politics – Page 5

Another day in the nation our fathers fought and died for

Newly reported this day in The Country Formerly Known As The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave:

There is a growing mountain of evidence to suggest that the anthrax attacks that followed on the heels of 9/11 were orchestrated from within our own government to cement the public’s fear and distrust of Islam and propagandize for war with Iraq.
We are prisoners within our national borders, except for those willing to surrender their privacy, their property, and their right to due process.

Just one day in Bush country. (Another recent day.)

About the anthrax attacks: Glenn Greenwald (the superb Salon.com reporter whose column I linked to above) points out that the anthrax/Iraq propaganda campaign — which is fact, not surmise; the falsehoods involved have been exposed and not refuted — was carried out by multiple “well-placed sources” feeding misinformation to ABC News, which repeated the talking points so faithfully that it became ingrained in the national discourse.

This put me in mind of a story that Larry Flynt told in an interview a few years ago (coincidentally also in Salon.com — or not so coincidentally, considering how few good, independent news outlets there are):

In 2000, I got a call from a lawyer in Houston. He told me that his client, “Susan,” could prove that George W. Bush arranged for his girlfriend to have an abortion back in the early 1970s. Her boyfriend at the time, “Clyde,” was pals with Bush and set up the procedure. We checked up and found that indeed “Clyde” was responsible for keeping Bush out of trouble. Bush had knocked up a girl named “Rayette.” We talked to the doctor that performed the abortion. We felt we really had a blockbuster story, but about two months before we were going to break the story, “Susan” disappeared. We finally found her. She was living in a half-million-dollar home in Corpus Christi, Texas. Before that she was living in a small apartment working for $13,000 a year as a cocktail waitress. I’m not saying Bush bought her off, but I’m confident that one or more of his cronies did. The only thing that interested me in this story is — I’m pro-choice, but to have a guy who is running on a pro-life platform… and this procedure was committed in 1971, two years before Roe vs. Wade, which would have made it a crime.

I went to two members of the national press (during the 2000 presidential campaign) and said, “Look. I don’t have anyone out on the stump. You guys do. At least ask Bush the question.” You know what? They refused to. One of them had the nerve to tell me that the election was too close. “We don’t want to be the ones to tip it in any direction.”

“We don’t want to be the ones to tip it in any direction” — as if by withholding the news they somehow weren’t doing exactly that.

I can almost identify with what that reporter told Flynt. Early in my career as a computer programmer I occasionally soliloquized about my unwillingness to work on anything much more mission-critical than e-mail software. “I could never write medical software,” I’d say, “or flight-control software, or anything like that. If there’s a bad bug in my code, the worst that happens is that someone loses some personal data. They don’t die.” I found the very idea of that much responsibility appalling.

But guess what? Someone’s gotta write the mission-critical code. If I’ve got the knowledge and the access, it’s my responsibility to do it, because otherwise someone not as qualified might do it in my place and then I would share some of the blame for any critical failures anyway. On the flip side, who’s to say what’s mission-critical and what isn’t, even when it comes to e-mail software? It’s remotely conceivable that the loss of the just the wrong data at just the wrong time could cost someone his or her life — especially if some unscrupulous person (a war profiteer, say) had figured out a way to “game the system,” taking advantage of my desire to avoid responsibility in order to create a certain outcome.

The reporter who talked to Flynt was exhibiting the same fear of responsibility and was being gamed in just that way. But my (somewhat strained) point is that you’ve got responsibility whether you like it or not. You can’t avoid it; the best you can do is to refuse to acknowledge it.

I write software that people rely on; it’s my responsibility to make it reliable, whether or not it’s a matter of life and death. Those reporters in 2000 were part of a system on which a healthy democracy relies: keeping the citizenry well-informed, letting them decide whether a news item should tip a race one way or another. That was their responsibility; they blew it.

The same fear of responsibility is what leads modern news operations to present two sides of every issue as equal, when it’s perfectly obvious that they seldom are. It’s their responsibility to treat propaganda skeptically rather than presenting it on the same footing as legitimate news. When it’s decisively exposed as propaganda, it’s their responsibility to report on that.

