Rethinking Civil Unions

Some of you may have noticed that statistics from France show that nearly half the civil unions performed there involve straight couples. In other words, civil unions are not just for gays and lesbians. I have no idea what the statistics are for our ruder nation, but I can say this: my grandmother, my mother, my wife and my daughter formed pacts with their partners at city hall. That's four generations in a row.

Perhaps that was because none of us had money. My family has been here since the Revolution without making it out of the working class.

I should mention that certain of my family's "registered partnerships," as some call them, were more civil than others. My grandmother, who had numerous informal male friends, would often redden her cheeks with blush and visit people she'd grown fond of in the afternoons, but she was civil. She always had supper on the table when her second husband arrived home after a hard day of vulcanizing tires. He'd earned a timely meal.

Civil Unions were officially invented for gays in Denmark in 1989, but they have always existed--we used to call them "common law marriages." The definitions of civil unions differ from one jurisdiction to the next, and so does the nomenclature. My favorite term is "civil solidarity pact." Straights are allowed to sign up for these pacts in places like Quebec and Uruguay. Young people do this, I read, where it's easy to end a civil union and complicated to get a divorce.

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe that gays have the Constitutional right to marry each other. That's what many want, and it is both a practical matter and a matter of respect. For the 16% of straight Californians who are not religious, though, I suggest considering civil solidarity pacts--get married by a judge at city hall. It costs little, goes fast, then you eat Chinese and go to a Cohn Brothers' movie.

Extorting Teachers

I read two reports today. The first was about how depraved gangs in Ciudad Juarez have been extorting teachers and schools, demanding that they give up their Christmas bonuses or the gangs will attack the teachers, the schools or the children. Some attacks have taken place.

The second report was closer to home. One section of the Democratic Party has joined the Republicorp in attacking teachers' unions, on the grounds that union busting will lead to better schools. I doubt if I can express how pathetic this plan is.

Back in the twentieth century a huge amount of compelling research in many different countries went into studies of how young people learn effectively. None of it demonstrated that punishing teachers or their unions would raise the success rates. What we are seeing in American public systems--and this includes the Obama administration--is a scapegoating of faculty members, blaming them for problems brought on by system-enforced concepts refuted by science a hundred years ago. Often the teachers know better, but they held captives to a stupid rule book, ignorant parents, overcrowding, and a mania for testing and punishment. Private schools and charter schools, on the other hand, range from excellent to weirdly eccentric with approaches so intellectually ridiculous no expert would give them a second glance.

All I can say to parents today is (1) try to be born wealthy so you can afford one of the few excellent schools or (2) take heart from the fact that most of a child's learning takes place out of school; pay close attention to your child's interests and cultivate learning that the child will love.

--Gary Goss

Muck

Samuel Johnson's A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND is my source for the story of Muck. In 1773 Johnson and James Boswell toured northern Scotland, investigating the habits of the Highland Scots. One thing Johnson discovered was that local leaders of the Scottish clans were often named for the particular islands or areas they ruled. If you were the chief ruler of Mull, for example, you would be known as Mull. That was fine with the exception of the leader of Muck. He did not care for his place name and made an attempt to change it to Monk, but that failed to catch on. Finally a compromise was struck, and he became know as Isle of Muck, which some think a small improvement.

This problem came to mind the past few weeks as I participated in several discussions of the meanings of the terms liberal, hippie, progressive and radical. A variety of people could not agree on what these words signified or what to call themselves.

My own view solidified in 1969. In those days a liberal was a Democrat who supported the Vietnam War. A radical was Marxist or socialist or anarchist or pacifist. A progressive was a wider term that included radicals and others who opposed the war. A hippie was a lightweight dude who dropped acid and listened to Pink Floyd. If you called a serious leftist a hippie, he or she would be deeply hurt.

That history is now forgotten. I run into people who insist that a liberal is to the left of a progressive and that both of them are hippies. Like Isle of Muck I remain unsatisfied--I'd rather be a radical.

Free At Last

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was well intended at its inception, although never a good idea. It's wrong to require people to pretend to be what they are not--something politicians seldom grasp, because they pretend for a living. To make things worse, military bigots immediately altered the law to mean "I will catch you if I can." Thousands of gays and lesbians who did not "tell" were hunted down and discharged.

Repeal of this law is a major gain in civil rights. It moves us into the twentieth century and gives America hope of entering the current century. We have cast off the shame of legal second class citizenship. And we can thank two sources: the fighting spirit of people who refused to accept the status quo and the strategy of Obama, Pelosi and Reid, which was often condemned but worked out exactly as the President had planned.

--Gary Goss

Ice Man

Mark Twain used to tell the true story of a mail carrier in Death Valley, a public servant who couldn't take the heat. As summer approached, he considered his problem at length and eventually designed and built an overcoat made of sponges. To this coat he affixed a bladder of water and a handpump, which he planned to use to keep the sponge coat wet. On the first really hot day, he put on his new coat, loaded the mail into his wagon and set out on his route, only to be found shortly after noon, beside the road, frozen to death with an icicle hanging from his nose.

I thought of this tale yesterday while listening to a panel of talking heads who claimed that President Obama's recent gratuitous attacks on his liberal political base were actually part of a shrewd plan to win over more conservative independent voters in the 2012 election. I doubt that. Obama is unlikely to be found by the side of the road, but no conjecture is too dumb for the Talking Heads of TV.

A MEANINGFUL LIFE

To be meaningful, philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, a life must be actively engaged in worthy projects. Her summary came to mind recently as I read the Los Angeles Times' obituary of Stu Pidasle (not his real name). The obituary was an eighteen paragraph tribute to the meaningless life of an aggressive political hack.

If you are lucky, you never encountered Stu Pidasle or his missing brain pan, but Senator Diane Feinstein called him the "indefatigable wise man of Californian politics." Al Gore claimed Pidasle "was also a great champion of progressive political causes." Feinstein and Gore were mistaken. Pidasle was actually a fairly stupid donut depository who lived to serve, in a thuggish way, the anti-progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Also he looked like a sock puppet filled with cottage cheese.

Two anecdotes from the 1960s might convey what a pleasure it was to know a Stu Pidasle. At one point a friend of mine planned to attend a state Democratic convention where he would be supporting the Henry Waxman & John Burton caucus (so to speak) rather than the Pidasle & Jesse Unruh caucus. My friend asked me and my brother to stick around during the convention to protect him against physical threats. Sure enough, about half way through, Pidasle and several of his tough guys cornered us in a hallway. These dudes were mean by political standards but not by street standards, so my brother and I told them to get lost, and they ran away down the hall with tears in their eyes, Pidasle in first place.

A year or so after that, I was helping in a Democratic primary contest, supporting a brilliant attorney who went on to a fine career on the California Supreme Court. We lost narrowly to the incumbent, a stumbling alcoholic who seldom voted, supported, of course, by the Stu Pidasle faction of our party. Anyway, one afternoon during the campaign I drove over to hear what the inebriated incumbent had to say at a public meeting. Pidasle was in the crowded hall, the only person who knew me. I paid him no attention and gradually began to doze off. About halfway through, I woke and decided to leave.

I had driven my ancient car about three miles on the freeway when the heat gauge suddenly registered extreme pain. I pulled off the freeway and into a service station where the attendant replaced the hose on my water pump and handed me the old hose, which he noted had been cut open from stem to stern with a pocket knife. "You could have been killed," he said.

I drove back to the meeting place. The space where I had parked before was still open, so I parked there again. Then I checked the car parked behind me. Through the window I spotted the registration and the name Pidasle. I took a sturdy coke bottle out of my trunk and used it to redesign Mr. Stu Pidasle's brake lights.

I'm Gary Goss, and I approve this funeral.

Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?

Two of America's most famous school child's questions are "What color is a white horse?" and "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" I can answer the second.

Those of us who live in the northern part of Sonoma County daily pass by a road named Shiloh. Or we live on Grant Street, and it's time to learn why.

Many, who took history in high school, know that Grant graduated from West Point near the bottom of his class, fought in the war against Mexico (where we had the highest casualty rate per soldier in American history), served in the army in Sonoma County for a while and then resigned in disgrace because of drunkenness, failed in civilian life, and reentered the Union Army at the start of the Civil War, also known, in some places, as the War of Northern Aggression against Proud Illiterate Christians Defending Slavery (or something like that). During the war, the drunken but stubbornly heartless Grant achieved a measure of undeserved success by sending vast hordes of looting Union troops on stupid frontal assaults against tiny numbers of brilliant Confederate dudes, who would have prevailed if they had not fragged their best general, Stonewall Jackson, now a central name in gay rights history.

Most of the above is false, of course, a set of rumors first started in the North (by generals who wanted Grant's rank and by war correspondents who did their writing in the rear while running away with the other deserters) and later taken up by apologists for the South and its totally defeated army.

Part of the price by which Southern men were reconciled to the loss of access to slave women was a national glorification of Robert E. Lee and a denigration of Grant and the Union victories. Never mind that Grant's battles became the core study in military academies around the world (and unfortunately inspired the German army).

