids on miner’s pay (which, for our younger readers, is approximately jack shit thousand dollars per year, adjusted for inflation), and managed to sound pretty cheerful about it; today, there are entire websites dedicated to the morose bitching of people trying to raise one kid on banker’s pay.  So, whenever people talk about money — especially the kind of money that the owners of our country tend to have — I find this to be a useful illustration.

Ever since that glorious day in August of 1927 when the nation’s millionaires officially ceded control of America over to the nation’s billionaires, the G.O.P. has been the party of the very, very rich.  The party as currently constituted may not agree on much, but they do agree on this:  millionaires pay far too much in taxes, and billionaires pay far, far, far too much in taxes.  Official Republican godhead Ronald Reagan literally defined the party as the one that “wants to see an America in which people can still get rich“; more recent developments have subtly altered this to “still get richer”, and later to “still stay richer”.  If the G.O.P. of Grover Norquist, of the Tea Party and the Anti-Tax Pledge, can be said to stand for anything, it is that billionaires should be all but exempt from taxation, and that they should be free to do anything they like with their money short of being asked to help people who haven’t got any.

To appreciate what this really means, it seems necessary to get a grip on exactly how much a billion dollars (or, if you prefer, a thousand ‘doesn’t-go-as-far-as-it-used-to’ million dollars) really is.  Let us say that you are the freshly scrubbed recipient of one billion dollars, which you have gotten through a clever combination of sound investments and emerging from a vagina into which a rich man once shot a load of sperm.  You have already paid your 14% tax rate on the money, just like your chauffer and your maid except a lot less, and you have decided:  ”You know what?  Fuck my stupid kids.  Fuck saving for the future.  Fuck investments and wise financial discipline.  I’m going to take all this money, convert it into cash, and start spending it like the Rapture is coming.  I’m not even going to put a single goddamn dime of it into a shitty low-yield savings account at some swindling mega-bank.  I’m just gonna start pissing it away, to the tune of $25,000 every single day, until the money runs out.”  That’ll show whoever!

So starting on January 1st of the new year, you pay some college intern to take your money and put it into stacks of 250 $100 bills.  They’re too big to put in your pocket so you take the first stack and you pay Shoshanna Lonstein to design you a special money hat.  And you set out on your mission to piss away the rest of the billion dollars, 25 grand at a time.  At first, it’s easy.  You pay off your student loans.  You buy a couple of giant houses, a couple of giant cars, a couple of giant bags of cocaine.  You take a trip to Europe.  You hire a homeless guy to break a bottle against his face.  But then you start to notice:  you’ve already bought yourself every possible material comfort you have ever imagined, and it’s not even April.  That’s when you decide to sit down and do the math: starting with a billion dollars, and spending $25,000 every single day — an amount of money that over 70 million American adults do not make in an entire year — it will take you over 109 years to spend it all.  If you are old enough to read these words, it is basically impossible that, following this course of action, you would live long enough to do anything but leave your children multiple millions of dollars.

Now, of course, not every big Republican donor has a billion dollars.  Many have far more than that.  Swift Boat funder T. Boone Pickens is worth triple that amount; Amway guru Rich DeVos is worth over $4 billion; Christian arch-conservative Philip Anschutz   has about $6.4 billion to his name; and FOX News prince of darkness Rupert Murdoch clocks in at well over $7 billion.  The shadowy Koch Brothers spend huge chunks of cash funding conservative causes and disseminating right-wing propaganda; lucky for them they have $50 billion in cash-chunks.  (Which means that they could spend $1,250,000 a day for over a century without running out.)  And at the very top, the Walton family of exurban retail banditry is worth a combined total of $90 billion, meaning that they could spend our arbitrary $25,000 a day retroactively going back to the beginning of human civilization and still have tens of millions left over.

These people all do two things with their time:  make more money, and lobby to ensure that they have to pay as little money as possible into the system that allowed them to make all the money they already have.  They have so much that I have to invent perverse illustrations like the one above just to render the amount of cash they have to hand fathomable to the human mind, and yet their primary occupations are increasing that amount and ensuring that virtually none of it goes to helping people who have less by orders of magnitude.  It’s just something to think about the next time someone mentions austerity measures, or assures you that the country simply hasn’t got the money to spend on a social safety net any more.

