Understanding a Tea Partier (Really…)

murraypowers — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:11:46 +0000

For anyone really interested in understanding, or at least really trying to understand, some of the Tea Party folks, the video interview below is a really good one. It was done by the website theyoungturks.com, and the guys who made it have a good laugh at what this woman had to say. Rather than unpacking her comments and trying to understand where she was coming from, instead they only come off like self-righteous, yuck yuck jerks. But if you really listen to her, she’s not a nut or a crazy. She doesn’t always make sense as you’ll see if you take a few moments to check it out. But if you do, bear in mind that it’s a lot harder to do a spontaneous, on camera interview for folks like her who are not experienced than you may think. Words don’t always come out right and trains of thought can get jumbled. But let’s look at what she actually said.

To the question “When did America lose her honor,” she replied “a very long time ago…but I was sleeping…and not paying attention.” Depending upon what your definition of “honor” is, and whether or not it’s “lost,” she nails the larger point exactly. All of our current problems- 100% of them- have been many years, decades, in the making (Bill Clinton sowed the seeds of our Wall Street Meltdown, for example). She says that she didn’t notice because her life “keep rolling along,” and this is true of almost all of us. As citizens the vast, vast majority of us all basically tuned out and ignored what was going on around us, from the banks to corporate corruption to dodgy mortgages to jobs being exported and all the rest. Instead we focused on bigger cars and newer gadgets and leaned ever harder on our own credit cards. As citizens we not only let the swine run the trough, we kept our own snouts in it too, and now we’re getting the bill and it’s shocking. Ben Franklin would be ashamed of us and rightly so.

To the question “What woke you up?” her answer is of the sort that sends the MSNBC crowd howling- “Reverend Wright.” She says that she can’t be convinced that President Obama did not go to Wright’s church for all that time without buying into Wright’s “God Damn America” philosophy. This single idea is not unreasonable. Any political candidate who sat in Jerry Falwell’s church for twenty years should be held accountable for that church too. The reality is that Obama rarely went to that church and probably didn’t pay much attention to what was going on there, which is something he no doubt regrets now. He almost certainly only joined that church because it was a political powerhouse and without Wright it’s unlikely that any of us would know Obama’s name today. He wasn’t exactly seeking out the Good News.

But next, in what seems at first to be a thoughtless contradiction, she claims that Obama is really a secret Muslim, which for many people is the turn off switch for listening to her. But if you really do listen to her, you find that she is not “a hater.” She even goes so far as to say that if he were a Muslim that would be fine as long as he were just open about it (It’s unlikely that she actually means this even saying it shows that she is not just bitter and nasty). The smug interviewer makes great hay from the contradiction between Obama being a “Wright follower” and a “secret Muslim,” but if you take a moment and think about it you can see what this woman is really trying to say.

Without knowing what her own religious views are, though if she was at Beck’s rally it’s highly likely she considers herself “a Christian,” it shouldn’t actually be that surprising that she conflates the radical Reverend Wright with radical Islam. What she hears from both sounds like anti-American demagoguery- from “God Damn America” to “America is the great Satan,” and all the rest of it. For her and so many like her, neither Wright nor Obama espouses what at least a solid quarter of this country, if not more, considers “Christianity,” Wright, because he is clearly an extreme radical, and Obama simply because he doesn’t say anything about Jesus or faith at all beyond the standard presidential boilerplate. Obama does not go to church, any church, and is never seen with a prayer book, singing a hymn or anything else. Unlike Clinton, he doesn’t even try to bullshit it.

What is at the heart of this woman’s words is confusion and fear and we should all relate to that. While we can argue that hows and whys, she is not wrong that the country is in serious and deep trouble. She is right to be scared and it’s to her credit that she has gotten up off the couch to do something about it even if it’s only going to a rally. What is troubling, however, is that like so many of her cohorts she is conflating our economic mess with increasing ethnic diversity and acceptance. That hard times divide people is an all too common theme throughout History across the globe but the reality is that the argument that our diversity makes us stronger does not resonate with people like this woman who are losing their financial power because it’s just not true for her in her world- which she shares with more and more Americans every day. She doesn’t see the top notch heart surgeons, the scientists and inner-city cops of all difference backgrounds and religions. Instead, “diversity” for her has become a code word for “illegal immigrants” and “welfare queens” and people who will sue her if she says the wrong thing. Like a lot of Americans who would never use “the N word” in their own lives she may well resent being told that she can’t use it if she wants to keep her job. Like all of us, she is looking for someone to lead us out of this mess, or at least make a good show of trying.