Robert E. Lee was, of course, one of several unusually able generals who fought for the South. At the start of the war, the best generals the country went with the South, one reason the South won so many early victories. They were the same generals that Grant defeated--Grant never lost a battle in his career or took a backward step. Of Grant, Lee later wrote: "I have carefully searched the military records of both ancient and modern history, and have never found Grant's superior as a general."

Grant was not a drunk, left the army because of low pay, and made a middle class living for his family in civilian life before the war. While the Union Army was slightly larger than the Confederate Army, in many of Grant's early battles, both sides had the same number of troops or Grant led the smaller force.

Among all the generals on the Union side, Grant was the only one who led successful offenses. His trademark in an attack was speed and the unexpected. For example, he mounted the first amphibious attack in modern warfare, coordinating the army and navy. His contribution was not simply tactics. Grant's strategy, the three pronged attack that included Shermon's' crushing march to the sea, cornered Lee and ended the awful fighting.

In a sense the decisive engagement of the Civil War came in 1862 at the battle of Shiloh where, for the first time in the conflict, two equal armies with two good generals met head on. Confederate General Albert Sydney Johnston's goal was to annihilate the Union Army, and he was a great general, but Grant destroyed the forces of Johnston (killed in battle) and Beauregard. After the battle, Grant noted that the South had fought hard and retreated in order. He understood what that meant: the war would be long and difficult. The South would have to be invaded and beaten on its own territory. Grant spent the next year trying to convince his superiors of the need to fight.

The South could have won. They were conducting a defensive battle around their own homes. They had interior railroads and rivers on which to move highly motivated troops rapidly from place to place. The North had to invade long distances and fight on unfamiliar ground, a logistical nightmare. But Grant was good at logistics. He was especially good at drawing relief maps of what lay ahead. He planned. His army moved food and ammunition.

Grant had to win fast. Democracies don't like long wars, and Lincoln seemed on the verge of being defeated for reelection. Grant did win, of course, at Appomattox Courthouse, where he granted generous terms to the South when Lee surrendered (Grant was not really an "unconditional surrender" man).

At the time the North was grateful. Grant was elected President twice, but he proved a political novice misled by Washington's corrupt elite. He did get some things right, though. He enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting former slaves the right to vote, and he prodded congress into inventing the Justice Department to continue this work. "It is to Grant that we owe the institutionalization of universal suffrage and racial equality that we take for granted today," wrote John Mosier, historian. (For more on Grant, see Mosier's book with a foreword by General Wesley Clark, who ranks Grant first among America's military men.)

Reading about Grant has made me fonder of him. As a young husband, Grant planned to live out his life as a civilian in California, which he loved. He had not wanted an army career. His father had made him enter West Point for the free education. Grant's own goal was to become a math professor--he excelled at math--and he had a job lined up when the war with Mexico broke out. In his memoir Grant called that war "unholy," and he explained how the Americans had started it by advancing unprovoked into Mexico until finally the Mexican Army had to fight, at which point President Polk declared the country under attack. The motive for the war was to add Texas and other slave territories to the block of Southern states. As Grant saw it, the Mexican War was the start of the Civil War. In fact, Grant wrote that the Civil War was our punishment for what we had done to Mexico.

Grant's final act, completed at the behest of Mark Twain as Grant sat dying from cancer, was to write a memoir, the only Presidential memoir absorbed into the canon of American literature. Grant died within a week of finishing the book and providing an income for his wife.

That's who is buried in Grant's Tomb.

The Party of Loss

In the December HARPER'S, Corey Robin has republished an article on a phenomenon common to conservative politics from its inception. The conservative movement has relied on Tea Party populism, with its immoderation and adventurism, going back to the days of Edmund Burke.

My family illustrates the difference between two kinds of populism. My working class Irish mother's populism was a populism of hope. She reached adulthood at the start of the first Great Depression, and she had, to start with, nothing, not even a high school diploma. With nothing to lose, she had no more sense of loss than FDR. Instead she had hope. She was no victim. Her goal was to live day to day and put her children through college. She had no negative feelings about Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, Gays, hookers or men.

My father came from a border state "Scotch-Irish" family that had been in America since the Revolution without making its way out of the working class; and he was the other sort of populist, the angry man who had suffered, as Corey Robin points out, a terrible loss. He was a victim, a white man who had lost his birthright, lost his place in the world as a member of a master race.

I have resisted, as too simple, the idea that the Teabaggers are racists with a grievance, and of course that is too simple. There is a strong component of populists in the tea party who have either suffered small financial losses or fear that they will soon suffer small financial losses. The Teabaggers tend to be old. They fear the end of Social Security (so, in their unproductive way, they vote Republican and demand a balanced budget). But what seems to drive the Tea Party most goes back to before the Civil War, when the Southern elite managed to convince the Southern white populist to fight for slavery, more or less on the grounds that every white person belonged to a class that was superior to black slaves.

My father did not believe that Blacks, Asians or Latinos were inferior--he was afraid that they weren't. He fought in a losing turf war, as he saw it, and his sense of loss turned his politics on its head. He moved from being an early supporter of FDR to being a committed follower of the NRA. Of course, he did not endorse racism, any more than Glenn Beck openly endorses racism today. Instead we see men and women practicing racism-once-removed by talking about closing the southern border and cutting entitlement programs. Euphemistic racism has become as American as apple pie.

My father, an admirable man in many ways, did not live to see a dark-skinned family in the White House, but that would have been for him a kind of ultimate end of his own special status. He would have joined with other angry "victims" and supported the populist party of emotional loss.

In the Heart of the Heartland

I suppose everyone knows that many of the Republicorp members of Congress believe that climate change (see the science of geophysics) is a fabrication invented by liberals as part of a plot to take control of the world. They also hold that the planet is 10,000 years old (so much for geology). They deny natural selection (cross off biology). They believe that a snake once talked and that a virgin once gave birth. These beliefs are common in the Heartland.

Many Heartlanders probably subscribe to related beliefs: that the blood of a black chicken will cure shingles; that the root of rhubarb worn on a string around your neck will prevent stomach aches; that cutting your hair in the dark of the moon will make you go bald; that burying a chicken head under a full moon will cure warts; etc.

Wittgenstein once said that if he met someone who claimed that he did not believe in science, Wittgenstein would not know how to continue the conversation. That's where we are today. It has become clear that a sizable number of us in the heart of our heartland reject science while, at the same time, using science to make weapons of war. We share this contradiction with certain jihadists.

The shock some of us feel, I think, comes from the realization that so many of our elected representatives reject geophysics, geology, biology, modern medicine, facts in general, and rational thought. These are the people with whom President Obama is attempting to converse. It is his job to represent them (and everyone else in the country), but how--unlike Wittgenstein--will it be possible for Obama to continue the conversation?

Geophysics

On Facebook, from time to time, I run into some fellow who pontificates about climate change, taking the position that climate change is just a theory supported by some scientists and denied by others. This thoughtless approach is often presented as a kind of lecture on uncertainty that may include a list of cases where the science of one era changes in a later era. For example, Newton's theory of gravity was superseded by Einstein's theory of gravity (actually I have yet to run across one of these skeptics who knew that Einstein had a theory of gravity).

Perhaps the best answer to this sort of pronouncement is to point towards the American Geophysical Union, the country's largest association of climate scientists. It recently announced that 700 of its members have agreed to talk to hostile audiences and defend the consensus view that climate change is happening and that in part it is the result of human activity. They are preparing a handbook on the human causes of climate change for use in secondary schools.

There is no way to answer another sort of skeptic, the paranoid who claims that climate change theory is a leftist plot. About 50 of the new Republican members of congress support this view, joining with older members like Congressman Darrel Issa of California. These walking meat tubes are now in a position to speed up climate change, which they will do, acting out their delusions. Anyone--like Ralph Nader-- who argues that it doesn't matter which party controls congress might want--for the sake of a planet humans find habitable--to reconsider.

News from the Republicorp

Until recently John Boehner (R-Ohio) was known mainly for combining two jobs, congressman and lobbyist. He's the dude who famously passed out tobacco lobby checks to fellow crooks on the floor of the House of Representatives. In the words of the song, he needed someone to help him scrape the mucous off his brain. Boehner is also famous for weeping in front of microphones (someone asked recently what would have happened if Nancy Pelosi had addressed the nation with tears streaming down her face). So Boehner is a red-faced booby, but what he's not is a Teabagger. Boehner is in politics--like any career Republicorp--for the hundreds of millions of dollars he can make in Wall Street payoffs.

The clash between the Republicorp millionaires and the Ayn Randian loonies of Teabaggertown has already begun.

I had noticed years ago that the Press Democrat's three or four person editorial board was pro-environment only as long as it did not interfere with corporate profits. The PD is a corporation, and its editorial board will defend business profits even if doing so makes the planet uninhabitable. That is their job. That is what the editors do for a living. The most recent example is their destruction of Pam Torliatt (using a Rovian fake "sanctuary" issue) and their Santa Rosa coup in electing profit-over-environment business puppets to the city council.

The PD's method is to join the Republicorp in secretly backing corporate Democrats to defeat genuine Democrats.

I canceled my subscription.

Hail California!