That’s the responsibility that ABC News can now deny but cannot avoid: to disclose the identities of the propagandists who manipulated them and to shine a light on the whole operation. Until it does, ABC can deny, but cannot avoid, its responsibility for launching a war that has killed thousands, decimated our military, and bankrupted our nation.

I want to suspend my disbelief

[This post is participating in South Dakota Dark’s X-Files blog-a-thon.]

I can’t resist a good blog-a-thon, and South Dakota Dark’s X-Files blog-a-thon, anticipating tomorrow’s release of the new X-Files movie, seemed as good as any. For the past couple of weeks I watched the date of the blog-a-thon approach and waited for a good idea to strike. By the time it began on Sunday, none had yet. And I don’t appear to be the only one — sad to say, the X-Files blog-a-thon appears to be even more sparsely attended than my “I Can Do It Better” blog-a-thon of a few months ago.

What can account for this? The X-Files was a major pop-culture phenomenon in its time. Was its time too recent? It takes a while to ferment a classic after all. Those who were fans while the show was on the air have long since moved on, finding no shortage of well-written, well-acted conspiracy/mystery/thriller/science-fiction shows. (I’m thinking particularly of Lost, whose jaw-dropping third season I just finished on DVD last night.) And it takes more than a scant decade for a new nostalgia-minded fan base to build.

As for myself, every time I tried to think of what to write about The X-Files, my mind kept drifting instead to The West Wing. Why was that happening? I think I know, and if I’m right, it doesn’t augur well for tomorrow’s premiere.

During the late 90’s, Andrea and I used to love sitting down and watching The West Wing each week. It took place in a progressive paradise where, even though the moneyed interests sometimes won — it was about presidential politics, after all, and dealt believably with moral and political dilemmas — at least the public interest was usually uppermost in the minds of the fictional senior officials.

Star Trek had nothing on The West Wing when it came to enticing visions of an enlightened possible future.

That all came to an abrupt end during a few wrenching weeks in late 2000. The real-life presidential election results were up in the air, hinging on voting irregularities in Florida. The bad guys gamed the system and bent the rules to get the count to go their way. The good guys, being too principled, didn’t put up enough of a fight. During those weeks there were reversals of fortune and counter-reversals and counter-counter-reversals. I was a wreck. I followed every development as closely as I could and each scrap of news flayed my nerves raw. Democracy itself was under attack, and everyone involved in the battle had a stake in the outcome — meaning there was no disinterested authority to help settle the matter reasonably, not even, in the end, the Supreme Court. That authority vacuum felt like a taste of anarchy; the election battle, a gang fight in a bad neighborhood where the cops never patrol. The bad guys won, democracy lost — and at once The West Wing went from uplifting, optimistic, educational entertainment to simple-minded, far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy. The very thought of watching another episode was almost too painful to bear. We did try a few times, but we weren’t entertained and we weren’t optimistic for the future. The show’s only remaining power was to remind us of the brutality perpetrated on our ideals and the ease and speed with which it had been done, and was continuing to be done.

I think something similar may have happened to X-Files fandom. After seven and a half years of George Bush, who could be entertained by the idea of a shadowy government conspiracy? Who would even find such a story remarkable? Our real-life news is a constant barrage of conspiracies and corruption taking place in broad daylight. Cigarette-Smoking Man, with his furtive ways, would be laughed out of the Bush administration! The Lone Gunmen wouldn’t be three weirdos in a basement shining light on official misdeeds, they’d be DailyKos! As for Mulder and Scully, if they wanted to keep their jobs at the FBI they’d have to accept assignments trumping up new terrorism fears, busting consumers sharing mixtapes, or cracking down on porn. (Hmm, that’s one Mulder might actually like.)

Well, there’s one thing that George Bush hasn’t managed to ruin, and that’s a good working relationship between two intelligent people with a lot of integrity and courage and a little sexual tension. If the producers were smart and made the movie be about that, then tomorrow’s premiere stands a decent chance.