The state of the nation as Baby 2012 makes its squalling entrance is extremely hard to gauge.  The answer to the question of where we are politically, as is often the case, depends entirely on where you are standing, and what sort of filter you are looking through at the world around you.  From one position, the country is more divided than it has ever been, the previous year having been marked by street protests met with police brutality from one coast to the other, for what seems like the first time in ages.  From another, though, it begins as a quiet year, full of triangulations and calculations, and the most important form of political theater takes place not in the parks but in the studios, and the sounds are not screams but polite sniggers at the unpalatable items on the menu being presented by the Loyal Opposition.

It has been over 20 years now since the Democratic Party made its transformation from the oppositional liberal group it was before the Reagan Revolution to the moderate corporatist technocratic organization it is today.  Unfortunately, the changes in the character of the party have not been accompanied by similar changes in the electoral process, and we remain a staunchly two-party system, in which any meaningful opposition to the official Democratic candidate — voting for an unofficial candidate, voting for a third party, or not voting at all — seems destined to count as a win for the Republicans.  And since no one wants that, we find ourselves at an ugly impasse.

To say that Barack Obama has been a disappointment is…well, it’s both an understatement and an overstatement.  He was faced with a nearly impossible situation from the beginning; he came into office at the very beginning of a nearly unprecedented economic collapse which, though largely the fault of his Republican predecessors, came to be laid entirely at his feet.  He encountered an opposition terrifying in its vociferousness, the birth of a somewhat bogus but nonetheless influential populist movement that utterly despised him, and the chronic and lethal pre-existing condition of two unfunded wars.  But, given all that rope, he fashioned not a ladder with which to escape, but a noose with which to hang himself.

He expended a vast amount of political capital in passing a national health care initiative, but he spent more on getting it passed than making sure it was effective; years later, very few of its benefits have come to pass, and a huge number of Americans remain uninsured at a time when affordable health care is more necessary than ever.  The G.O.P. is still trying to kill “Obamacare” any way that they can, and it’s unclear if the Democrats have the power, or even the desire, to stop it from happening.  His support for unions and worker’s rights has been limited to a handful of roaring but toothless speeches, and he couldn’t get his own party to make the sound of a damp firecracker in support of his jobs bill despite crippling unemployment and underemployment.  Regardless of how much of a choice he had in the pathetic and costly bailouts, he hasn’t exactly gone out of his way to keep the banks in line by reminding them of who saved their asses; he’s jumped feet first onto the misguided debt reduction bandwagon; and even his defense of programs like Social Security and Medicare can best be described as passive-aggressive.

Likewise, his defense of freedom of speech — particularly at a time when it was being tested every day on the streets against out-of-control law enforcement — was pretty flimsy, and like his colleagues across the aisle, he seemed to make more statements supporting democracy in the Middle East than he did supporting it here at home.  He eventually got us out of Iraq, but we remain bogged down in Afghanistan, and rumblings that he will soon move against Iran are depressingly plausible; it remains to be seen if it’s a truism that every president must now maintain a belligerent foreign policy, but if it’s not, Obama has done precious little to contest the idea.  And his continuing to play fast and loose with an international or domestic civil right more weighty than being gay in the military has recently moved from mistake to disgrace.  Even given his extremely limiting circumstances and being sidled with the worst Congress since the Civil War, he has not been a very good president.

But a funny thing happens when you make this argument to a lot of Democrats:  you are presented with a variant on the old “he may be a loser, but he’s our loser” routine.  A vote against the President, or no vote at all, you are reminded as if you didn’t know, is a vote for the opposition.  We live, like it or lump it (with “lump it” being the only option on display), in a two-party system, you are reminded as if you cannot count.  The 2000 elections will likely be mentioned, and the specter of Ralph Nader will be invoked, as if it were his fault that Bush ended up president and not that of a shameful betrayal by the Supreme Court.  A litany of horrors to be inflicted on the populace by a theoretical Republican president will be recited, as if that’s what you wanted, as if that’s what you were arguing for by the mere fact of lamenting how Republican the Democrats have become.  You will be reminded of George W. Bush, as if you voted for him.  You will be accused of cutting off your nose to spite your face.  You will be accused of acting like a spoiled whiny baby who cries whenever he doesn’t get everything he wants, as if decaying civil rights, unjustified foreign adventurism, and the wholesale abandonment of the social support network and the liberal consensus are minor policy issues not worth complaining about.  The whole lecture is sure to have a condescending tone, regardless of its particulars, as if you were too stupid to figure out that we are faced with once again pressing the lesser-of-two-evils button.  Of course, nobody will claim to be happy that the President has no progressive credentials, but the risk of seeking another solution is simply too great.