To state the obvious, we should thank the Teabaggers. They had a huge impact on Democratic victories in Nevada and Delaware. They never developed traction in California. Rep. Thompson defeated a Bagger easily. An incumbent Bagger in Cloverdale lost badly. The Republicorp now has a running sore to nurse: the Baggers control the Republican primaries but lose in most general elections.

In short, the Baggers can make Sarah Palin the Republicorp candidate for President in 2012. If they do, she will take the party to its worst defeat since Goldwater. As of today the race is on: Sarah Palin vs. the Republicorp establishment. It should be interesting to watch.

ON BOARDING THE TITANIC

Van Jones, community organizer, recently said, "I thought I was on the Amistad and the goal was to free the slaves. Instead I was on the Titanic."

Before the current depression began, more than one billion adults on this planet were unemployed. No jobs existed for these hungry people. Most of them, of course, lived in the Southern Hemisphere--out of sight, out of mind. They won't always be out of sight. They are beginning to act on Sam Kinison's exasperated advice: "Go where the food is!"

The absurd economic and political systems around the world, run by corporate executives, balmy dictators and kings, are crumbling. I take no pleasure in that because I have no idea what is coming next or at what speed, but one prediction seems safe: progressives need to prepare for change.

Hail to the Republicorp

Move-On has an ad out in which a woman from the future attempts to persuade us to vote in a way that will head off the coming "Republicorp," which is the next step in our social evolution. Consider our future pledge of allegiance: "I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the multi-national for which it stands, one corporation, indivisible. . . ."

Anyway, I bring this up to try to clear up a major issue. Many Democrats are critical of Obama for having done so little. Yes, he's edging our troops our of Iraq and he passed a comprehensive but flawed health care bill and he got unemployment benefits extended and he saved General Motors, but there is a long list of jobs he's left unfinished. Why didn't he also do X, Y and Z?

The basic reason Obama did not do X, Y and Z is that he couldn't.

Those of us who think of the President as the most powerful person in America are living in the wrong century. There are probably a hundred corporate CEOs with more power over legislation than Obama has. The President's best hope has been to squeeze through some minor progressive adjustments. One step over that line, and his entire program would have been brought to an end by the Republicorp.

Does this mean that the Democrats are as corrupt as the Republicorp? Not hardly. If the Democrats are the same as the Republicorp, why have the corporations rained hundreds of millions of dollars on the teabagging Republican lackies in an effort to dump Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?

Share the Wealth

About one billion people on this planet lack jobs. Some of them live in France. The French government's solution? Raise the retirement age two years. No wonder the French are in the streets.

I have a suggestion. Drop the retirement age to 55. Then everyone who wants a job can find one.

Reality Check

Our last three Presidents smoked marijuana (and probably still do), but they advocate prison for today's users. If Clinton, Bush and Obama had been clapped in prison for puffing weed in their youth, none would have become President. But now they are willing to ruin the lives of others.

The hypocrisy is contemptible.

Back in the 1960s, some police officers in Buffalo confiscated a pound of marijuana from a kid and then began to roll joints and light up. "This stuff is good," they explained to a friend of mine, "Too good for hippies."

The federal attorney general has issued a threat to the voters of California: if they pass Proposition 19, legalizing marijuana, the feds will crack down on the state. It's hard to know what to make of this. It might be a ruse designed to enrage California voters and ensure passage of Prop 19. Or, the only real alternative, it might be the same bluff that was tried when medical marijuana went to a vote. You might recall the result of that threat: nada, nothing, nil. We have medical marijuana. Anyone in California who wants dope can get it. No one cares. The feds are quiet. Washington isn't quite stupid enough to make open war on the voters of California.

I intend to vote yes on Proposition 19 and make marijuana legal, safe and taxable.

The Compromised

At the moment I think of the Left as consisting of three factions. The first (and smallest) consists of those who support dictators--many dictator-supporters mean well but have a loose grip on reality.

Moving on quickly, we find a larger group of activists whose heroes are writers. These voters follow Amy Goodman, Molly Ivans, Studs Terkel, Malcolm X, Alice Walker and Howard Zinn. So far, so good. The problem with following writers is that they are ineffective leaders. In the cases of Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader, they can be worse than ineffective. The writers are insightful, entertaining, informative and well-fed, but they don't get much done. They don't know how. They don't hold office; They can't get elected.

The largest group of voters on the Left takes its inspiration from pragmatic leaders who actually lower themselves to participate in making hard decisions: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Hillary Clinton, the Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer. These leaders master the skills needed to run for public office and the skills needed to govern and work for progressive goals. They really get real laws passed. Real laws, of course, are compromises. Effective office holders are always compromised. Even Lynn Woolsey compromises--and gets denounced by vocal parts of the Left.

Prop 23

Proposition 23 is an effort by oil companies to roll back a law that limits greenshouse gas emissions. Giant multinational oil corporations make the usual Republican claim, which is that limiting greenhouse gas emissions is anti-business and will cost California jobs.

Multinational corporations could not care less about jobs in California. In fact, a war on greenhouse gas emissions will create jobs in the clean technology industry.

What is of more interest are the greed-driven people who run these oil corporations. They are enormously rich but unsatisfied: they want to own everything that exists. They want to own your house and rent you the shoes on your feet. If it's needed to reach their goal, they are quite willing to make the planet uninhabitable for humans, including themselves. Oil Corporations are staffed by the insane.

I guess I will vote no on Proposition 23.

Is Obama a Human Being?

According to about 24% of GOP voters, President Obama is not a human being. He is, instead, the Anti-Christ.

What GOP insanity calls to my mind is that we are one month away from an election that might put the Tea Party in control of Congress. Yet some on the Left are attacking the Democrats. They have reasons, and they have the right to tell us that it makes no difference if Gore or Bush/Cheney becomes President or if the Insane Party or the Democrats chair key committees in Congress.

Maybe because I grew in a working class family, I vote more pragmatically. I sort out the two or three candidates who have a chance to win, and then I vote for the one who will do the least harm. In 2000, for example, I saw that either Gore or Bush would be the next President. I asked myself which one was more apt to kill ordinary people in bunches? Which one will more strongly support Social Security?

American elections are about how much pain will be inflicted on real people, the poor, the middle class, the defenseless around the world. Make your choices.

Willys

I'm back from cycling in Oregon. Maybe the most memorable moment happened in a parking lot along the Columbia Gorge (which is impossibly beautiful). A young father brought his two small children over to examine a jeep parked next to my van. "Isn't that interesting," he told his children. "Of course it isn't a real jeep. It's an imitation. See here, it has 'Willys' marked on it."

(Maybe I should translate--Willys was the once famous company that made the World War II jeep.)

The Permanent Anger Class

What would satisfy the Super Rich? What is it they want?

"Everything."

Civilization started about 7,000 years ago in China and the Middle East. In the last 3% of that 7,000 years, wealthy white men won the right to vote, followed by the remaining white men, then black men, then women. Ordinary people became the owners of land, not just tenants of a king or nation state. Social security and universal medical care were pioneered in Europe. Today gay people are winning equal rights in the United States.

These gains by ordinary people constitute a threat to the Rich owning everything. To reverse the gains, the Rich don't express anger--they fund the mobilization of a permanent Anger Class to express vulgar fears and rage for them.

On television we watch Tea Party paranoids attacking the Democrats and centrist Republicans of Nambypambytown. Teabaggers are stirred to act by Republican leaders like the former Speaker of the House who recently claimed that Obama was channeling his long dead Kenyan father (whom he barely knew) and taking revenge for the way the British had treated black Africans. No charge is too idiotic. There is little that is new in this--it's American politics as usual.

Presidents are typically attacked viciously. The Rich funded an attempt to use the Anger Class to take the government from FDR by force. Truman was labeled a pinko traitor. Eisenhower was called a communist. JFK supposedly intended to build a tunnel under the Atlantic so he could get his orders directly from the Pope. The Clintons murdered Vince Foster, the Republicans said.

The claims that President Obama was born in Kenya or that he is a Muslim fit the same pattern. The Super Rich fund movements designed to stir up the Anger Class whenever a Democrat or centrist Republican gets elected President.

Consider the history of the Liberty League and the John Birch Society. There will always be 2% or 3% of the public with heads of knuckle. With a little planning and a lot of cash, the Anger Class can be set in motion by the Super Rich, and they will gather friends and allies as they storm ahead.

The Super Rich have not gone after President Obama because his father was black, although that adds a tool useful for their purposes. The Super Rich aren't racists--they hire walking tubes of meat to do the racism. The Super Rich probably like Obama, but he has slowed their acquisitions a bit. From their perspective, the Democrats have to go in November.

What would satisfy the Super Rich? What is it they want?

"Everything."

Who Owns the World?

My oldest friend and his wife live in Canada, where Queen Elizabeth owns their house. That makes them fortunate on a planet in which only 15% of the people own land. In Europe, less than 6% of the people own 59% of the arable land. And these enormously wealthy folks get subsidies from the European Union to farm it. That's a good deal.

The world's richest person, far richer than Bill Gates, is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, who owns Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. In fact, she owns lands totalling about three times the size of the United States. The humans who live on her land have two forms of tenure: freehold (a type of tenancy) and leasehold.