If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em by joining ’em

What can we do when the President is bought and paid for, opposing the public interest at almost every turn? Demand investigations. But what if our Justice Department is bought and paid for too? Demand Congressional action. But what if Congress is bought and paid for? Why, vote them out of office. But if the voting-machine industry is bought and paid for, and local election officials are bought and paid for, then what? Agitate for a popular uprising. But what if the mass media is bought and paid for in order to pacify the electorate and to reinforce the status quo? Turn to more democratic means of getting the word out. But what if the “more democratic means” is under the control of the (bought-and-paid-for) corporate establishment?

At this point it looks like there’s only one choice: get money out of politics somehow or other. Meaningful campaign finance reform and other similar measures have the virtue that they address the very root of the problem, and the drawback that they will never, ever happen. (In part because of entrenched interests, but also in part for the legitimate reason that campaign spending has been equated with free speech, which must not be curtailed, especially in a political campaign.) Not to mention that any mere legislation, depending as it does on enforcement and judicial interpretation, is weak medicine in the current environment.

So are we screwed? Are we doomed to suffer the worst that tyranny and endemic corruption can ultimately produce?

I thought so, until I thought of two movies (because that’s how I think, in movies): The Untouchables and Schindler’s List.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!

Why are we (the good guys) denying ourselves the use of the most powerful weapon in the other side’s arsenal? I’m talking about bribery. To borrow a page from the NRA (“Guns don’t kill people…”), bribery itself is not the problem; the problem is what people are being bribed to do. There aren’t thousands of evil people in the Establishment. There are just a few; the rest are all whores. The thing is, when only evil people employ whores, the whores only do evil. But the nice thing about whores is that they’ll do whatever you ask as long as the money’s green.

Oskar Schindler understood this. He became one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century by using bribery for good for a change. At the cost of his personal fortune, he bought, via bribery, the lives of hundreds of Jews who were otherwise doomed. To him, it was nobler to befriend and enrich Hitler’s murderous sociopaths and actually accomplish something, dammit than it would have been to disdain those methods and let the “Schindler Jews” perish in the name of not lowering himself to the Nazis’ level.

That was just one man’s wealth. Imagine how much good we can bribe Establishment whores into doing if we pooled our resources! We could bribe Brian Williams into reporting the real news. We could bribe Nancy Pelosi into putting impeachment back “on the table.” We could bribe any number of high-ranking officials to ease their troubled conscience and spill everything they know about Bush administration misdeeds. (As if there were any shortage of evidence.) I thought of this, rushed to the nearest domain registrar and discovered that bribe4good.com was available, and started thinking about how to design a website where citizens could contribute money and dicuss how best to use it to fight bribes with bribes.

Of course, even though there is presently a raging epidemic of illicit bribery, and even though law enforcement agencies routinely look the other way, you better believe that if the good guys started using bribery, the law would crack down faster than you can say, “I’m shocked, shocked!” And forget about keeping secret a slush fund that consists of contributions from millions of individuals (hey, why not dream big), all of them with a say in how the bribes are to be allocated.

But perhaps a modified version of this idea could still work. Instead of setting up a slush fund and proactively bribing those in a position to fix our country, set it up as a reward fund instead, meting it out to those who contribute to achieving specific goals. “Presidential signing statements declared unconstitutional” — $100,000. “War crimes trials for torturers” — $250,000. “Expose attempted bribes between corporate officers and government officials” — twice the amount of the bribe.

I call it Healthy Lucre and have an embryonic demonstration website up and running. Watch this space for further developments.

Once there was a country called America

A court ruled that George Bush has the legal authority to arrest and detain any U.S. citizen indefinitely, without a warrant or judicial review, and without any right to a trial.

His Department of Health and Human Services is now defining the use of birth control as “abortion.” (They must have read my blog and drawn the wrong conclusion.)

Subscribers to Comcast basic cable TV in Pittsburgh can no longer get the news on MSNBC (whose show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, is occasionally critical of President Bush), but they can still watch the Republican propaganda channel Fox News.

