Pushing the envelope

Veterans for Peace established this memorial on the beach at Arlington West in Santa Monica in 2004, and it has expanded relentlessly each year with the casualty count in Iraq.

As of today, the war in Iraq has inflicted 3,454 deaths and 26,188 wounded on U.S. forces. 980 of those deaths have occurred since last Memorial Day weekend, compared to 807 during the previous year. Over two hundred troops have been killed over the last two months alone. It's not unusual for the same number of Iraqis to be killed and wounded over a single weekend.

And it will only get worse, as Bush warned on Thursday:

"We're going to expect heavy fighting in the weeks and months," he said. "We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties." He added, "It could be a bloody -- it could be a very difficult August."

Meanwhile, yet another poll shows that:

"Six in 10 Americans say the U.S. should have stayed out of Iraq and more than three in four say things are going badly there -- including nearly half who say things are going very badly, the poll found."

Last week the Democrats in Congress blinked in their confrontation with Bush over timetables for withdrawal. They had little choice, of course, since they lack the Republican support needed to override the inevitable second veto. The war is funded through September, and it seems unlikely that even these poll numbers will persuade Republicans to desert Bush in sufficient numbers to have an impact on policy. Unless the situation deteriorates dramatically, they're unlikely to go into total panic mode until the primary season begins in 2008.

As a lame duck, Bush is unlikely to be able to pursue any kind of domestic agenda in Congress, for which we can all be grateful. But on Iraq, as with the Gonzales affair, he can safely adopt an in-your-face posture, defying the growing opposition to do something to force a change.

During the 1996 campaign, Bob Dole got exercised because Al Gore visited a Buddhist temple and was rewarded with some $122,000 in (legal) campaign contributions. He asked: "Where's the outrage? When--when will the voters start to focus? ...How far can you push the envelope? How much can you get away with? What can you do? "

The context has changed completely, but eleven years later Dole's questions—which seemed trivial even back then—are far more momentous. Voters are clearly focused on the war, and there seems to be no lack of outrage, but Bush has plenty of reason to believe that he can get away with just about anything—and nothing can be done about it. Sadly, he apparently faces no political consequences even if another 2,000 Americans die in Iraq before January 20, 2009.

PHOTOS: Arlington West [Thanks to Digby at Hullabaloo for the tip.]

Geaghan: Saturday snippets

Back on the circuit

Al Gore is riding the interview circuit again, peddling his latest book. The Assault on Reason, directed at a wider target than the current execrable administration, sounds terrific.

Last night, on Charlie Rose, Gore was both passionate and articulate with such force that you had to wonder yet again what Gore '07 might've been able to do in 2000 (when he won by a half million votes, of course) or 2004. At a minimum, he might've put up a more strenuous fight over the Florida recount rather than quickly ceding the field (and the election) to the likes of James Baker, Katherine Harris and the Supremes.

It seems clear enough, for now, that Gore would be the strongest in the current field of hypercautious Democrats. But "strongest" doesn't necessarily mean "electable," given the baggage that Gore has to carry—quite unfairly, for the most part. Still, he's the only candidate in either party who comes across as what we once called "presidential," back when that was a compliment.

A candidate Gore, with a lot more to lose, might revert to that strange combination of timidity (especially after the first debate) and arrogance that fatally constricted him in 2000. He seemed to leave the door open, just a crack, to running if the right conditions develop—like if Clinton or Obama self-destruct or get dismembered by the proverbial vast right-wing conspiracy. A Gore candidacy, of course, would invigorate the hyenas who have never stopped circling him. But, for now, no one else inspires much confidence that he or she is up to the job.

As for Charlie Rose, he and Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air still do the best in-depth interviews in the U.S. media. Though I'm a dedicated viewer of The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, their interviews are simply too short—and too facetious, by design—to address complex issues. And Colbert's interviews are, hilariously, as much about Colbert as they are about his guests.

No subject is too obscure for Charlie Rose's show, and it lasts a full hour, so there's both depth and breadth. But he has an irritating tendency to interrupt responses that promise to be interesting, and he seems to think he has to give progressive guests a hard time to pre-empt conservative critics who otherwise might accuse him of lacking "balance." This tendency remains widespread among journalists (especially on PBS/NPR) who still overreact to conservative challenges. For the most part, though, Rose tends to be obsequious, sometimes to the point of fawning, towards his celebrity guests. Still, it's consistently the best interview show on television.