Clearly at the top of the list of Obama’s biggest mistakes was not to wear a love for Jesus, old school, on his sleeve. His skin color aside, had he done this- bullshitted it as he would have no doubt had to- he would not be facing anywhere near this level of malevolence. During the campaign he was aware, and even lowered himself to so porcine and grubbing a figure as Rick Warren in order to get some Jesus cred. But it was a one night stand and Warren’s Hawaiian shirt, cheese on toothpicks, self-help book brand of Jesus hucksterism was not what people in Middle and Southern America recognize as authentic anyway. It is ever his opaqueness, his seeming lack of a core, that bedevils his relationship with the American people and will almost assuredly result in a one term presidency. It is this opacity that makes so many feel leaderless and adrift at best and highly suspicious at worst. It the vacuum of this opacity that is so easily filled with all of this conspiracy horseshit and thus far Obama has been Dukakis-like in his inability to counter it.

So, yes, the woman in this video makes some confusing statements and the “secret Muslim” stuff is clearly not rooting in anything resembling the truth. But she is not stupid and she is not crazy, and most of all, she is not sitting on her ass. She says: “I think we are truly a divided country, I think that both parties are corrupt, and that each of us has a responsibility to ourselves, our children and this country’s future to pay attention.” She certainly has got that right!

When anger reaches for stupid

murraypowers — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:16:31 +0000

People in America are pissed off, no doubt about it. And rightly so. The America we thought we knew feels like it’s falling apart- and that means all of us not just those who can’t abide a black president. From the run away deficit to Katrina to the bank meltdown to the oil slick filling up the Gulf of Mexico, corruption seems rampant and nobody seems to be able to do anything right anymore. None of us are happy, save a handful of bankers, and few are optimistic about the future. But forget the politics, let’s just talk about good ol’ downright stupid for a moment- and the problem stupid presents for us all.

Is anyone really surprised to find out that Wall Street firms were engaged in shady deals that reaped billions of dollars? No, of course not, but when the average American feels his own pants getting pulled down, he gets upset and grabs a pitchfork and a torch. The reality is simply that our most sacred political agreement has been breached. The age old American axiom- that we don’t really care if government is a grab bag for cronies and corporate interests who line their pockets as long as we, the average American, can hang on to enough of what we earn to live at a basic level of security and consumer comfort. The great problem with a pissed off public is that, untrained as they are in how things really work, they cannot navigate the complexities of solutions and are lead by those who simply call for hanging and burning. That is where we are today and the great problem is that those voices of leadership are, for lack of a better word, stupid.

In one of her speeches during the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin scoffed at wasteful government spending projects like research into fruit flies. As most anyone who took High School Biology should know, and as anyone in the science field will tell you, fruit flies are one of the most valuable subjects for scientific research available because their life cycle is so fast. They are heavily used in genetics research among other things. It was a really stupid thing to say and what’s more damning than just her saying it is that no one on her staff apparently had any clue either. Even if you excuse Ms. Palin for not knowing this herself, as a potential president, she should at the very least have someone around her who does have a clue. But she is stupid surrounded by uniformed.

But the rightly oft-ridiculed Ms. Palin is not alone. Last week Rush Limbaugh told his radio audiences that the oil pumping out into the ocean was not really that big a deal because, like the ocean itself, oil is part of the natural world and nature would absorb it. As Bill Maher noted, mercury is also part of the natural world but you don’t put it in your Cheerios. Crude oil, of course, is not found in the ocean and nature has gone to great lengths to keep them separated. It was an amazingly stupid thing to say and shows just how lacking in basic education Mr. Limbaugh also is.