It’s been revealed that the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban just four months before 9/11.

And this is just what’s been reported in the past day. My prediction for tomorrow: schools abolished; election coverage placed under state control.

Remember the legend of Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects? That when bad men held his family at gunpoint, Söze shot his wife and children himself rather than allow the bad guys to threaten him that way?

That’s what we’ve done to the America we once loved. The Constitution — BAM! The middle class — BAM! Clean air and water, reliable infrastructure, basic services — BAM! BAM! BAM!

That’ll show the terrorists.

Oh Gorby, where are you when we need you?

GORBACHOV: THE MUSIC VIDEO – BIGGER AND RUSSIANER from Tom Stern on Vimeo.

Obviously

[Cross-posted at DailyKos.]

President Bush has been pushing and pushing to get Congress to pass a bill granting him expanded warrantless surveillance powers, even though the existing FISA court already served as a rubber stamp to approve almost any wiretapping the Executive Branch wanted. Why then would he need such powers? Obviously it’s to conduct surveillance that even the FISA court wouldn’t approve — i.e., surveillance not essential to national security.

Cheney and Rumsfeld
The White House, 1975

What was it that the Nixon administration was busted for? (You know, the administration in which Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld served?) Oh yeah: spying on its political rivals.

Bush has also insisted that any such bill include retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that complied with his illegal orders by conducting electronic eavesdropping on Americans without duly obtained warrants. So they can never be sued for those illegal acts. So the facts never have to come out in court. Bush has shown so little concern for the law to date — undermining Federal agencies, approving torture, striking out bits of legislation he doesn’t like, defying Congressional subpoenas — and has suffered so little in the way of consequences, why would he need to make sure the facts of past warrantless wiretaps never came to light? Obviously because those facts are so heinous that for once, Bush and his friends would be in serious trouble if exposed.

Where is it that Bush recently made a huge purchase of land? Oh yeah, Paraguay — that haven for state-level criminals fleeing justice, where the notorious Josef Mengele and other Nazi officials ended up after the fall of the Third Reich (which was funded in large part by Bush’s grandfather, by the way).

Fortunately, the Democratic Congress beat this legislation back a few times, albeit with difficulty. They were responding to outrage from the public about the bill’s frontal assaults on the Constitution: the vast new powers being handed to the Executive branch, the near-elimination of protections against unwarranted search and seizure, the institution of precisely the kind of tyrannical authority that moved the Founders to rebel in the first place. There was no corresponding outcry in favor of the law, except from telecom lobbyists.

As recently as May it seemed like this issue was finally dead until the next Congress — and the next Presidential administration. Crisis averted, right? Not so fast: all of a sudden, the bill was back in Congress, and before you could say “Bush and Pelosi sittin’ in a tree,” it had been rammed through the House of Representatives. There was an interlude during which a vast coalition of citizens, rights groups, legal experts, whistleblowers, and editorial boards raised an almighty uproar (and a lot of cash) in opposition to the bill — and then yesterday the Senate passed it anyway, at the behest of a president whose approval rating is the lowest in the history of presidential approval ratings. Wasting no time, a gleeful Bush signed it today. It is now the law of the land.

(That is, it’s the law of the land only if you believe that when Congress passes a bill and the President signs it, that makes it the law of the land. The only thing saying it’s supposed to work that way [besides Schoolhouse Rock] is the Constitution — that document that we just keep ignoring anyway, and about which Bush is on record as having said, “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper.”)

What can account for this abrupt reversal, this unaccountable betrayal, this act of seeming political suicide? Why did Congress — the Democratic Congress — stir itself to such swift action for the benefit of George Bush, a terrible, evil, and unpopular president, their sworn enemy, the man whom we elected them to bottle up before he could do any more damage to our beloved nation?

Some might say that the administration has to do nothing more than publicly utter “national security” and the spineless Dems wet their pants with visions of Republicans calling them “soft on terror” at re-election time. A year or two ago that might have been all it took, but I think most Americans can tell that the Bushies have gone to that well a few times too often. I don’t think it is the source of electoral fright for Congresspeople that it once was.