This situation is, of course, a continuation of feudalism. A labor parliament passed the Human Rights Act, which offers protection for inferior owners (the Queen is called the superior owner), but any future parliament has the power to repeal this protection. The injustice is not a technicality. During World War II, the British government seized eleven million acres of land while paying little or no compensation.

About 26 kings, emirs, etc., own 20% of the earth's surface. Most of the rest is owned by governments. Every inch of China, for example, is owned by the state, which leases some of it back to the people. The Cuban government owns Cuba. In Ireland, all land is owned by the nation, which took over the British Crown's feudal ownership. And so on.

The first country to encourage ordinary citizens to own land was the United States.

In many countries today written constitutions have built protections for inferior owners. It is unlikely that Queen Elizabeth will actually take control of my friends' home in Canada. What is most curious about the history of landowning-- a history of nearly everyone on earth renting living space from some king--is how, for many thousands of years, we stooped and kissed the whip of superior owners (and still do). What does that say about us?

. . . . read WHO OWNS THE WORLD by Keven Cahill

Manly Men

It occurred to me the other day that patriarchy has been a disappointment.

A case in point was President Obama's pledge during his campaign two years ago to wind down the pointless war against Iraq and build up the useless war against Afghanistan. Why would someone as thoughtful as Obama promise to fight a useless war? The answer: he wanted to get elected.

In a patriarchy nobody wins the highest office by pledging to end two wars at once with no victory. Obama had to promise to fight at least one war or go back to the senate. (This resembles a history story from Ancient Greece.)

Once elected, President Obama began to withdraw troops from Iraq, bringing home about 100,000 Americans. The last 50,000 are scheduled to leave by the end of his term in office. So far, he's getting away with that part of his plan. According to internet sources, Obama is secretly funding 150,000 mercenaries at triple the pay to replace the departing troops, but that would be insane.

I understand that recent Presidents have been senile or clowns or burned out substance abusers, but I'm not ready to agree that Obama is insane.

Meanwhile, despite his campaign promises, Obama has said he plans to wind down the war against Afghanistan and start bringing home troops before the end of next year. That's not manly at all. Maybe Obama plans to run for reelection wearing a dress.

If he does, I'll vote for him.

Delusions

In the September HARPER'S, Garret Keizer commented, in an interesting essay, on the delusion of our society, "not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism . . . in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn." This idea, unsurprisingly, has a long pedigree. We should focus on making this material world a better place.

Some disagree about our main delusion. I recall a French officer sent to help in the American Revolution, who reported back that "these people worship money." That sums up a lot of our recent history.

I doubt if the spiritualist delusion is our worst. About 20% of Americans believe that the Sun travels around the Earth. A third of all Americans, including members of congress, believe that the Constitution protects freedom of religion only for religions that are well liked by the majority.

Among the most deluded are the members of the Tea Party who worship, more or less, our Constitution. In fact, the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution deliberately designed to frustrate Tea Party types (and most of the rest of us, for that matter). The Founding Fathers had a distrust of direct democracy that was based, I suppose, on their knowledge of the conflicts in ancient Athens, their sense of the people around them, and their studies of philosophers like Plato and Socrates, who were totalitarians.

The Constitution the Fathers adopted divided sovereignty into many parts (states vs. federal government, President vs. House, House vs. Senate, voters vs. the Supreme Court, etc.) The effect of this was to slow the pace of possible change to a crawl. That is our frustrating system.

There is much that the Founders did not see coming. They did not expect multinational corporations to take on the funding of our major political parties, assuming control over our financial lives. They granted ordinary citizens the right to bear one-shot rifles that took a minute to reload, not expecting the rise of machine guns. But they did get the Tea Party right. The Tea Party will be stopped by the muddling devices for slowing things down in Constitution they think they support.

We are faced now with an election in which the Republicans of all sorts are going to make gains. It is up to us to get out and limit those short term gains if we can.

Gary Goss

Paint It Black

Loony Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, once ran successfully for the school board while arguing that black was an ungodly and wicked color that invoked the devil. Her attempt to prevent the local high school football team from wearing black uniforms succeeded.

Angle has described her current campaign as divinely inspired. God called on her to run for the Senate. This might be the case--God might have arranged for the Republicans to nominate the only candidate so ludicrous that she would lose to Harry Reid.

The Islamic Community Center

I've been looking through Facebook where many pragmatists have come out with doubts about the Islamic community center--I suspect it is because they don't want to hurt the feelings of the local residents. Yet a recent poll showed that a majority of the people of Manhattan favor building the community center. Community Board 1, which represents the area, including the 9/11 site, voted 29 to 1 in favor of the community center. Manhattan itself is polyglot. And, as Hendrik Hertzberg put it, anguish "is not an entitlement to abandon rationality."

The World Turned Upside Down

Yesterday the Swedish authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, on the charges of rape and molestation. Today the arrest warrant was withdrawn. No reasons were given. Meanwhile a Pentagon spokesperson resembling Lady MacBeth complained that Assange "had blood on his hands."

The Bell Curve

The good news is that the last American combat brigade has left Iraq. Some of us, including former soldiers, have worked for that safe exit for eight years now, and it's a relief to bring home, out of harm's way, our combat troops. Still at risk, of course, are 50,000 advisers and support troops, along with the forces fighting in an apparently pointless war in Afghanistan.

The bad news is that 20% of Americans are morons--I refer to the 20% who maintain that President Obama is a Muslim. I'm not sure what this does to our intelligence bell curve, but it can't be good.

About 60% of us are religious bigots. This figure includes women like Democratic County Supervisor Shirley Zane, who opposes the Muslim cultural center located in Manhattan near the Twin Towers site (which the cultural center predates). Of course she might think that Manhattan is in Kansas or near Occidental, so let me add that the Manhattan in question is found at one end of Long Island in the state of New York. That's a long way from Santa Rosa, but bigotry is elastic enough to stretch around the world, the Bill of Rights be damned.

Finally, THE PROGRESSIVE reports that the New York Times, which consistently referred to waterboarding as torture in the past, changed its ways during the Bush administration. From 2002-2008, the Times called waterboarding torture 1.4% of the time. The reason the Times editorial board gave for its grammatical shift was "We are moral idiots" (not really).

--Gary Goss

Primitive Religions

News reached us this morning that the Taliban in Afghanistan has stoned to death a young couple accused of adultery (it's unclear what "adultery" means to people suffering from religious mania). President Obama is under attack by the Stupid Party for his support of religious tolerance. And a three-bigot federal appeals court has blocked same-sex marriages in California, although they are legal in Canada, Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire and Washington, D.C.

Marry and Do Both

On Wednesday gays will once again be able to marry in California, which reminds me of a 1960's slogan: "Make love, not war, or marry and do both." Anyway, in an era when skies often seem gray, it's nice to catch a few moments of bright sunlight. I'm going to put on k.d. lang, pour some whiskey and toast the idea that we are all human together.

Dr. Laura

In case you don't know, Dr. Laura is a stupid but successful radio talk show host who, yesterday, used the "N" word repeatedly on the air in order to demonstrate, I suppose, that a White person can use a term that is used by some Black persons. She felt it necessary to do this because she is, after all, a racist--Dr. Laura has a history of related episodes.

I mention this because I know a four-year-old who is genuinely repelled by dark skin. She talks about it openly. She did not pick this up from her parents (progressives with advanced degrees) or her teachers. She did not get it from Sesame Street. And this has not been an easy matter to fix. Her family, friends and teachers have not made much headway.

You might ask where this prejudice came from. The answer, I think, is that the election of President Obama did not erase racism from the American scene. Racism is in the water we drink, where it goes almost unnoticed. But a tot can see that Barbie is a blue-eyed blonde. We swim in a lake of cultural biases that progressive adults have learned to get beyond (we hope), but under the surface lurk unseen carnivorous fish.

I'm not talking about the rampant racism of the Tea Party Republicans. I'm dumbfounded that racism reaches down to wonderful children in some unknown way.

----Gary Goss

Lafayette

On my vacation I read an autobiography of the famous Marquis, who turned out to be more than the absurdly young general who once led the charge at Yorktown. Lafayette grew up with a famous name but not much money, spending much of his time running through the woods with peasant children. Unlike most noblemen he was used to physical hardship. As a teenager he inherited a gigantic fortune and went to court (he was apparently tall and likable and welcome everywhere). He joined the French army. Believing that all men (including slaves) should be free, when the King refused permission for Lafayette to join the American Revolution, he bought a boat, loaded it with his friends and followers, and sailed anyway. The American rebels, who had no chance without French cannon, ammunition and soldiers, welcomed him.

Lafayette was not one of the foreign experts who came to train the provincial Americans. He had come, he kept saying, to learn. The Americans, mostly, loved him.

In France after the American Revolution, Lafayette was a hugely popular figure who went on to help dethrone several kings and a dictator (Napoleon). In the French revolution, Lafayette commanded the people's army and worked to set up a constitutional government. His views gradually lost out to the Terror, which Lafayette survived only by crossing the border into Austria, where he was imprisoned in foul conditions for five years until President Washington secured his release. America did not forget Lafayette, and he came back to visit twice. At the time of his death Lafayette was probably the most beloved figure in France and in America.