Remember Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal? He was the Great Brown Hope for the Republican Party for a few minutes until he sashayed into a video performance like a stylist during Fashion Week. Homophobia aside, while the less than macho aura was problem enough for the Republicans, Mr. Jindal also, in that same speech, railed against $140 million for something called “volcano monitoring.” “Instead of monitoring volcanoes,” he opined, “what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington.” This comment was worse than either Palin or Limbaugh’s because, ignorant of basic science as those two are, coming from the very state where poor planning created the most notorious disaster this century, you’d think he’d be among the last to ridicule disaster planning. It was a stupid thing to say.

And then there is the increasingly pathetic specter of John McCain as he ransoms his dignity in the face of a challenge to his senate seat from a Neanderthal who can do nothing but mimic. Never known to be a towering intellect, the 2008 presidential campaign revealed an intemperate, scatterbrained airhead with an appalling sense of judgment. This was a person who, with no understanding of the history and dynamics between Russia and its former state Georgia, nevertheless when a conflict broke out rashly proclaimed that American’s “were all Georgians now.” When it turned out that the Georgians themselves initiated the conflict to try to manipulate NATO countries, McCain looked…well, stupid. But there is a pattern here. He made a great show of “suspending” his campaign to return to Washington as the financial crisis unfolded only to sit slumped in a chair with the dumbfounded look of a student facing a test he had no clue about.According to the book Game Change, rather than getting a briefing on the drive from the airport to a meeting at the White House, he instead talked on the phone for an hour about dinner plans and then turn to his briefer at the last minute as he was getting out of the car and asked “what do I kneed to know?”

What ties all of these dimwits together is not conservative or right wing politics. What they all share is the idea that political success is simple and that it’s tied to nostalgia. They think the way to get people’s votes and to win elections is by promising to take them back to the good ol’ days when life too was simple. That is the really stupid idea, because there is never any going back televisions with four channels and dial telephones. The naked reality is that human existence is far more complicated, for good and not so good and that going forward will be difficult but it will also be complex as all progress invariably is. Following pissed off simpletons and hotheads waving pitchforks and torches who don’t understand science ain’t gonna lead any of us back to the past, mythical or otherwise. New Orleans will never be the same and the millions of Spanish speaking immigrants ain’t going anywhere. Our days of being the big, bully, “exceptional American” pig around the world also need to be over if we are going to survive. We are all going to have to learn to live on, and with, less.

It’s understandable that the realities of today’s world, and our diminishing place in it, will cause grief for many Americans who used to view the world as two camps- fellow Americans and those who wish they were. The world is equalizing whether we like it or not and the sooner we all move on from the anger and denial stage towards the bargaining and accepting stages the better it will be for all of us, and more importantly for our children. Stupid won’t get us there and the longer we listen to stupid the harder it will be for all of us.

Drain the Swamp Thing…

murraypowers — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:03:30 +0000

Love or her politics, there was a moment, right when Nancy Pelosi ascended to the office of Speaker of the House, that it looked as though, she might actually do some “swamp draining.” Perhaps its a sexist thing, that women seem somehow more fair and decent, but it appeared that she might enforce a higher ethical standard. But, as always, politics is about alliances and it’s hard to toss a long standing ally out onto the street and, all position issues and ideology aside, Pelosi is no different from any of the rest of them.

The case of Charlie “Swampthing” Rangel, however, and despite is “leave of absence,” is absolutely beyond the pale. It’s probably a truism that anyone who stays in congress over ten years will accumulate things that can’t stand the light of day, from trips to golf rounds to plane tickets, etc. But the Swampthing Rangel case is so very far beyond that. He’s been around for forty years and is no less than the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which despite its boring name, is one of the most powerful committees in the whole congress. It oversees, ironically, the tax code, the very thing Rangel has apparently so egregiously trespassed. The New York Post reported that Rangel did not declare the income that he earned from an apartment building in the Caribbean that he and several major campaign contributors are investors in. The income that Rangel received from this investment could be as much as seventy five thousand dollars a year. Seventy five thousand dollars a year? Seriously? And that’s just the tip of the Rangel slimeberg.

The point that Pelosi and her fellow Democrats miss here is that people, and not just the Tea Party crowd, are FED UP with this kind of crap. Sure it happens, and we all know that congress is a slimy, corrupt institution, but when a slimy turd like Rangel floats to the visible surface, it has to be removed as fast as possible. If she wants to retain any…ANY…credibility, Pelosi needs to yank him out of his committee chair and NOW!