Cynics would say that the telecoms and/or the administration simply bribed the hell out of our lawmakers. I’m sure that played a part, but there’s clearly something more at work here than run-of-the-mill payola.

After seven and a half years of George Bush I think I know his administration well enough to say with confidence that they would never use just a carrot when a carrot and a stick would work so much better. It seems likeliest to me that an element of blackmail was involved. Has the Bush regime been collecting damaging intel on legislators? Has it done such a thorough job of spying on its political rivals that it can now use some secret dossiers to compel them to legalize spying on political rivals? Is this how it’s been getting them inexplicably to roll over on issue after issue despite the public humiliation and the clear will of the electorate?

If I were a lawless cabal intent on a scorched-earth looting of America, that’s certainly how I’d operate.

So obviously Bush and his gang have some pretty good dirt to hold over the heads of our elected officials. To be blackmailed into commission of a gross dereliction of duty — directly contravening their oaths to uphold the Constitution — some of our Congresspeople must have some major skeletons in their closets. The kinds of secrets that would cost them their fortunes or land them in jail.

Well Congress, you may have just cut off the public’s avenue for investigating Bush’s abuses, but we will need justice sooner or later, and if those skeletons really are there to be found… well, Rambo said it best when he was hung out to dry by a weaselly bureaucrat:

Citizens, here is what to do in the meantime:

The rules

Once in a while I toy with a blog post for a long time before publishing it — sometimes many months, as in the case of this one. I knew that I wanted to tell the story of The Grape, tie it together with my interest in flying and in computers, and prognosticate about similar leanings in my son Jonah, but as sometimes happens, the ideas didn’t quite gel, meandering aimlessly in search of some relevant point to make.

And then, as also sometimes happens, current events provided the frame for my story. So, let’s begin with The Grape:

When I was about five years old, my mom brought me and my sister on a routine trip to the local supermarket. As we entered the produce aisle we found to our delight that grapes were in season again. Immediately my mom plucked a grape from a bunch on the shelf and popped it in her mouth. She gave one to my sister, who did the same. She gave one to me and I stared at it, aghast. “I can’t eat this,” I told her. “We didn’t pay for it!” My mom patiently explained that it’s OK if people take one or two grapes as they walk by. “But that’s stealing!” I protested. “If everyone did that, there’d be none left!” Other shoppers turned to see the little boy making accusatory sounds at his mom. “We’re going to buy some anyway,” my mom said, still holding out a grape to me, “so it’s OK if you have one.” No, I insisted — we had to wait until they were paid for. Losing her patience, my mom uttered through gritted teeth the punchline of one of my family’s most-retold stories about me: “Eat. The. Grape.” I flatly refused, and she pointedly fed more grapes to my sister. We went home sore at each other, and for the rest of her life, I would express dismay at her occasional willingness to commit (very) petty larceny, such as taking home a hotel towel or an interesting salt shaker from a restaurant; and she would come back with, “Eat the grape,” which became her shorthand for my irksome excess of honesty.

A few decades later, on a visit to Tucson for a wedding, I decided to find an airplane rental club and spend a morning exploring the local airspace. I tried to persuade my friend Bruce, also visiting Tucson, to come along for the ride, since he’d expressed an interest in learning to fly and had tried it once or twice. In the conversation that ensued, he told me his interest had flagged: “I just want to fly. I got bored with all the rules and procedures you have to follow.” “Are you kidding?” I returned. “That’s the best part!”