I came away with this thought. When you look at the popularity of successful progressive leaders, you may detect a pattern: they are hated (as Lafayette was) by the Right and attacked by Far Left (who find them too pragmatic). The most passionate on both sides go after them. That comes with the job. No wonder so few apply for it.

--Gary Goss

Vacation

I was sorry but not surprised to read that the Rohnert Park City Council had ignored their own planning commission and voted 4 to 1 in favor of WallMart. City Councils, not Congress, are the most morally bankrupt institutions in American politics. Much of the time town councils are staffed and controlled by the few who have the free time to pay attention to them: well-off pro-corporate lackies who worship at the alter of Greedyguts.

I'm off to visit Canada the next ten days. I'll be back on about the 10th.

The Two Chelseas

I'm unsure which Chelsea I like best, Chelsea Handler or Chelsea Clinton.

Chelsea Handler is a striking woman who was born in 1975 in New Jersey to poor parents, a Jew and a Mormon. If you never heard of her, she's an award winning stand-up comic with a long-running talk show on cable. She's quite funny if you don't mind cringe-worthy smutty jokes (okay by me). Her sidekick on the talk show is a dwarf.

Chelsea Clinton was born in 1980 and grew up in the White House where she learned good values from her wealthy Protestant parents, a President of the United States and a future Secretary of State. Today she is a hedge fund manager, and she is about to marry in a ceremony that will cost a rumored 3 million dollars. She did not invite the Obamas to her wedding. (Well, we are in a depression, and money is tight.)

This reminds me that in 1965 I invited Lyndon Johnson to my wedding at City Hall in Los Angeles. He didn't come, but someone in his office sent a nice note and signed his name.

I think in the end I have to go with the older Chelsea. The younger one is not all that amusing.

The Gong of Arnold Schwarzenegger

On Wednesday our acting governor vetoed a bill that would have given farm workers the same overtime pay earned by all other hourly workers in California. He did not want to upset agricorporations, who feast on cheap labor.

The social injustice is obvious.

Very hard stoop labor on farms is so badly paid that, in many places, the only people willing to do it are undocumented migrants. If you raised the pay, you might attract local citizens. But Schwarzenegger is too dim to think ahead. Steroids have solidified the gong he calls a head.

The Irrelevant Press Democrat

Last Sunday's Press Democrat ran its usual confused commentary on "warring tribes" in local and national politics. "The issues that motivate these warring tribes are no longer relevant," someone wrote. The issues he cited as irrelevant are mostly environmental, including resistance to big chain stores, and doubts raised about massive land development by multinational corporations. The PD, a decent paper in some ways, has never met a corporation whose backside it didn't fondle.

The newspaper's curiously ahistorical claim is that the warring political tribes are dying off, being replaced by young sane centrists. The evidence cited for major change is the Sonoma County elections of Supervisor Efron Carillo in 2008 and the election of Supervisor Mike McGuire in 2010.

In fact the struggle between greedyguts and compassion predates written history and shapes each new generation as it matures. Greedyguts doesn't become irrelevant in the same sense that newspapers become irrelevant.

I don't remember what position the Press Democrat took on Carillo when he ran in 2008. I do recall that the PD opposed McGuire, who won without its useless endorsement.

***

From my perspective, what has been happening is not the rise of new neutral or conciliatory generation but the demise of the local Republican party. Sonoma County voters today are overwhelmingly Democratic. The local plutocracy has responded to this fact in three shrewd ways. (1) They have encouraged Republican politicians to switch parties and run as centrist Democrats. (2) In races that end up being contested by two progressive Democratic candidates, Republican voters are advised to vote as a block for the more polite Democrat. That can decide a close election and give the well-funded and well-organized Republican machine a little clout with the winner (they hope). (3) The plutocracy has orchestrated a campaign (see the claims above) to convince Carillo and McGuire that they are and should be political castrati.

Are Carillo and McGuire the sort of Democrats who believe in science (climate change), equal rights for gays, compassion (immigration reform), fiscal sense, no unnecessary wars, careful county planning, full employment, etc? I don't know Carillo, but he has forcefully resisted racial profiling (and been denounced for it). I've known Mike McGuire for ten years, and it's obvious that his core values are progressive. The Board of Supervisors has not shifted to some neutral pro-corporation center, as the Press Democrat hopes. The Board has moved Left.

Gary Goss

Dog Whistle Politics

You might wonder why the ancient Chinese built the Great Wall. It was to keep out Mexicans, Canadians and Mongols; it didn't work.

********************************************

William Rivers Pitt wrote in Truthout about "dog whistle" politics. "Dog whistle" is a new name for an older Republican practice. Wikipedia, Pitt notes, defines the term thusly: Dog-whistle politics, also known as the use of code words, is a type of political campaigning or speechmaking employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is an analogy to dog whistles built in such a way that humans cannot hear them due to their high frequency, but dogs can.

Pitt is concerned because of coded messages coming from places like Pat Robertson's "700 Club." Robertson has nothing but praise for attempted Adolf Hitler assassin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a trained theologian.

Pitt wrote: "The interview basically stated that it is the holy work of any good Christian to assassinate a fascist tyrant, and given the serial ways these right-wing media people have used those exact terms to describe the President, it is a pretty short leap to realize the "700 Club" was essentially sending the [coded] message that whoever puts a bullet in Obama will be considered a saint on the level of Bonhoeffer."

The invention of lying

A turning point in the history of American political dementia came when the Confederacy trudged home from the Civil War with a silver medal. The pathological thinking the South had needed to justify slavery lives on 150 years later in the current hate campaigns against people of color, against science and education and against the elected national government.

Some racists today threaten to adopt what they call "second amendment solutions." That's a call for a second Civil War. There will be--of course--no war. Even the badly warped Republican leadership, trained in hateful lying, will stop short of another open rebellion. What concerns me are attempts to reason with these addled prevaricators. It cannot be done successfully. They are not equipped to participate in rational discussion.

The Second Amendment

Recently our dismal Supreme Court--may five of them burn in Hell with broken backs--ruled that the Second Amendment to the Constitution granted individuals the right to bear arms. What interests me, though, is the fact that for many years leading liberal intellectuals argued that the founding fathers had passed the second amendment to make sure that militias, not individuals, could bear arms. (Not all of the left agreed. My closest Marxist friend, ready for the revolution, owned a submachinegun he used to fire off his back porch on the Fourth of July. When I attempted to fire my 1873 Winchester, he stopped me on the grounds that it might explode and endanger the children.)

The argument that Mason and Jefferson and Madison had written a Constitutional right for militias to bear arms but no parallel right for the cavalry to ride horses or for the navy to sail ships had long troubled me. In fact, all militias have the right to bear arms--it's part of the definition of a militia. The argument that the second amendment protects the rights of soldiers to carry guns makes no sense.

Here is what really happened. The founding fathers granted each of us the right to carry a sword or a one-shot musket. Looking ahead, they correctly envisioned the Sergeant Yorks and Audie Murphys of future wars, draftees who had learned to shoot accurately on their own time. It did not occur to Madison that some sociopath might invade a public school, hold hundreds of children prisoner and massacre many of them with a one-shot weapon. The times (and arms) have changed.

If we want to ban guns entirely, we will have to amend the Constitution. If we want to regulate guns (as we regulate cars), we might have to amend the Supreme Court.

--Gary Goss

The Future of Our Form of Life

Some American voters tend to vote thoughtlessly. If they are annoyed by the weather, they may vote someone out (and vote into office an idiot). That's a sad fact of life.

Consider the Republican agenda below. It's what we will get if the Republicans win in 2010.

• Privatize Social Security
• Cut taxes for the rich
• Log the national forests
• Expand offshore gas and oil drilling
• Privatize highways and waterways

Not to speak of more wars. Not to speak of climate change and its impact on the future of our species.

We need to make a maximum effort to turn back the Tea Party Republicans.

Gary Goss

Winter's Bone

About once in two years I see a striking movie, something original. Recent examples include MONSTER'S BALL, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and MICHAEL CLAYTON. Last night I saw WINTER'S BONE, and I'd like to recommend it.

This is a film impossible for me to compare to others, but after a night of troubled sleep I 'm going to try. I'd say it combined EMMA (or CLUELESS) with the Orson Welles thriller TOUCH OF EVIL. It's like a novel of manners set among violent hill people who are cooking crank. A teenage girl sets out to keep her family together. . . .

Reactions to the movie will differ, I believe, according to one's background. A major part of my family left Kentucky four generations back in order to escape from the Hatfield--McCoy feud. We came from people somewhat like those depicted in the film, and I felt the cultural kinship. I saw something upbeat in the movie. My wife, with nothing like that in her background, experienced the film differently, perhaps because she lacks a "been down so long it looks like up to me" mentality. She found the movie grim but memorable.

Survival

A message to Republicans from Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives. . . nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."

--Gary Goss

Idiocracy

Recently Keith Olberman referred to Republican leaders as resembling "dogs chasing a car."

Dogs chasing cars, yapping, aren't dogs at their best. Dogs can't take on cars. They sometimes get caught under the wheels. Their tremendous effort is wildly brainless, and so dangerous you'd rather not watch.

The last forty years have witnessed a steady decline in intelligence among Republican leaders, and now the party is headed by people who seem genuinely clueless. That didn't happen by chance. Step by step, over the years, the Republican Party has been moved to the Right when centrist politicians lost in party primaries. Finally they fell off a cliff.