Who’s the Real Idiot?

murraypowers — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:39:37 +0000

For all of the jokes and snickering about Sarah Palin and her lack of knowledge about politics and policy, consider this. Girl is getting paid and in a major, major way. For her 45 minute appearance at tonight’s “Tea Party Convention” she will drop a check for $125,000 into her back account. That’s more than she made in a year as governor of Alaska. With an entry fee of over $500, however, the event will be light on those who are actually supposed to constitute the whole “tea bag” movement, the regular Joes and Janes who drive their flag adorned camper vans filled with “Obama the African Lyin’ King” posters from protest event to protest event. Instead it’s a conference for high rollers who want to associate themselves with the movement people who won’t actually be present, let alone represented. It will be like calling an event a black empowerment conference and hiring Jesse Jackson to address a room full of rich white people who want to look like they care. But girl is getting paid and in a major, major way.

Then consider her book. It was written to sell to all those folks in the camper vans and their ilk who consider her a leader and want to hear what she has to say- or rather want to hear her say what they want to say and are sure she wants to say too. But, given her notorious inexperience with the written word, she had Lynn Vincent, a features writer for the uber-conservative World Magazine, write it for her. We can’t know what Vincent’s deal with Palin was, but we can bet pretty safely that it’s a paltry percentage of Palin’s reported $7 million haul.

Lastly, consider her gig at Fox News for which she’s clearly also getting a very fat paycheck. Fox and company are probably smart enough to know that Palin’s value is in direct correlation to her scarcity. The more she’s on the screen, the less valuable she’ll become and they must know that it’s only a matter of time before she’ll say something mind blowingly stupid that will blow her whole deal. Fox’s answer to Rachel Maddow she is clearly not, but she obviously knows this and has zero interest in wading through policy details or masterbating into a microphone for three hours like her pal Limbaugh.

But perhaps she and her snowmobile husband have figured all this out too? Perhaps, after having been through it once and being a national laughingstock, they have zero interest in running for a public office again. Perhaps they know the smart play is to cash in as much as possible while she’s hot enough to command these big checks and before she is relegated, as she most surely will be, to the Ross Perot/Monica Lewinsky pantheon of “used to be’s.” Until then, girl is going to get paid and in a major, major way.

So who’s the real idiot here?

The State of Obama

murraypowers — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:39:21 +0000

As Barack Obama wrapped up his State of the Union speech, and ends his first year as our president, it’s more and more clear that not only was he our first African American president, he is our first real amateur. He was really is the first outsider, the first rabble-rouser, to actually ride the backs of voters roughshod over the establishment, at least those parts of it who didn’t get a clue and join the bandwagon, all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Normally a person with so threadbare a resume would never have made it to the Oval Office but a perfect storm- a crash and burn predecessor, a terrific campaign and great speeches and the meltdown of the Clinton machine- put him there. And, of course, the Internet. We the people ponied up online and provided him with such an enormous war chest that he literally didn’t even know what to do with it all. It was an exciting ride with a thrilling conclusion…but then what?

According to the book Game Change, when his wife Michelle asked him why he wanted to run for president his first response centered around the historic accomplishment his victory would be and the impact it would have on black youth in America to see a black man as president. Oh yeah, and he could also “fix stuff,” primarily foreign policy. His thinking was in broad, conceptual strokes- justice, fairness and “change.” Never short of self esteem, he probably thought he could do it all. The problem was, lacking virtually any Washington experience, instead of getting out front he decided to rely on the cooperation of others who all have their own agendas and were not nearly as enamored with him as he and the folks at rallies were. The people who make it to Washington have long knives and even longer memories.

For the Republican party the gameplan for Obama was very simple. Arriving as he did on an unprecedented wave of popular support, if he stepped up he could be another FDR and they would face a generation in the wilderness. Their only play was simply to do everything they could to obstruct anything he suggested no matter what it was and then throw the bucket of old liberal labels on him and try to make them stick. So far, “just saying NO” has worked very well for them.