The words sounded strange coming out of my mouth — what a bizarre thing to admit enjoying — but it was true, I enjoyed the arcane radio protocol, I enjoyed filling out navigation logs and filing flight plans, I enjoyed checklists and weight-and-balance computations…

In fact, I enjoyed flying (it occurred to me) for the same reasons that I enjoyed road rallies. In Pittsburgh in the late 80’s and early 90’s, my friend Steve and I participated in several amateur road rallies of the “time-speed-distance” variety, where the goal is not to run the course in the shortest possible time but to follow the route — mostly picturesque rural roads — as accurately as possible, armed with a sometimes deliberately misleading set of “route instructions” devised by a more or less devious rallymaster, and a complex set of regulations for how to understand them. (To this day, one of the top Google hits for “road rally” is a document that I helped to write long ago.) The pretty scenery, for me, was secondary to the intellectual exercise of driving in a rally — just as I considered the rules and procedures to be “the best part” about flying. (True to his nature, the one time Bruce tried a road rally, he grew impatient with the route instructions, tossed them into the backseat, and struck off at random into the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania — with the enthusiastic support of his equally bored rally partner, Andrea. “And today that woman is my wife.”)

Rules — I love ’em. I love the way simple ones gives rise to complex behavior, whether it’s a game of Go or the orderly society that emerges from (for instance) people paying for their produce before eating it. It’s no wonder I was drawn to a life of writing computer software, where rules per se achieve their purest realization. A computer program is nothing but rules, after all, and with some care and some artistry it can be made elegant and simple and still create a very rich set of behaviors.

Obviously not everyone is as enamored of rules as I am. So what’s the attraction? It must have something to do with a need to impose order on a bewildering and uncertain world — bewilderment and uncertainty that comes from the irrational behavior of other people. This is a common bit of pop psychology. Being unable to fathom irrational behavior, and withdrawing from even trying, explains, for example, the popularity of Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock (who, interestingly, is a hero especially among computer programmers).

My son Jonah seems to be like this. He is always keenly aware of the rules in any situation, and alert to anyone not following them, or to any other source of unfairness, and quick to call it out. Most of his friends are not so preoccupied about fairness, but he does have one or two who are paralyzed by fits of red-faced outrage whenever anything doesn’t go according to the rules.

Having witnessed a couple of those fits, and thinking back over my own life, I’ve lately come to think that those who love rules are at a disadvantage to those who can abide their neglect, who can tolerate ambiguity better. Mr. Spock was only the first officer aboard the Enterprise, after all; it took the greater resiliency of James T. Kirk to be the captain. And while one of Jonah’s friends is pitching a fit, the others are still running around and having a great time, completely unfazed.

This is what brings us around to current events. This week the U.S. Senate will debate the so-called FISA bill that, among other things, gives retroactive legal immunity to the Bush administration and to various large corporations for illegal warrantless wiretapping activities dating back to before 9/11, and prohibits any details of those illegal activities from ever coming to light. You could have been the subject of illegal surveillance, and if this bill passes, as it is expected to do, you would have no legal recourse for finding out about it, ever. Does this sound fair? Of course not, and those who love playing by the rules have been up in arms about it — red in the face and all but paralyzed, like one of Jonah’s fit-pitching friends. As DailyKos’ Hunter writes:

So, why have activists spent so much effort opposing retroactive corporate immunity as part of new FISA legislation, when there are so many other things in the world to be outraged about? […] It demonstrates a complete lack of regard for the law

and

We were never told why it was so all-fired important […] the only rationale available seems to be the most cynical one — it is merely doing the bidding of companies that provide substantive campaign contributions.

So we citizens can believe all we like that everyone’s equal before the law, but in fact if you’ve got pockets deep enough, you can buy whatever kind of law best suits you. Very likely this has always been the reality in America (as it has throughout human history), but all past attempts to tilt the playing field in favor of the powerful and the well-connected at least pretended to be for the common good. This bill does not, and that’s what’s so jaw-droppingly wrong with it: it says that the vaunted “rule of law,” the very bedrock of the Enlightenment and the principle that has always guided America no matter how far she’s strayed from it, is now officially just a fairy tale, and only fools will henceforth strive toward that ideal. If you’re wealthy, go ahead and break whatever laws you like; your pals in Congress will patch things up later.

How many generations will it take for America to recover from abandoning even the pretense of fairness? How much civil unrest? How much political violence?

This is another reason people like me love rules — we can see what life would be without them. But if the rule of law is just a fantasy and always has been, then laying it bare like this might be just the thing we need. Give everyone else a chance to see what life is like without rules. In the end, I predict, though the cost may be high, everyone will love them like I do.