It is this aversion to risk, however, that has landed us in much of our current predicament.  As with everything else, we have learned a poor lesson from our bosses in the boardrooms:  publicize the risk, privatize the gain.  Nothing great is accomplished without risk, but risk has become too much to bear politically:  even a theoretical loss is unthinkable, and it’s better to maintain your party’s position than risk losing it to the opposition by trying anything bold.  There is a name for this:  it’s called being an office-holder.  A timeserver.  A seat-warmer.  A do-nothing.  Every great president we have ever had risked a tremendous amount, and made unpopular decisions.  Sometimes it cost them their position, or even their life, but they moved according to the principles of their souls, not the currents made by triangulating the rudders of public opinion.  Abraham Lincoln plunged the country into a horrific war, but he didn’t just punt the ball forward like Buchanan; and who today do we remember as great, and who do we remember as a failure?  FDR vowed to roll up his sleeves instead of twiddle his thumbs, and today we remember him as a man who won a war and tamed a depression, and we remember Hoover as a man who sat on his hands and let things get worse.  Jimmy Carter made commitments to civil rights, diplomacy, transparent government, conservation, and smart spending. They were risky, unpopular, and cost him his job.  But at least he stood in clear opposition to Reaganism, whose subsequent victories have run the country into the ground.  What would America look like now if Carter had been a tired, calculating centrist who failed to make a clear distinction between himself and his goals and those of his opposition?  Perhaps Michael Dukakis can answer that question.  Our vote has to carry some risk to mean something; if it’s just a hedge against a worse result, it’s a low-yield bet that will never pay off.

If you want to see the future planned for us by centrist technocrats like Obama, you needn’t imagine it; you just have to turn your clocks forward six hours and seem what’s happening in Europe, where bankers and financial experts call the shots.  Greece and Italy, with their vanishing safety nets, disappearing pensions, increasingly irrelevant unions, and drooping wages, are beginning to make southern Europe look a lot like the southern United States.  And with the exception of those like the Icelanders who took a huge risk in deciding they wanted to be the ones to dictate their country’s future instead of handing it over to financiers and credit agencies, the rest of Europe may be following the same path.  And the argument is always the same:  we must do as they do and lower our standards, or some shark of a nation will eat up our jobs.  Never is it suggested that we encourage those nations to adopt our standards; the race to the bottom is the favored sport.  And as economics goes, so goes politics:  instead of demanding more accountability and higher standards from our politicians across the board, we are told — by our fellow liberals! — that we’re better off putting up with increasing incompetence, corruption, and betrayal of our standards from our own party than we are risking the government falling even temporarily into the hands of a worse opposition.

Despite the rhetoric of the economic right, the markets are not a divine force that work independently of human agency;  they are creations of man that function based on the decisions of man.  And so too with our political system.  We made it, and the people who operate within it do so because we put them there.  The system is broken, and it did not break because that is its nature; it broke because it was made to break, and it will be repaired only if we move to repair it.  If the bus we are all traveling in catches a flat, we have a choice; we can listen to the condescending lectures of those who point out how hard it is to change a tire, and how much worse off we would all be if we had to walk everywhere, and how we might be going slow, but we can’t risk the other bus getting there first.  Or we can get out and fix the fucking thing.

It is in Ezekiel, near the beginning of God’s crazy-old-man period, when he admits that he deliberately gave his followers stupid ideas and made them follow intentionally bogus rules just to make them miserable and remind them who was really in charge.  For all their talk of abortion, homosexuality, and other ancient bugaboos, one wonders, given the current state of the Republican Party, if it is here that they draw their primary motivation.

In a way, it is no surprise that the G.O.P. has forsaken the idea of, well, ideas.  Republicans of old at least had stern Austrian Vons like Mises and Hayek to prop up as thinkers; but the days of genuine conservative intellectuals may have died long before that, burned to death in the flames of European revolutions.  Even second-rate intellects like George Will and Bill Buckley are considered effete and ungraspable by the modern conservative, and their greatest accomplishments were having read and understood the thinkers who preceded them rather than any authentic contributions to original thought.  Ayn Rand, a third-rate novelist and a fourth-rate philosopher, is what passes for an intellectual titan amongst current movement conservatives.  Proud Republicans unashamedly champion the likes of one-note dimwit Herman Cain, straight-shooting ignoramus Rick Perry, and small-town Jesus-jumper Michele Bachmann as serious candidates for leadership of the free world.