Obama can credit a good deal of the problems he now faces to his choice of Rahm Emanuel to be the action yin to his intellectual yang. Rahm, he of the “don’t let a crisis go to waste” school of thought was supposed to be Obama’s experienced enforcer with congress. Many envisioned Rahm, using the wind of popular support at his back as a counter to lobbiest leverage and channeling Lyndon Johnson as he brought members and staff into the Roosevelt room to be given their scripts for the coming Obama Passion Play to change America. It didn’t work out that way and Rahm has been a disaster and instead of Batman and Captain America we just got a couple more suits playing by the house rules at the Washington gaming tables. And perhaps most inexplicably of all, they let Nancy Pelosi, an anathema to most Americans, deal the cards.

So here we are a year later. Instead of riding into Washington to shake things up, Barack Obama has instead simply become a member of the band that plays the same ol’ tunes, with the Wall Street Shuffle featuring high on the play list as it always is. It would have been almost impossible to make any other play because, as James Carville noted, “Washington always wins.” But worse still, Obama has showed a shockingly tin political ear. Rather than leading the bipartisan revolution he naively promised, he let Pelosi run with the ball and then allowed himself to be painted with the old Tax and Spend Socialism/Soft on National Defense brush that covers her and which leaves a stain that is almost impossible to remove. His stunning lack of ability to define himself, and unbelievable optic mistakes like setting up a teleprompter to address a third grade class, has resulted in him being easily defined by those eager to see him run out of town in three years. If he doesn’t step forward forcefully, leave the Democratic establishment behind and pull himself into focus for the American people soon- and stand up for something other than settling for the lowest common denominator- that is probably exactly what is going to happen.

Why Healthcare is so Ugly…

murraypowers — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 20:56:48 +0000

Regardless of where you stand in the healthcare debate the one thing everyone can no doubt agree on is that it has been one of the uglier episodes in American political life for many, many years. It’s been far uglier than the previous champion, the Clinton’s healthcare fight fifteen years ago. This time, all of the back and forths, amendments, positions, loyalties, rationalizations, and embarrassments have been right there in the spotlight. Left/Right Ideology aside, however, there is a more serious reason that it’s been like an oozing, open sore in the public eye for almost a year.

When the Antiquities Act of 1906 gave President Theodore Roosevelt the power to proclaim parcels of land as national monuments, he took full advantage of the new power. Within six months he had proclaimed four- Devils Tower, Wyoming, on September 24 and El Morro, New Mexico, Montezuma Castle, Arizona, and Petrified Forest, Arizona. It was the start of a century long trend of power moving inexorably from Capital Hill to the White House far in excess of not only the spirit of the Constitution, but its very words. The Founding Fathers had been famously paranoid of anything resembling a monarchy. Their number one concern was power being concentrated into any one branch of government, but especially the executive, and their document tried to outline how that is to be avoided. But like most of what they wrote, the language was either too vague or too specific to be taken at face value.

By the early decades of the last century, the world had changed dramatically. Technology played a pivotal role as radio and film personalized and advanced charismatic personalities into strong leadership roles. Democracy seemed weak and a host of dynamic new media savvy leaders like Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Germany were transforming their countries into powerful nations. While parliaments and congresses dithered and bickered, they got things done. Germany went from a basketcase to a world power in just over a decade. In 1932, in the wake of the Great Depression, Americans elected their own savior, Franklin Roosevelt, and all eyes looked to him to grab the reigns of power and right the American ship.

Almost a century later, George W. Bush ran the most imperial presidency in American history. Love him or hate him, and regardless of who he listened to, there’s no doubt that he wielded unprecedented power over our nation from his desk in the Oval Office. When another depression loomed before us, as we did in the 30’s, we once again looked to an elegant and charismatic to replicate what Franklin Roosevelt had done and the Republican party braced itself for a generation in the wilderness.

And then a funny thing happened. Rather than assume the imperial presidency, Barack Obama reverted back to the Constitution and essentially disengaged the Executive Branch from legislating, tossing that ball back to Capital Hill where is supposed to belong. Instead of sending drafted legislation to congress, the way most every president since FDR has done, he simply waited for them to pull it together the way the framers had intended.