How does a man find his way in a world full of grey?

In honor of yesterday’s history-making speech about race relations in the U.S. by Barack Obama, I’ll relate my own brief tale, allegorical but true.

Late one night in college I was walking home from my friends’ house along Ellsworth Avenue in Pittsburgh. As I neared Negley Avenue I apprehensively observed a small gang of young black men coming toward me from the other direction. (I’m white.) I say “gang” because the similarity of their attire was conspicuous — they all wore white pants and white windbreakers.

My apprehension was mixed with shame at the knee-jerk racism of that reaction. As they and I closed the gap, I determined to employ my New York City street smarts to avoid eye contact while showing no fear. I’d walked harmlessly by tough-looking individuals and groups thousands of times. There was no reason to think this time would be any different.

We passed each other, and without warning one of the gang lashed out with his fist, catching me in the jaw and knocking me flat on my back. For one terrifying, helpless moment I believed their fun was just beginning and that the others would get in their licks; but then they simply continued on their way.

For several long seconds I couldn’t move. I was seeing stars; the wind had been knocked out of me; I was bleeding. I could feel my jaw swelling up moment by moment. I could not believe that I had just become a victim of racial violence (for what else could it have been?).

That’s when the allegorical thing happened. A man who’d witnessed the attack hurried over to me from across Ellsworth Avenue. He helped me sit up and asked if I was OK. He stopped me from trying to stand until I’d had a moment to recover, sitting with me on the curb and waiting patiently for my head to stop spinning. Then he helped me to my feet. He asked me what had provoked the incident and expressed outrage and dismay when I told him nothing had. He offered to escort me to Shadyside Hospital, just a couple of blocks away; I politely declined. He asked if there was anything else he could do. I told him I was OK to continue on my way and thanked him profusely.

If my attackers were devils, this man was a saint. And he, too, was black.

I haven’t told this story too often compared to some of my others. Part of the reason is, who wants to tell a story about being helpless and afraid? But another part was my confusion, frankly, about how to cast the role of race in this story. I’m fairly sure that if my attackers hadn’t been black or I hadn’t been white, there would have been no attack. But like a good liberal I wanted to be politically correct, disregard our respective skin colors, and make the attackers into four generic people who were only strikingly antisocial.

But thanks to the lesson Barack Obama sought to teach us yesterday I can acknowledge that race in America is a complicated issue, and we only perpetuate the problems — I do — by ignoring them or by pretending they’re easier than they are.

Yes, it was wrong to react with apprehension to the sight of four black men; but yes, it was also naïve to ignore my intuition. Yes, the men who attacked me were pathologically maladjusted individuals, the polar opposites of the kind stranger who helped me, proving I should judge them all not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”; but yes, their pathology was likely to be rooted one way or another in race.

Yes, it’s all difficult and confusing; but yes, it’s time to get the difficulty and confusion into the open and air it out. Until now we’ve all pretended that acting color-blind is the way to achieve racial justice, but it isn’t. The real answer is to admit we don’t yet have an answer, but to take the first step anyway of agreeing on the goal of universal equality.

There’s no black, there’s no white
Where is wrong? Where is right?
I’m confused and unable to say
How does a man find his way in a world full of grey?
— Oscar Brown Jr.

Lump in my throat

Feeling deflated since the withdrawal of John Edwards from the race for president, I have been wondering whether to cast my primary vote tomorrow for Barack Obama, who is the next best candidate, or to vote for Edwards anyway, throwing away my vote in order to make a statement about the control of our electoral process by the mass-media oligarchy.

I hate the idea of my vote being against the candidate I like less rather than for the candidate I like more, which is what a vote for Obama would be for me.

Then I saw the following Obama video and now I know how I’ll vote. If enough people think this way about Obama, then it doesn’t really matter what he is actually like; the people will hold him to their idea of him and he’ll succeed or fail by that measure.

The fat lady sings

[Cross-posted at DailyKos.]

John Edwards has ended his presidential run.