Indeed, anti-intellectualism, in its curious latter-day Nixonian-populist manifestation, is virtually the creed of the modern Republican party.  Even its intellectuals write books about how disgraceful it is to be an intellectual.  It elevates, with a straight face, the clownish Jonah Goldberg and the disgraceful Charles Krauthammer to the position of ‘leading thinker’, and allows its position papers to come from the likes of Rich Lowrie.  It is a world in which Newt Gingrich, whose mind flits from one half-formed notion to the next like a bee trying to pollinate a garden of toothpicks, is deemed an “idea man“.  So utterly lacking in original or even cogent thought is the modern G.O.P., so caught in the thrall of what Lionel Trilling called “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”, that its party politics are governed by a man whose sole guiding notion in the incredibly complex world of political thought is that no one should ever have to pay taxes.  Even the previous generation of Republicans — people who championed brainless partisan compère Ronald Reagan as a revolutionary political seer — are beginning to wonder what exactly happened to their party to make it such a shambolic joke.

But, as is all too often the case when trying to triangulate the race-to-the-bottom trajectory of the modern G.O.P., the joke is increasingly on us.  Liberals are a famously contentious bunch, largely because intellectualism appeals to us, and intellectualism is all about the hotly contested war of one idea against another.  In that war, nuance is important, words are everything, and compromise is bitterly earned.  We fear the dire ramifications of letting a bad idea take root, and we loathe the idea of electing someone who won’t deliver on their promises to labor, to gay rights, to the environment, to peace.  Our honest political differences often prevent us from forming a united — and victorious — front, and I’m not even convinced that’s a bad thing.  But modern conservatives take full advantage, and have formed a coalition of the greedy and the stupid.  The religious nuts, jingos, bigots and cut-rate market ideologues will rest assured that even if they never get what they want, at least they’ll be not getting it from a Republican.  (This species of “Who cares what flavor it is, as long as the label says ‘chocolate’?” derangement is no longer isolated on the right, unfortunately.)  And at the other end of the spectrum, the millionaires and the merchant class will always vote blue because, regardless of what the moron-in-chief has to say about this issue or that, the party will never fail to deliver what they really want:  tax relief and deregulation.

And it’s by no means a leap of logic to assume that the party hacks and strategists at the RNC are aware of this, and play into it.  You’ll note, as did the George H.W. Bush aide who pointed out that millions of people will remember the lie and thousands will remember the retraction, that liberals spend far more time refuting the nonsensical statements of an Ann Coulter or a Megan McArdle than those ladies spend making them, but in the end, it’s the nonsense that gets retold and reiterated, not the refutation.  We actually bother to read the source materials that the Victor Davis Hansons of the world distort and propagandize, because we don’t want to be wrong.  The right-wingers don’t care if they’re wrong; they just want to win.  They don’t stick around to defend their arguments for a reason.  While we’re still assembling a list of 50 reasons their scaremongering about the “World Trade Center Mosque” is ridiculous, they’ve already moved on to the next piece of political chicanery, plowing the electorate under with fresh new layers of bullshit, like God burdening the Israelites with “statutes that were not good, and judgments by which they should not live”.

It’s a fiendish tactic, and one without an easy solution.  In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, eminent skeptic Michael Shermer discusses the mountains of misinformation propagated by Holocaust deniers and revisionists of every stripe, to which he has devoted a significant chunk of his career as a skeptic to combating.  When he was scheduled to appear on an episode of the Phil Donahue show dedicated to the subject of Holocaust revisionism, a number of respected Jewish public figures appealed to him not to do so.  No matter how false their contentions were, these people argued, appearing in a widely viewed public venue, even to contest those contentions, would just result in them getting more attention than they deserved.  Shermer saw the logic in the argument, but what, he asked, was the alternative?  To ignore them completely?  This meant that they’d still keep telling their virulent untruths, but now they’d be doing so uncontested.  He had a point, but so did his enemies.  It’s a very hard decision, whether or not to give further publicity to an obvious piece of nonsense; it’s even harder when you begin to suspect that its ludicrous quality is why it was presented in the first place.