Oops.

The problem is that congress is now a very, very different entity than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. They were clever men, but they did not have crystal balls. They did not foresee how political parties, media, lobbyists, elections- and most of all money- would look two hundred years later. Nor did they anticipate just how arcane and complex the whole process would become and how “the people” would long since have been left in the dust of thousand plus page bills written intentionally in unintelligible language by invisible hands (virtually zero words of congressional legislation are ever written by elected legislators).

The reality is that over the last half century, the job of a congressperson was largely twofold- to cut out chunks of meat out of whale sized legislation as it drifted by their office for the folks back home and to appease the powerful lobbyists whose money got them re-elected. This system ensured that, for the most part, not only that mollusks and hacks comfortable with this arrangement would occupy those seats, but that leadership roles would go to those most happy with it and least likely to rock the boat- hence such feeble and flaccid lumps like Harry Reid, Dennis Hastrick and Tom Daschle found themselves in leadership chairs.

No doubt one of Obama’s intended consequences is that America is certainly now paying attention. We all got to see the sausage grinding up close and the embarrassing stunts of Joe Lieberman and naked hostage taking by Ben Nelson were played out in front of our eyes. The people of Nebraska will no doubt be thankful to Nelson while the rest of the country should be upset. That’s how the system was set up to work and Obama has waved it under our noses. We all gagged.

The great problem for Obama, and for all of us however, is that while reverting back to a purist’s observance of the founders’ outline of shared government makes perfect sense around a conference table or a grad school seminar, especially for a former constitutional professor, in practical reality it’s a disaster. The original system is simply too corrupted to work and the 21st century world moves too fast for anything of consequence to go through the endless tugging of committee after committee, conference after conference until the original tree has been whittled down to a single toothpick that takes a thousand words to express. The system is broken, and broken badly.

21st century America needs leadership and that’s why we elect presidents. We expect them to run with the ball, not to hand it off to someone else. We expect them to lead by “bully pulpit” which is just another way of saying that their personal style and qualities need to overcome the constitutional restrictions. Reagan and Roosevelt used the public and the media, Lyndon Johnson used the hallways and bathrooms of Capital Hill and late night phone calls. Whatever works, just get it done. As we all- and hopefully Obama- clearly saw, going “old school” certainly didn’t.

Mistaking War for something else…

murraypowers — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:53:14 +0000

On Sunday we remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the war that has defined our country ever since. People often try to compare September 11th with December 7th, but the two events are not even remotely comparable. There is no such thing as “Islamofascism” and Saddam was not “Hitler.” It is this very comparison, and others like it, that have led us down the path into the mess we are now in- again.

World War II is how we Americans like to see ourselves- honest, courageous, willing to sacrifice and most of all victorious over naked and obvious evil. World War II made us the undisputed good guys around the globe. That great victory, however, also spawned and has fueled our own mythology as the world’s valiant knight who must remain ever ready to take up arms in the cause of right. Over the years, however, the notion of what is “right,” and what is “evil” became conveniently conflated with what best served our needs. Virtually all of our subsequent military endeavors in the service of this mythology, and ourselves, has ended in either useless stalemate or disaster. A lot of money has been wasted and a lot of people have been killed and wounded.

The reason for this is that in World War II we were not fighting “fascism” but rather countries with defined armies and our military pursued attainable and recognizable victories. “War” means two armies fighting over real estate and when one side gets it the war is over. That’s how war works. Since that war, however, and in the service of our own needs and wants, we have upped the ante and declared war on nebulous ideas- communism, drugs and now endless strains of a conceptual enemy we can only roughly call “Islamic extremism.” What we yet to realize is that our military is not the tool for those problems- not in Korea, Vietnam, Columbia, Mexico, Iraq or Afghanistan. The even bigger problem is that, while we could go in and beat on the Vietnamese and then just bail out, now we really have ourselves in a mess because it is Pakistan that is the real problem and there’s nothing we can do about them but watch.