Guillermo del Toro

Speaking of Fresh Air, Terry Gross offers an outstanding interview (available via podcast) with Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican writer-director whose Pan's Labyrinth won four Academy Awards this year. The mythical dimensions of this film run far deeper than were apparent to me after just one viewing. Del Toro is impressively articulate and entertaining, and Pan is on my short list of the best films of the last five years.

"The Lives of Others" (2006)

This German film (Das Leben der Anderen), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, has been playing to full houses here in Portland for the last six months or more. If you haven't seen it yet, and it's still in local theaters, don't miss it. It deserves comparison with my other German favorites such as Mephisto (1981) and Downfall (2004), along with such classics as Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire (1987) and The American Friend (1977). Like the comic Goodbye Lenin (2003), it's set in East Berlin during the last years of communist rule. Great acting, directing and cinematography throughout. Oddly reverberates on this side of the Atlantic after six grim years of George Bush.


PHOTO: Al Gore (Wikipedia Commons, 2006)

Blues Break: Dire Straits - "You And Your Friend"

Mark Knopfler casts a spell, and displays his inimitable talent, during a performance in (most likely) Nîmes, in the south of France, during the mid-90's or so. The song first appeared on the album "On Every Street" (1991).

Portland metro: The region that works, sometimes

When I moved to Portland—the one on the Upper Left Coast—more than three decades ago, the downtown was separated from the Willamette River by a freeway and a parking lot filled the defining space in the center of the city. Now the freeway is Waterfront Park and the parking lot has become the fanciful and popular Pioneer Courthouse Square. The city is arguably the most politically progressive in the country. Its politics have been dominated by a liberal/progressive coalition that has elected a variety of eccentric but effective politicians to city, state and national office—including a mayor who ran a tavern and first made a name for himself by posing for a photo in which he opened his trench coat and (apparently) flashed a downtown bronze nude.

The "city that works," as city vehicles describe it, has been a success on so many levels that it's hard to object to the rampant smugness about the place. Until recently, innovation has been a recurring theme in city and state politics since the era of Governor Tom McCall, one of the last progressive Republicans. He collaborated with a Democratic legislature in 1973 to create Oregon's legendary land-use scheme, which limited sprawl and protected farms and forests until it was eviscerated by Ballot Measure 37 in 2004. Mayor Neil Goldschmidt, since disgraced, had a vision for downtown Portland that was successfully realized over two decades.

The Portland metro region extends from the state capital in Salem to Vancouver, Washington, and has a population approaching two million. Land-use planning in Oregon has achieved two major successes in this region:

1. Transportation

Some twenty-five years ago, federal funds were diverted from a freeway project to create the first segment of the MAX light-rail system, which has been extended to the western suburbs, the south shore of the Columbia river and the busy airport. The system is fast, efficient and unaffected by heavy traffic on local streets. However, it only carries about 4% of daily commuters in the region, even though rush-hour trains are packed. And it lacks the express trains that would offer better competition for freeways by shortening commutes.

A new $117-million commuter rail line through Beaverton, Tigard and Wilsonville could become a promising model for similar intersuburban projects. Still, the new line is expected to attract a ridership of only 3,000-4,000 daily trips by 2020. Regional transportation planning lags far behind the demographic curve.

2. Containment of sprawl

The Urban Growth Boundary (UGB) was intended to draw a line in the rural dirt, beyond which urban development would not extend. The rich farmlands of the Willamette Valley, though often wasted (IMHO) to cultivate grass seed for golf courses, are directly threatened by the urban expansion of Portland, Salem and Eugene. The Portland region's UGB extends over 232,000 acres and includes 24 cities and parts of three counties.

Where I live, near the limits of the UGB, there's no transition from urban to rural: you drive about a mile and suddenly the subdivisions stop—you're in pristine open countryside. And you don't see miles and miles of the miniature baronial estates on 1-5 acre plots that desecrate the landscapes of places like upstate New York and Pennsylvania with their immaculate lawns and aristocratic pretensions.

The UGB's governing body, called Metro (for Metropolitan Service District), has resisted pressure from developers and other lobbyists to extend the UGB in our area. But the UGB has grown incrementally in other parts of the Metro region that have been designated for suburban expansion, partly in response to a state law requiring a 20-year supply of buildable residential lands. (Care to guess how that happened?) In fact, the boundary has been adjusted more than three dozen times, most recently in 2005. Metro asserts that the UGB was not intended to be "static."