One thing is certain, though:  the body politic may have been reduced to a joke, but the G.O.P. is laughing all the way to the bank.  There may be no clear solution to the flooding of political discourse with toxic levels of trivial crap, but if something isn’t done, we’re one step closer to deciding our elections via haircut.  We’re already far gone enough that news of a “gentleman’s agreement” with the Justice Department allows financial criminals to police themselves and avoid prosecution and the discovery that the Federal Reserve made secret loans to big banks before the TARP bailouts that netted them billions of dollars can come on the same day, and yet all the candidates can talk about is making unemployed people take drug tests and deporting the entire population of Ohio, leaving the party’s intellectual wing to call those who wish to see the people largely responsible for our country’s transcendentally fucked-up economy brought to heel a bunch of “rambling stoners, malcontents and Grateful Dead camp followers“.  Look, folks, everybody likes to go to the circus.  But eventually, you have to come home.  And if, when you get there, your house is on fire, bringing the clowns back with you to put out the blaze is just going to make things worse.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement drags on, and law enforcement agencies make the foolish but predictable decision to respond to its persistence with violence, a fundamental contradiction begins to make itself known in our political lives.

It has always been a basic assumption of even the most partisan political disagreements that one’s opponent comes by their opposition honestly.  No matter how much disagreement there may be between leftists, who believe the government has a responsibility to help citizens in need, and rightists, who believe the government’s role is minimal and largely consists of staying out of the way, civil life demands that we believe each side truly believes in a genuine philosophical position, and we accept on good faith the arguments that are made in favor of that position.

The question of whether or not it helps the economy in hard times to increase taxes on the wealthy, for example, or the general efficacy of deregulation:  no matter how settled I think these questions may be, no matter how far back I can cite the historical record, I must allow myself to believe that those who disagree do so out of an honest interpretation of an opposing, but legitimate, alternative view of economics.  Opposing opinions on the value of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, too — indeed, the whole idea of an aggressive and belligerent foreign policy as opposed to cooperative or isolationist ones — must be taken at face value if the all-important common ground, the cornerstone of political progress, is to be found.  Even obviously self-serving attempts to line up the facts in a partisan way is acceptable, provided we can all agree on what the facts are.  The belief in good faith is as essential to democracy as voting, and while we may forgive our political opponents for ignorance, we must not suspect them of deception.

What has emerged in the last 20 years or so, in conjunction with (if not because of) the rise of new media and the deepening of political division, is something different — not new, but ugly and old.  It is an argumentation based on deliberate falsehood and distortion, which is not politics, but propaganda.  And propaganda is not a tool of civil society; it is an instrument of war.

More and more, the rhetoric and argument that has crept in from the fringes of the right wing to its political mainstream is based on intentional lies and group slander, of the sort found in the language of eliminationism.  The goal of this type of language is not to win a political debate, or to shape policy; it is to dehumanize the very possession of an alternative viewpoint, to wage war against entire groups of people, to not just defeat an opponent’s argument but to drive it from the face of the Earth.  There is precious little difference between the characterization of the entire political left as an agglomeration of thugs, crypto-Soviets, race-baiters, terrorist sympathizers and hippie freeloaders and the Soviet view of capitalists, backsliders and kulaks, or the Nazi cartoons of Jews as parasites and wreckers.  None of these arguments are about politics, and their presumptions are not based on practical analysis of policies and results, but on apocalyptic pronouncements of ruination and evil.  They are, at heart, moral and existential judgements, not political arguments, and this makes them extremely dangerous.

And perhaps the most dangerous thing about them is their increasing frequency in mainstream political discourse.  With unemployment at near-record highs and unprecedented lengths, the get-a-job hoots — nonsensical but a real crowdpleaser with the right-wing crazies — continue to ring out despite their obvious absurdity.  Anyone who pays even the slightest bit of attention to the news knows that jobs are scarce and joblessness is at record highs.  (Particularly egregious is the vituperation directed at people collecting unemployment insurance, who are not only being repaid money already put into the system, but who are, by definition, blameless; in almost all circumstances, you cannot collect UI if you quit or were fired for cause.)  And yet it begins to be heard, not just from the amateur busybodies in comment sections and blogs, but from mainstream, legitimate candidates like Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain.  Almost every leading Republican has repeated the malicious lie that the majority of poor and working-class people do not pay taxes; this is beyond a partisan interpretation and into the realm of a deliberate and harmful untruth designed to paint huge segments of struggling Americans as leeches and scum.  It’s a falsehood that has no place in legitimate political discourse, but it has come out of the mouth of GOP heir apparent Mitt Romney on several occasions, though he surely knows it is a lie.