I would like to jump straight to the final of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, “acceptance,” but it’s probably unhealthy to skip right over the other stages, so please bear with me as I race through:

Denial. Edwards has obviously made a deal with one or both remaining Democrats to be the VP nominee, so at least some of his agenda still has a chance of moving the country forward.
Anger. Welcome to America, here’s your shit sandwich. Enjoy your next media-conglomerate-approved president, be it the warmonger, the religious nut, the focus-tested corporatist machine politician, or the kumbaya guy who talks a great game but has yet to exhibit a single actual act of courage.
Bargaining. Edwards supporters, let’s band together and make Obama promise to adopt some of John’s most important policies before we throw our support to him!
Depression. Only Edwards’ plans were bold enough to fix America’s problems in less than a generation. Now it’s going to take a lifetime — my kids’ lifetime! — of excessively cautious half-measures to straighten out Bush’s mess.

There, OK. Now I can do acceptance.

In truth, either Obama or Clinton could get the job done, but as I’ve written before (and as others have written, and I’ve highlighted): it’s not just the person, it’s the narrative. America urgently needs to turn the page on its recent past and make a fresh start. Hillary may have the best intentions, but rightly or wrongly she’s still an indelible symbolic link to the past. Only Obama represents real change, and the world needs to see real change in America.

On the bright side: even if nothing else progressive happens in the next administration, we still have the fact that the handsome, rich white guy couldn’t compete with a black guy and a woman. We’ve come a long way, baby.

Do the abortion math

It’s the thirty-fifth anniversary of the famous Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that affirmed the legality of abortion.

Of course abortion remains a fantastically polarizing subject. It seems like the country is divided fairly evenly in favor of choice and opposed to it (and not necessarily along traditional party or ideological lines); and that most opinions are strongly held.

I for one believe that Bill Clinton got it exactly right when he said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” but why do I believe that? No opinion is worth having if it can’t be examined, challenged, and defended, so here is my defense.

First we must determine whether it’s possible to attack or defend abortion dispassionately, without appeal to emotion. Most people who oppose abortion do so because they believe that it is murder, a naturally emotional subject. We could try to remove or distort the emotional component (e.g., by confining ourselves to a discussion of costs and benefits — as routinely happens in cases of state-sponsored murder such as executions and wars), but I think there’s another way that sidesteps the question of murder altogether.

Whether or not abortion is murder depends on whether or not a life exists to terminate. Indeed that’s what it came down to in the Roe v. Wade decision:

We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

Nearly everyone agrees that life does not exist prior to conception. Nearly everyone agrees that life does exist upon birth. So where, in between those two events, is the switch flipped? We don’t need medicine, philosophy, or theology to decide; just simple math.

Life may not exist the entire time, but what does exist is an ever-increasing probability of life — more precisely, a probability of being born alive. The appearance of a fetal heartbeat at about eight weeks after conception improves the odds. “Viability” (a minimal ability to survive outside the womb) at about 22 weeks improves it some more. The chances of being born alive continue slowly to climb as the fetus develops, until finally it reaches 100% at the moment the baby takes its first breath.

Can we scientifically choose a probability threshold before which we say abortion is OK and after which we say it isn’t? Sort of. A threshold very close to 100% would be unacceptable to most people, even pro-choice advocates, for emotional reasons (although this has not been true at all times or in all cultures, some of which routinely disposed of unwanted infants simply by exposing them to the elements). It makes no sense to talk about a threshold of 0% as some extreme anti-abortionists might prefer it, because the probability is higher than zero even before conception — especially if Barry White is playing and the lights are turned low. Any other choice between 0% and 100% would be arbitrary, so the best we can do is to choose the least arbitrary number in that interval: 50%. As it happens, in modern America a 50% chance of a live birth appears to be reached, on average, between the 22nd and 28th week of pregnancy.

So that’s my position: abortion should be legal (and safe and rare) before about 22 weeks, and illegal (with the usual pragmatic exceptions — rape, incest, health of the mother) otherwise. Your emotions aside, I think I’ve shown that no other position on this subject is more rational than that one.