At this point, to win a Republican primary, you have to agree that the world is 10,000 years old, that climate science is a Marxist plot, that Hawaii is Kenya, that corporations are people, and that, although the government supplies you with social security and medicare, you stand alone, a proudly free individual who doesn't need government (except for food, clothing, shelter, water, safety, highway maintenance, and entertainment). You take for granted that progressives exist as a form of unmotivated absolute evil. You're willing to make the planet uninhabitable if you can get rich in the process.

To believe the above you must be mighty dumb, but American politics has long been shot through with absurdities, including the belief that slavery was a good thing for people with dark skin, and proof of this was to be found in the Christian Bible. Learning to accept that rubbish built a level of political lunacy into the South that might last until the end of time, which some expect in a month or two.

The running dogs of Transnational Corporations are seen most clearly in elected leaders who continue to defend BP in ways that even BP finds embarrassing. When it comes to electing stupid people to congress, we have finally reached bottom. And that's the way some of us like it. Some hope to live in an Idiocracy.

--Gary Goss

Soccer Distopia

America's sports writers seem upset with our country's failure to win soccer's World Cup--as if that had been an option. Soccer, of course, is our country's most popular youth sport; about half the fathers I know have served as soccer coaches in recreational leagues. Our sports talkers and writers respond to these facts by mocking the sport mercilessly, taking time out every fourth year to demand victory at the World Cup

Perhaps victory for the United States had been an option, because in soccer, as in baseball, the worse team often wins. This tendency gets exaggerated in soccer; the refereeing is often absurdly incompetent. In this tournament I saw (on television) three goals disallowed for no reason.

The teams from Mexico and the United States did well. Both made it through the preliminary groups into the final round of 16. That's not bad for North America, a continent with only three teams to start with. Landon Donovan demonstrated high competence, as did the American goal keeper. As I see it, the USA and Mexico made it into the top 16, and maybe next time they'll make it into the top eight.

Three Reasons Why the Left Seldom Wins

1. I was watching Amy Goodman a few days ago. She is almost the only source of genuine world news on TV. She's the best source of bad news. But when Amy runs out of bad news to report, she fills in her free time by recalling atrocities that occurred ten years before.

I wonder how many of her followers have become totally discouraged? (There's one in my house.)

2. The moratorium on whaling is ending. Time is running out. It wasn't a total moratorium--it had loopholes, and the Japanese and two other nations continue to kill whales and munch on them. Recently representatives of the human world met and attempted to set up up a new plan. Japan, backed by the African nations it supplies with foreign aid, blocked a moratorium. The USA offered a compromise that allowed some whaling (but less whaling than the current loopholed moratorium). The American Left cried out at their own wretched compromising government. But no worries--the whaling commission rejected the pragmatic compromise so condemned by people like me. We have a different kind of compromise: Japan is free to kill whales at will, while I retain my moral purity.

3. The leaders of the Left in Sonoma County seem in some cases to be Truthers who get their information about 9/11 from a source that broadcasts through their dental fillings. Yet to succeed we need able leaders who can communicate with centrists.

So it goes.

--Gary Goss

Tea Party Madness

We live in strange times with Birthers to the right of us and Truthers to the Left, but little seems as odd to me as a state government, that of Arizona, taken over by teabaggers. The Tea Party is mad, a topic taken up by J. M. Birnstein, a philosophy professor writing for the NY Times Opinionator (called to my attention by John Cascone). Birnstein's conclusion is that teabaggers are enraged because they dearly love the ancient American myth of individual autonomy. Arizona's Tea Party activists are rightwing anarchists, a "libertarian mob." They want to deny vaccination, school their children at home, treat emotional problems with beer, and treat medical problems with water and chanting. They want to be left alone, yet they find themselves dependent on government for road maintenance, fire safety, social security checks, Medicare, etc. And government is tottering, calling attention to itself.

Arizona is short of everything but retired Republicans. The state lacks industry. Liquid life, sucked from ground wells, is running out--which why some cities are cutting down their woods. As State Senator Sylvia Allen put it, trees were "stealing Arizona's water supply." Madness.

Birnstein's hypothesis is that events have demonstrated to teabaggers the absolute dependence of everyone on government action, and this is exactly what the teabaggers do not want to know. Social Security was fine as long as we ignored it and pretended to be autonomous. That was the social bargain: pretending to be independent of others. Today the teabaggers cannot ignore the role of government, and like the rest of us they can't control Washington. Hence we see rage and madness produced, Birnstein writes, not by politics but metaphysics. The Tea Party, he points out, "wants nothing." It expresses a nihilistic fury of destruction. At its peak, it breaks up meetings.

As apt as Birnstein's analysis is, it's obviously incomplete. The July Harper's published an article by Ken Silverstein that helps fill in the picture. Arizona's legislature, he points out, is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists and cranks. They have to respond to the country's worst budget crisis. Naturally, they fired hundreds of state auditors and tax collectors, saving $25 million and costing $174 million in lost revenue. They sold their capitol building and then rented it back. Madness.

Arizona is the first (and one hopes the only) state actually taken over by tea party activists, who dominate the local Republican Party. These people (mostly old white people) are, Silverstein writes, fixated on taxes and immigration; and they control the Republican primaries. They believe that government exists to help the undeserving. Funding for GED programs "has been reduced to zero."

Much of the anger, of course, has been directed at Latinos. Some of this is racism. Some of it is a hatred of diversity--which is why it is now illegal to teach Latino children about their heritage in the public schools. Teabaggers want their (imaginary) country back. They feel the rage of betrayal. They hope they can stop change and live in an unchanging world.

The BP Gusher

I like to think that my undistinguished working class family does have one claim to fame. My ancestors labored in the industries most responsible for California's environmental disasters. When ridding the Sierras of redwoods was the main thing, my people were lumberjacks. In fact one great-grandfather, a master carpenter, designed and built the world's longest wooden flume (later used as a thrill ride) to bring lumber 60 miles down from Hume Lake to Sanger. When the redwoods gave out, my forebears moved into the oil fields of the Big Valley in time for the Lakeview Gusher, which blew oil a hundred feet into the air for 540 days, which brings me to this.

The BP "oil spill" in the Gulf is not an oil spill. That's BP rubbish. An oil spill takes place when a tanker springs a leak. What BP did, in the name of greed, was bring in a gusher in water so deep the well couldn't be capped. They killed nine workers. All of that should be a crime.

--Gary Goss

McGuire and Fudge: Good People

As some of you recall, I supported both Debora Fudge and Mike McGuire for supervisor in the 4th district, where I live. Both are excellent people and strong progressive candidates. McGuire won by a twenty point margin--which I had predicted--and some people are asking why.

Several factors were involved, but the crucial factor was that Paul Kelley, the incumbent Republican, decided not to run for re-election. McGuire, as he has done in other races, campaigned for every vote in the district, including the Republicans. Fudge made his effort to gain Republican support a campaign issue. When votes were counted, Fudge and McGuire had split the progressive vote (I'm guessing), and McGuire took everyone else.

I note that McGuire won despite the endorsement of Fudge by the Press Corporate Democrat's rather dim editorial board.

We owe Debora Fudge and Mike McGuire our thanks for the efforts they put in representing progressive causes in a demanding campaign. I can't recall another election in which I had the luxury of admiring both candidates.

A really big oil spill

It's no consolation, but the Gulf Oil Spill is not the largest in our nation's history. I come from a family of oil workers who were drilling in Kern County in 1910 when the Lakeview gusher exploded into the sky. It was five times the size of the Gulf Oil Spill and lasted 544 days. Berms were built and a lot of the oil was contained. About half the oil made it to market. The rest soaked into the near desert, where you can find it today in the form of asphalt. There is a small monument there, too.

If faced with a choice between greed and common sense, well, common sense isn't much of a motivator. Greed is powerful.

Al and Tipper

I can't tell you how many times I said through the years that Al and Tipper's marriage wouldn't last.

When a long marriage fails at the end, which happens more often than you might expect, consider the investment in time and emotion. You can find a new partner, but you usually can't turn to her or to him and say, "Remember the time when the Saint Bernard ran between Aunt Helen's legs?" Your new partner never met Aunt Helen or your father and mother. So much gets lost.

Good News

The news, almost by definition, is news that will bum you out. Good news is seldom interesting enough to get mentioned on TV or the radio, but consider this minor non-Republican effort.

The Healthy San Francisco program, passed in 2006, offers care to uninsured adults not covered by Medi-Cal or Medicare. It now covers about 53,000 people.

San Francisco restaurant owners have appealed to the California Supreme Court to block having to pay for part of the costs of the program. The Obama administration's lawyers filed arguments last week urging the Supreme Court to reject this appeal.

---Gary Goss

We Are A Mighty Nation Containing Contradictions

1. As usual, a group of especially greedy trolls has mailed out a fake endorsement card to Democrats. The title of this deception is DEMOCRATIC ELECTION EDUCATION GUIDE.

2. China's economy is doing better than the economies of Europe and North America. China enforces regulations. If we want our economy to survive, we will regulate it.