The most curious thing is the reversal taking place, and how easily it is accepted:  liberals and Democrats are the ones who are called radical socialists, wreckers of the social fabric, usurpers of the Constitution, and Occupy Wall Street Protesters termed dangerous lunatics seeking the destruction of our sacred institutions.  And yet, outside of a few fringe types, the Democratic party could not be more mainstream and moderate, and the OWS crowd’s demands — for jobs, for government aid to stimulate the economy during a lengthy and profound slump, for more responsibility and accountability from fearsomely powerful institutions — are hardly those of the Supreme Soviet.  It is from mainstream Republicans that the truly radical proposals stem, and they could not be more open about it:  Newt Gingrich calls for our only national retirement program to be dismantled.  Rick Perry demands the wholesale elimination of government departments charged with vital roles — at least, the ones he can remember.  Grover Norquist has politicians sign pledges to take part in the murder of the entire concept of public governance.  Every major candidate speaks of a return to the time of robber barons and Edwardian poverty — and it is those who oppose such mad notions who are called out of touch with the mainstream.

The inevitable upshot of talking about your political opponents as if they are immoral, inhuman, and unwanted is that you begin treating them the same way.  I have spoken elsewhere about the need, and even the desirability, of forcing law enforcement into a confrontational position, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy watching the ugly, ’60s-style brutality unleashed on OWS participants in the last few weeks.  It’s bad enough to see protestors gassed, beaten and shot at, but it’s absolutely galling to hear the victims referred to as the threats.   At the now-infamous UC-Davis incident, the chief of the campus police made the claim that her officers felt “threatened” by the peaceful student protestors, who gave them “no way out”; even a cursory glance at photographs and video footage of the incident shows what an utter fantasy this is.  And, lest this be thought of as an aberration, it’s become increasingly clear that this is the officially sanctioned response:  media blackouts have been an integral part of the anti-OWS crackdown, as if the press keeping tabs on the tactics used by police to break up harmless protests is itself a crime to be prevented, and the Department of Homeland Security — itself a grotesque partisan power grab in response to an exaggerated existential threat — has coordinated local responses, making it perfectly clear what side the federal government is on.  Governments calling upon law enforcement to shut down peaceful expressions of popular sentiment is never a good thing, but the fact that thousands of OWS activists have gone to jail while not a single one of the multimillionaires responsible for the current economic crisis has even been charged with a crime ought to be a national disgrace.  (It’s particularly ironic timing, since both the federal government and many conservatives, have loudly deplored the use of similar tactics against pro-democracy protestors in Egypt.  Freedom abroad and repression at home is not a policy to be proud of.)

The difference between politics and propaganda is that one is based on a disagreement, and the other is based on a lie.  One is an instrument of policy, and the other is a weapon of war.  And while the outcome of politics can be unpredictable, the outcome of propaganda never is:  it can, and will, only ever end with a dead body, who will immediately be declared an enemy of the state.  The kind of eliminationist rhetoric being employed by even the highest levels of the right — against people whose only crime is to be victims of a painful economic downturn — is the kind that inevitably leads to the kind of violence we are beginning, and hopefully not only beginning, to see.  Our sympathies do not belong with the police, or with the government, or with the bankers and financiers; they belong with their victims.  And yet we hear Ann Coulter speaking in a positive way about the Kent State killings, suggesting that a few state-sponsored murders would put an end to the protests that so irritate her.  She will surely make this out to be a joke, but Kent State was and is a shameful moment in our history, and it is difficult to fathom the kind of mind who finds anything funny about theoretical democide against the poor.

If this is the message the right wants us to hear — that they hold the power, that they consider the police and the wealthy they protect our proper rulers by simple possession of power, and that they feel that any dissent, however peaceful, against the exercise of the rule by divine right of wealth is an act of treason to be punished by a swift and powerful blow — then they are telling us the kind of world they believe we are living in, and I hope we have the courage and the strength to respond in kind.  But if they truly believe in democracy as anything other than a convenient farce they must play to get their hands on the levers of power, then it’s about time they back off the propaganda and start speaking as if their opponents were living human beings.