So the central question for a UGB defined in this way is: what's the point, long-term, in having a growth "boundary" that keeps expanding? The current answer goes something like this: the UGB promotes orderly growth that won't overwhelm local governments and infrastructures. In reality, though, periodic expansions of the UGB only delay sprawl, which moves inexorably into some of the best farmland west of the Mississippi. Metro claims that it utilizes a 50-year planning horizon, but current rates of UGB expansion are unsustainable over such timespans.

In Oregon and the other 49 states, no once seems capable of contemplating hundred-year horizons, much less the Great Law of the Iroquois: "In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine."

The other major failure of regional planning has been its inability to effectively regulate sprawl within urban growth boundaries. (At a meeting of elected officials, I heard a councilor from a nearby city declare flatly that "you can't have sprawl within a UGB.") The result is suburban sprawl that would be difficult to distinguish from what you'd find around Atlanta, Minneapolis or Phoenix, including:

• Freeways that are totally inadequate for the volume of traffic they have to accommodate in a rapidly-expanding region. And there are few plans to even deal with existing bottlenecks, much less anticipate future ones. Despite a vague sense that more freeways aren't the solution, there's little planning for alternative modes of transportation on a regional scale that could make a difference.
  
• Vast shopping complexes that similarly overwhelm the transportation network, especially the large regional megamalls of Washington and Clackamas counties.
  
• Euclidian zoning that compulsively segregates residential from commercial areas, forcing residents to drive miles to do their grocery shopping (with some notable exceptions, like Orenco Station on the west side). Mixed-use development is a still a rarity despite the influence of New Urbanism (and here) on professional planners during the 1990's.
  
• Traditional subdivisions built at relatively low densities on street networks that lack connectivity. Many of these subdivisions are visually oppressive, including "snout" houses with projecting windowless garages that produce neighborhoods devoid of charm.
  
• Low-density development creates an autocentric region in which mass transit becomes a less viable and more expensive alternative.
  
• Design practices that continue to place retail stores in strip malls at the far end of vast parking lots, creating a depressingly sterile wasteland of asphalt and parked cars.
• Trademark architecture, from Target to McDonald's, that is standardized across the country and demolishes any remaining sense of place.
  
• Wide boulevards that are so pedestrian-hostile that, for my children's safety, I once drove across an 8-lane avenue to go to the other side rather than risk crossing on foot.
  

The list could go on and on, but you probably get the idea by now. On balance, the UGB is far better than nothing, but it has failed to deliver on its real potential. The sad likelihood is that the region will suffocate on its own growth as freeways clot and the beauty of the landscape is subverted by sprawl.

Builders, developers and realtors have kept up the political pressure to erode even the few successes of Oregon's land-use system. BM 37 is their most recent (and spectacularly effective) effort, but they have also managed to persuade many residents that high densities are inherently evil—and almost a socialist plot. Yet some of the most expensive and desirable property in Oregon (and the world, for that matter) is built at high density, like Portland's thriving Pearl district. The real issue is not density, but design. If sensitively and attractively designed, with private as well as public spaces (and decent soundproofing), high density can be a positive feature in urban development.

Portland has one huge advantage in this regional free-for-all of internal expansion: it can't sprawl, since most of its incorporated area has already reached buildout. Land-use issues in Portland involve redevelopment (as with the Pearl district) and gentrification (as in parts of Northeast Portland that were once low-income and African American neighborhoods). In both respects, development in Portland has achieved some spectacular successes and a few notable failures.

Portland's downtown deserves first mention on the list of successes. It channels light-rail and bus routes along designated streets with limited automobile traffic. Design elements, including brick sidewalks and public sculpture, provide some visual unity (though nothing like you'd see on the streets of Florence or Paris). Short, 200-foot blocks and height restrictions help the downtown retain a more human scale. The overall impression, amplified by clean streets and heavy pedestrian traffic, is quite stunning compared to most cities in the U.S. No wonder planners and journalists (as here) still come from all over the country to tour Portland. As the old saying goes: "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed are kings."

Looking at individual buildings, though, downtown Portland is mostly bland and undistinguished. For the last half-century the ubiquitous glass and steel towers of the modernist style have dominated new construction, and few are memorable in any way. One of the rare innovative structures, Michael Grave's Portland Building, is a pale and sadly underfunded imitation of his original postmodernist design. Plans for new corporate buildings offer little but variations on a painfully familiar dehumanizing theme. Meanwhile, the city's political leadership faces constant criticism for its stagnation and lack of real vision.