3. Building a fence along our southern border and backing it with national guard troops will not keep out undocumented workers. Most undocumented workers enter our country legally with visas. When the visas expire, the workers stay here. The USA does not keep track of such matters--catching useful and inexpensive workers might cut into corporate profits. (Also note that studies now show that undocumented workers pay more in taxes than they take from the system.)

Gary Goss

New Law in Arizona

From Bill Maher (I think). New law in Arizona: beans may be fried only once.

RAND PAUL, fool

We should note Stephen Gale's discussion of Rand Paul's teabagger defense of private property's right to discriminate against people of color. All in the name of freedom, of course. But Paul thinks it is okay for the government to control public property. Gale notes that in Paul's view, a uterus must be public property. (By the way, when did we start naming people after think tanks?)

Weird Stats

In an NPR interview (Robert Seigel and Roberton Williams), Williams discussed who pays federal income taxes. About 47% pay no federal income tax: the poor, people with many children and the elderly. The rich pay aout 24% of the total income tax. Those making more than $100,000 a year pay 56% of the income tax total. By some oversight, we still have a moderately progressive federal income tax.

HARPER'S reports another poll that shows 59% of Americans support allowing homosexuals to serve in the military, while 70% support allowing gay men and lesbians to serve. Let's see--if you subtract 59 from 70 you get 11%, the figure for those without brain stems participating in a typical poll

----Gary Goss

Below is an informal roundup of endorsements for the primary election, which has begun.

For judge the county central committee has endorsed Thislethwaite and Broderick.

Proposition 13 (seismic retrofits) has been endorsed by the Democrats and AFSCME but opposed by the Nurses Association. I know nothing more.

Proposition 15 (fair elections) has been endorsed by nearly all liberal groups.

Proposition 16 (PG&E ripoff) has been condemned by everyone decent and also by the Press Corporate-Democrat (!)

Proposition 17 (Mercury Insurance Rate Hikes) has been condemned across the board.

That leaves proposition 14, which would change the state primary system so that the top two vote getters, regardless of party affiliation, would face each other in the general election. Both the major political parties oppose this measure; it would make it more difficult for party regulars to control primary results. It would tend to blur ideological conflicts and produce more centrist candidates. At least that is what I would expect. Moderate Republicans might profit (as things stand, they can't win Republican primaries). In the primaries you would get crossover voting (Republicans voting for Democratic candidates and vice versa).

I don't know what to say. You might get two parties that would be less sharply divided by ideology or you might get a mushy situation manipulated by Big Money. Or both.

-----------------------Gary Goss

Betty White and Arizona

Betty White

Betty White first popped up on television in 1952, when I was in high school and TV was three channels in Los Angeles. I don't remember the programs, but she might have been on A HIT OR A MISS?

TV was simpler in those days, just a couple of people sitting in wooden chairs and spinning new Bing Crosby records, after which a panel would discuss the new song and vote on whether it would be, yes, a hit or a miss.

Betty White was local and young and lively and an instant hit with my whole family. We were surprised but pleased when, as an older woman, she became a regular on the Mary Tyler Moore's national show and so on. Last night she appeared, age 88.5, on Saturday Night Live. In other words, her career stretches from the start of commercial TV to the present. Now she's old and lively. She's amazing.

ARIZONA

Arizona needs a new start. It might begin by giving up racism--Arizona was the last state to adopt Martin Luther King Day, which they did only after a nationwide boycott. Next Arizona could fine and jail anyone who employs an undocumented worker. That would bring an end to the Arizona economy, and the place could begin life again as an attractive but empty desert.

--Gary Goss

THE DUTCH MIRACLE

When automation came along in the 1960s, I recall the authorities telling us that while automation would displace a few workers, it would also create many fine new jobs. A few individuals might not make the transition smoothly, but most of us would benefit. If you were working class, that turned out to be incorrect, and today, thanks to automation, outsourcing and population growth, there aren't enough good jobs in the world to go around.

When you watch science fiction movies, do you wonder at times what kinds of jobs people work at? The main characters usually have military jobs, but what do the other billions of people do?

***

In 1982 Dutch business and labor leaders, according to MOTHER JONES, struck a deal that cut the work week to four days. That drove unemployment down from 10% to 5%. This event is known as "the Dutch miracle." And there is no chance at all that American leaders, hobbled by ludicrous ideologies, could consider this solution.

Saggio Hills Plagiarism

Several years back, when the Healdsburg City Council was negotiating with developers to build a resort for the idle rich in the Saggio Hills, it occurred to me to look at the environmental impact report on Saggio Hills and to compare it with the much older EIR on nearby Parkland Farms. As I expected, I found whole paragraphs in the new report that had been copied word for word from the older report on a different site. Copying saves a lot of time and increases the profit margin. It's apparently a common practice.

At the time I wrote a letter to the editor of our town paper, who published the letter. Local deciders, their brains temporarily stunted by lizardlike greed, ignored me. They hurried by.

Today, at the request of a county judge, a new EIR for Saggio has been ordered up, not because the first one was plagiarized (apparently no one can deal with that) but because the first one forgot to check out water demand and so forth. The new study is supposed to take six months if it isn't copied from the Parkland Farms EIR. My guess is that it will take several days.

----Gary Goss

Earth Insurance

At the suggestion of Chris O'Sullivan, I drove down to the Sonoma Academy last night to hear a talk by Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider. Schneider, a leading expert on climate change, was speaking at a meeting of the U.N. Association. I won't try to repeat the lecture here, except to mention some key points.

Schneider was highly critical of the (inane) ritual on radio and TV where the host presents speakers for both sides of the climate change issue: a scientist who tells the truth and an unqualified professional liar from the coal companies. The effect is to keep the country confused.

The speaker said that 97% of climate scientists believe that global warming is real and caused, in part, by human activity. (For balance, should we give the other 3% half of the air time?) What we need is to get an informed discussion going on what to do. How we cope with the change is an ethical rather than a scientific question.

Risky business--it is currently possible and relatively cheap to shoot enough dust into the air to reverse warming. The problem is that the results would be dangerously unpredictable.

This generation is deciding the climate that the next 100 generations will live with. Schneider's best hope is that the government will get serious about developing green energy sources. If we want less developed countries to take climate change seriously, we will need to help them master cheap green technology.

Schneider pointed out that most of us have fire insurance policies for our homes, although few of us get burned out. Why not take out some insurance on our planet? Funding green technology would have that effect.

Short Items

Stephen Colbert believes we already have an effective barrier against undocumented workers. "We lined the border with our crappiest states."

Lucie Jensen has suggested that Arizona's plan to require all citizens to carry proof of citizenship (buy passports) is a tax to raise money for the federal government.

A rich man's disease?--a Chelsea Lately guest pointed out that poor people never get treated for sex addiction.

TEA PARTY PLATFOM

For the Tea Party to succeed, it needs a positive platform that extends beyond states' rights (the right to own slaves, the right to secede if you can't own slaves, etc.). A friend has suggested four positions that would make a promising start.

1. Tea Party members pledge to refuse the Obama's middle class tax cuts. About 97.4% of Tea Party members have received these cuts. Returning the money will balance the budget.

2. It is in our power to return our health care to private sources. Tea Party members will immediately drop out of Medicare, a socialist takeover of the health industry.

3. Tea Party Members will burn their social security cards and mail back all social security checks, rejecting a plot to undermine the independent American character.

4. We will demand our rights. Two centuries after the Boston Tea Party, we still have no representation in the British Parliament.

REAL-TIME INSURANCE: Tom Belton's Analysis of Health Care That Does Not Require People To Be Covered

REAL-TIME INSURANCE

Now that medical insurance cannot be denied for pre-existing conditions, we can look forward to this feature being applied to other insurance products.

We can start in the home with our fire insurance. Why pay those premiums for all those years you don’t have a fire? Only when smoke is detected will your smoke alarm wirelessly connect to your insurance company and bind your fire insurance, then it will call the Fire Department.

Auto liability insurance will be activated when the bumper detects contact with another vehicle and full collision coverage will be bound when an air bag goes off and Triple A will be called. Many GM vehicles have the similar On-Star wireless system now.

With the current pace of innovations in personal medical devices, our Pacemaker/Defibrillator will soon evolve into a Total Body Function Monitor that will have access to your medical records that can detect malfunction or trauma and decide if you should just visit a doctor or need full hospital attention and then will wirelessly arrange the appropriate insurance coverage and call the ambulance.

The final insurance product is, of course, your life insurance. This is only needed once, so despite the uncertainty, it should only be bought when needed. This is where your Body Function Monitor will really pay for itself. It will detect the cessation of body function and then buy your life policy and call the undertaker.

These insurance products should be inexpensive because there will be no agents or brokers involved. Our wireless communication devices will deal directly with the insurance company’s computers with no human intervention. Because of the risk of false alarms, these policies will have five day cancellation clauses at the buyer’s option. The insurance industry will probably insist on using their adjusters with these settlements, except for the life policies where there is not much to adjust.

Tom Belton

Refighting the Civil War

On Facebook these days I see people refighting the Civil War. That is, they deny that slavery was a major factor in the war, and some of these deniers are not from the South. They're victims of ancient propaganda.