Powerlessness is our real problem now. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we responded by kicking some serious ass to the point of vaporizing their citizens in a nuclear flash. But Afghanistan in not Japan, and in the nuclear age no one else will be ever again, but yet Barack Obama has made the decision to throw 30,000 more soldiers into the cauldron of IUD’s and cultural and religious conflict. He did it for the same reason people who are buried alive claw at the walls of their coffins- because they can’t just do nothing. But nothing is all that we can achieve there and the only question left is how much it will cost us.

The End of an Era…

murraypowers — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:14:56 +0000

Last night in the town of Buffalo, New York, a luminous chapter in American cultural history closed with the last performance by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. While there could well be a few more shows lined up here or there, it was nevertheless the end of the road not just for the band but for an era of American Rock and Roll music. Springsteen will, of course, go on and do new and different projects such as his Seegar Sessions outing, but it will never be the same again. Even though there really hasn’t been an “E Street Band” album since 1980’s The River, without his band, The Boss will be moving from playing day to day in the outfield into a designated hitter role.

Before you roll your eyes and think this is just Springsteen fanboy stuff, consider the role he and his band have played and what they have represented over the last thirty years- rock and roll music written to be both recorded and performed live on the stage. That is now, literally, a dead art form in our mainstream culture. Now music is recorded with endless devices and tricks to tune vocals and insert phantom instruments. Those who do go out on tour invariably do so with computers and pre-taped accompaniment. This is not to say that watching an artist simply dance along to their own pre-recorded music or that listening to U2’s wall of synthetic sound can’t be a good night’s entertainment. If watching Elton John sitting in adult diapers and a comical wig in a Vegas casino is what makes your night, then have at it.

But the E Street band was never a nostalgia act. Seeing them was never like watching the remnants of iconic 60’s bands serve up their board of fare in a festival of teary joint memory of youth lived in happier times. The E Street band always had an album out and that music was always relevant. Springsteen’s songs were always about what we were all living through together, from the murder of of Amadou Diallo in New York, to September 11th to the end of the George W. Bush era and the hope we all had for renewal. The shows were never polite spectator events but rather family reunions at which everyone sang along and danced on their chairs. The E Street band tours were never sponsored by a credit card company or a product and ticket prices were always kept low enough for working people.

Music doesn’t mean to us what it used to. It was the dominant cultural art form of the 60’s and 70’s but was superseded by video in the 80’s. Today, in the era of sex toy dolls and disposable American Idol human products, one would be hard pressed indeed to name even one musical artist who will still command our attention and fill stadiums in thirty minutes, let alone, years. Music, and musicians, will never mean the same thing to us as it once did.

Those days ended last night in Buffalo, New York.

Fort Hood in Context…

murraypowers — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:17:18 +0000

It has been widely reported that before he opened fire on his fellow soldiers Maj Nidal Malik Hasan shouted “Allah Akbar,” or “God is great.” This, along with his Arabic name, naturally led to the conclusion that this was an act of “terrorism” and the work of what Rush and his ilk call “Islamofascists.” For whatever Maj Hasan is, and he is clearly a lot of things, an “Islamofascist” is not among them. He is, like so many Americans who have performed hideous acts of violence, simply someone who is mentally disturbed and who cracked up. He is no more connected to al Queda or the Taliban than the guy sitting next to him in the mess hall.

That is not to say that there was not a political component to Maj. Hasan’s act, because there certainly was, just as there was to Eric Rudolph’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics for the Glory of Christ or Sirhan Sirhan’s shooting of Bobby Kennedy or even Seung-Hui Cho’s warped vision that prompted the Virginia Tech shootings. But none of these connections were real outside of the skulls of these warped people, and perhaps in Rudolph’s case his little band of fellow travelers. The Manson family wrote lyrics from a Beatles song from which they somehow divined inspiration to commit murder but did that make them “Beatlefascists?” There is a huge difference between lone nuts doing these acts, and imagining connections to other people and movements, and organized terrorist actions, and real acts of terrorism.

It is a sad fact of life that a lot of people are not right in the head, and it is America’s particular burden to bear that we have so many guns lying around. The problem for us is that it is not always that easy to spot those folks who are on the verge of a Fort Hood or Virginia Tech episode ahead of time and those folks can arm themselves very, very easily. There is little, in fact nothing, that the police can do about these people. The police only get called after the fact in these cases. The challenge for all of us is to figure out what makes people like Hasan or Manson or Rudolph or Gonzales, who shot people in Florida on the same day as Hasan, go over the edge and to try to identify them ahead of time. This requires understanding social behavior and mental health issues and learning how to spot red flags when they go up, and they clearly did in the cases of Hasan and Cho.