Slaves constituted much of the wealth of the Southern elite. To defend slavery and greed (and the barely masked rape and murder of Blacks in the South) required a serious warping of Christian religion and American political theory. To defend slavery you had to defend rubbish--you had to pretend that you loved states' rights, for example. If you could make a case for states' rights, then perhaps you could con Robert E. Lee into leading your army. (As I recall he led it to defeat.)

Never mind that this enduring mind-bending Southern rubbish was and remains devoted to an obviously losing side in human history.

It's 150 years since my anti-slavery ancestors kicked Southern butt all the way to Fort Sumpter, yet we still hear the same rubbish: the governor of Texas threatens to leave the union. But I take heart. In ten or twenty years Texas will once again be Latino.

Gary Goss

Coakley vs. Cheney

Two quips I've come across:

Republicans won't let lesbians marry each other but eagerly pay thousands to watch fake lesbian sex in a night club.

Martha Coakley could not beat Dick Cheney for mayor of Berkeley.

Party Unity

The Pragmatic Left is made up of those who back Obama while disagreeing with some major policies, starting with his war in Afghanistan. Their opposite is the Idealistic Left who energetically attack Obama. This difference is sometimes thought of as a difference in party unity, with the Pragmatic Left putting the Democratic party above principle, but that's a misunderstanding.

It's the Idealistic Left that focuses on party unity. That is, they are disappointed that the Democrats are not unified in pursuit of progressive goals. The Pragmatic Left never believed that a big tent party could be unified. They aren't loyal to a party. They believe that they are working in a corporate system that makes every positive change as difficult as possible. They are loyal to specific goals and willing to take small steps in what they hope will be the right direction.

The Pragmatic Left ranges from Obama to the somewhat less pragmatic Kucinich and Michael Moore. The Idealistic Left, refusing big-tent compromises, is represented by Ralph Nader, who still believes that it made no difference if Bush or Gore got elected President.

***

Chris O'Sullivan sent along the following recent quote from someone called Fishpeddler: "It's important to remember that Republican elites think they are raising revenues by cutting taxes to the rich. The technical term for this theory is The Fifth Stage of Tequila (after 1. I'm rich, 2. I'm good looking, 3. I'm bullet-proof, 4. I'm invisible)."

---Gary Goss

1. In Republican health terms, this Fascist Communist country was doomed from the start when, in 1798, Congress enacted the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen Act. That was just the kind of thing that Hitler did.

2. Will the coverage of Cheetah Woods never end? I'm wearing out my remote control turning him off.

Republican Record

From Chris O'Sullivan (with thanks)

I come from a long-standing Republican family. Everyone in my family (myself excepted) has voted Republican in all contests, presidential and gubernatorial, since 1856. But lets face historical reality: the GOP has been on the wrong side of every major issue for the past 100 years, at least since TR's administration. They opposed American participation in the League of Nations; their pro-Wall Street policies in the 20's produced the Great Depression; they then opposed every effort to reduce the consequences of the Depression; they opposed every New Deal reform, including Social Security, banking reform, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining; 40 hour work week; and public works; they opposed FDR's efforts to fight fascism; they opposed health expansion plans proposed by Gov. Earl Warren AND President Harry Truman; they opposed Medicare in 1965 (Ronald Reagan predicted the end of freedom over THAT one, the End of Days itself); they staunchly opposed all Civil Rights legislation, including for African Americans, women, and gays and lesbians; and they've opposed Health Care reform since at least 1935. They've played the Race Card in just about every election since Reagan's 1966 gubernatorial crusade. Oh, don't forget their creation of massive deficits through tax giveaways to the super wealthy in 1981-82 and 2001-2002. Great track record, there. They've really put their "Country First" -- as was their slogan in 2008. No doubt they'll have much to campaign on in 2010. -- Chris

A lot happened in the last week.

I should write something about the health care bill. For one thing, there will be some nearly immediate benefits. Six months after the bill is enacted, the insurance companies will be banned from dropping your coverage because you became ill. Also the drug payment doughnut hole will begin to close right away.

1. Nancy Pelosi now holds the title of the most powerful woman in the history of the United States. Think of that. She is, among other things, a product of the progressive Burton machine in San Francisco--she holds Phil Burton's old seat--so the Bay Area can take some local pride in her.

The Democrats and progressives have passed a difficult bill; it seems possible, after all, to enact legislation the Republicans and teabaggers oppose. Let's do it again.

2. The Republicans strongly oppose catering to selfish special interest groups. Someone pointed out that nurses are a special interest group. So are carpenters, dentists, teachers, singers, police officers, etc. They aren't real American voters, just special interest groups we should denounce if we are Republican.

Who are the real Americans, the ones not in a special interest group? The Presidents of multi-national corporations?

3. Sue, Tim and I represented the Democratic & Progressive Club and the Healdsburg Peace Project in the big happy march on Sunday to call attention to immigrant rights. According to the Press Democrat about 5,000 people walked together to Courthouse Square. At one corner there was a brief confrontation just before I arrived. Apparently some white teabaggers stood on the sidewalk and yelled at the masses of people strolling by, people who, in most cases, were partly descended from North American Indians.The white dudes were telling the brown walkers to go back where they came from.

Ah . . . stupidity. We never get enough of it.

Gary Goss

Pragmatic Progressives

As I write this, the health care bill is in the balance. Dennis Kucinich has just announced his support for the legislation, and the Left's Circular Firing Squad has stacked its rifles for the moment. Time out to think. . . .

My sense is that most progressive reformists are pragmatic. That covers a range of views from Barack Obama to Michael Moore, with Obama and Clinton being, perhaps, more pragmatic than progressive and Moore, Rachel Maddow and Kucinich being more progressive than pragmatic.

Definition: A pragmatic progressive understands how to get minor improvements done in our corporate governance system.

The other sort of progressive is the Black & White Idealist, someone who believes that a democracy should function without compromises among the different groups. An example might be a voter who holds it made no difference to the children of Iraq whether Al Gore or Dick Cheney became President, because both candidates were imperfect.

No one likes the health care bill, not even the insurance companies. But here's the thing. If it passes in the next few days, it will save some lives and crack open a door that might lead to universal coverage.That's why Kucinich held his nose and offered his vote.

A little more than a year ago, my younger sister died because she had no health care. For me there is nothing abstract about the current proposal.

Gary Goss

Military Commies

As some of you know, the Pentagon now includes the impact of climate change in its contingency plans. The military does this in the belief that climate change is likely to result in social unrest.

Now if someone could just convince the Stupid Party. . . .

Knowledge Is Power

For about a year some of us have been trying to talk the City Council in Healdsburg into an ordinance that would require the gathering of information on the impact on the community of any large new property development. The big business majority on the council has dug in its heels, rejecting information. For a while this attitude baffled me. But then I noticed that Republicans on a national level were opposed to a health insurance exchange (a place where coverages and costs of different health insurance plans could be easily compared).

What it boils down to is this. The Republicans want to make it as hard as possible for ordinary citizens to compare one health plan to another; they want to make it difficult for ordinary people to gather facts about the impacts of a new property development. The less information available, the easier it will be to control the outcome.

Knowledge isn't always power. Just before the start of the second war against Iraq, many of us knew from UN reports that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, but we couldn't stop the carnage. Sometimes, though, knowledge helps. The Republicans understand that. That's why they systematically block attempts to gather facts.

Escape From Freedom

In its March issue HARPER'S reports on the brutal murders of Salah Ahmed Al-Slami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybe and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani at our secret Camp No in Guantanamo. We should try to remember their names. None of them had been charged with a crime. All had been eligible for early release. The Bush regime hid the murders by calling them suicides. The Obama administration has declined to investigate.

I mention this to illustrate why Americans ranging from Teabaggers to Greens to unaffiliated citizens no longer trust what the government says. A recent poll found that 86% of Americans believe that their government no longer works. We do not expect our government to do the right thing. We expect to be lied to. This set of public expectations is relatively new in America, new in my lifetime, although similar beliefs were once common in 20th century dictatorships.

Who are these people who no longer believe in our government? We see oddballs on the fringes who are as paranoid as Dick Cheney on acid, but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about myself. Ask yourself. Have you been lied to? Do you expect the governments of America and California to do the right thing? What about the governments of Sonoma County or of our towns? Will they demonstrate something approaching common sense?

The assumption that a body of elected American representatives might exhibit common sense makes me smile--it seems absurd. But I hope there are occasions when it happens.

Contemporary life is confusing and relativistic at best. Each of us has countless decisions to make based on incomplete information. We might begin as Catholics and end as Protestants. We know we can't trust our elected leaders or our cultural leaders, who often speak from ignorance--I'm thinking of Noam Chomsky chastising tribal people in Central America because they'd voted for candidates he hadn't approved.

There is a way out, of course. That's what the teabaggers and Stalinists are about. If you want to be free from anxiety, adopt a set of absolutes (of the right or of the left) that induce black-and-white thinking. Fanaticism soothes the fanatic . . . as long as she manages to squelch the relativism lurking somewhere inside, as Berger and Zijderveld point out in a recent book, IN PRAISE OF DOUBT.

We understand this much: we know why people become dogmatic. They choose not to be free.

--Gary Goss