But we also have to recognize that these incidents present a very, very different challenge to our society than guarding ourselves against real “terrorism,” which by definition means organized, premeditated acts of violence perpetrated for political purposes. Terrorism, unlike lone nuts, is indeed a police and law enforcement issue. Networks need to be penetrated, surveillance needs to be done and political policy needs to be considered. We now know that putting our troops into Saudi Arabia was a hugely contributing factor in motivating al Queda, as obviously was our lockstep alliance with the Israelis.

The essential point is that we must not confuse these two very different things- disturbed people, almost always lone nuts, who crack up and do heinous acts of violence and political terrorism and terrorist networks. They require very different skill sets and resources and the very worst thing we can do is lump them all together and blame the wrong people.

The Hardest Choice

murraypowers — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:21:48 +0000

When asked why, after decades of opposition, German Chancellor Willy Brandt was suddenly ready to reverse himself politically and engage East Germany, his response was “I got smarter.” He did not, of course, get any smarter but what he got upon attaining his country’s most powerful office was access to more information and more informed viewpoints which influenced his position. This happens routinely to elected officials who saw the landscape one way as a candidate and upon election realized the equations were much more complicated than they thought. Campaigns are necessarily about simplifying issues for lowest common denominator voters, many with astonishingly low levels of information and understanding. Governing, however, is a whole different story and idealistic candidates find upon entering office that the crowds and cheers and adoring faces have been replaced by the steel teeth of the meat grinder of government. What does not happen often is a change in policy, at least not an admitted one if they can hide it under layers of bureaucracy, which they usually can (which is how Clinton went from being a populist to the Wall Street tool who so dutifully tended the garden of our current financial crisis).

Barack Obama does not have that luxury and he already erred terribly on day one by making a big show of closing down Guantanamo only to find that it was not politically feasible- or simple- to do and that he will have to do a U-turn on that one. Much hay will be made of it as the January deadline comes, no doubt. But the much bigger problem he has is Afghanistan and being one of the smarter guys to have been elected president he must have no doubt that, like Brandt, he has to “get smarter.”

The problem with what Obama loudly and publicly called “the war of necessity” during the campaign trail- no doubt partially to simply look tough enough to appeal to the American voters- is that it is exactly the opposite. There is no “war” in Afghanistan there is only occupation in the hopes of staving off a one-sided civil war to topple a corrupt and vilified government that is every bit as inevitable as it was in Vietnam a generation ago. Not all of the much ballyhooed comparisons with Vietnam apply, but the one that does in the most important one- the outcome is inevitable and American lives and treasure staked in holding it off are simply wasted.

Yes, there are certainly many arguments to be made for trying to tame that part of the world, from humanitarian to domino effects in Pakistan and elsewhere, but the essential problem- the facts that must now be staring the president in the face- is that there really is nothing we can do about. Yes, it’s unspeakable what the people in that part of the world do to each other, and to women in particular, but we have simply reached the limits of our power. We can’t change that region with our military anymore than we could drain a flooded basement holding a screen door.

The problem for Obama is that he didn’t start this occupation, and very likely would never have initiated it himself, but he not only inherited it, he opened is yap widely about it. He now fully owns it. He and his consultants have to know that “getting smarter” in public- and simply acknowledging the reality- would play right into the age-old political narrative of Democrats being soft on national defense pussies would only make his increasingly daunting re-election prospects very dim indeed. Even more compelling is the political reality that, were he to pull out of Afghanistan, any terrorist event to occur in this country would be eagerly traced back to the very Afghan mountains he abandoned, effectively ending his political career.

What remains to be seen by all of us is exactly what Barack Obama is made of. Is he really a patriotic, new politician who loves his country and will do what’s right- even if it means his own political demise- or will he do what virtually everyone who has held that office before him did, and cover his own ass even if it means so many others losing theirs.