Like Pittsburgh, the area outside downtown Portland includes some revitalized neighborhoods (such as Northwest 23rd Avenue and the Hawthorne district on the east side) that retain their richly-textured urban charms. The downside of such gentrification, as usual, has been much higher rents and real-estate values, displacing residents who often have to look to inner-ring suburbs for affordable housing (if it's available at all).

It should certainly be noted that, for a city its size, Portland offers some impressive cultural advantages, including a thriving music and arts scene. It has also become a much more ethnically diverse area, with many fine restaurants, thanks to migration from both inside and outside the U.S. Portland, at last, is beginning to have the feel of a cosmopolitan city.

Meanwhile, Oregon is struggling to reclaim its tradition of innovative land-use leadership through a visioning process awkwardly known as the Big Look. A better name for it might be "On Second Thought."

Perhaps it's a mistake to expect a place like Oregon, and a region like Portland, to be an earthly paradise. The natural beauty of the state, deeply marred as it is by industrial logging and urban sprawl, continues to move and even astonish me more than thirty years after my arrival. But such a large and growing disparity between potential and reality leaves me, ultimately, disappointed and fearful of what's coming next. It's been a tough decade for Oregon, as well as the rest of the country and world, but there are some fragile signs of hope.

The people of Oregon have yet to prove that they're worthy of occupying this landscape. But all in all, it's still a great place to live, and (shameless plug) visit.

NOTES

This is the fourth installment in an occasional series—previous installments are here, here and here—about the so-called "Oregon Story," which might be more accurately described as the "Oregon Myth." My focus has been on successes and failures of Portland and Oregon as places to live and their potential as a planning models for other regions. The series is based on my observations as both a long-term resident and a former elected official in the metro region. I'm neither a land-use planner nor an architect, though I tend to have strong opinions about both disciplines.


PHOTO #1: Portland and distant Mt. Hood from the Pittock Mansion, about 1,000 ft above downtown. (My photo, taken March 2007).

PHOTO #2: Recent urban sprawl within the Urban Growth Boundary, including a Safeway, Barnes & Noble, Office Depot, Target, Haagen's and--inevitably--a McDonald's. Location: 185th Avenue and the Sunset highway in Washington County. This entire area was farmland when I moved to Oregon. (Photo from Google Earth.)

Welcome, Ellis!

Ellis, a refugee from the temporarily-dormant Disambiguation ("Voice of the overeducated liberal coastal elite since 2006"), is about to become a—we hope—regular contributor to Runes, starting as soon as he can free up some time from his present conditions of servitude. A philosopher by training and temperament, Ellis will no doubt touch on that subject as well as any damned thing that interests him. Like the rest of us, he enjoys reader comments and the occasional full-blown controversy. So welcome, Ellis!

PHOTO: Ellis Island, after which our friend was not named.

Blues Break: B.B. King and Tracy Chapman - "The Thrill is Gone"

B.B. King and Tracy Chapman team up to sing King's classic back in 1997.

Playing out the clock

In case you haven't heard, the surge in Iraq is a success. For confirmation, all you need to do is tune in to the recent evaluations by George W. Bush, Tony Snow and Fox News. Or listen to John McCain, who (on NBC's Meet the Press) once again regurgitated the Bush line that the U.S. still has "a chance of success" in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of U.S. operations in Iraq, declared:

"What I am trying to do is to get until April [!] so we can decide whether to keep it going or not. Are we making progress? If we're not making any progress, we need to change our strategy. If we're making progress, then we need to make a decision on whether we continue to surge."

In fact, it's impossible for the surge to fail, as Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money (among others, including us) noted a month ago. If U.S. and Iraqi casualties go down, it shows that the pacification plan is working. If casualties go up, then the insurgents are getting desperate, like cornered rats.

In the alternate universe where most of us prefer to analyze our news, the tangible evidence suggests abject failure so far and little patience among the U.S. public for an indefinite continuation of the war. As noted in today's online London Guardian:

The US military surge in Iraq, designed to turn around the course of the war, appears to be failing as senior US officers admit they need yet more troops and new figures show a sharp increase in the victims of death squads in Baghdad.

In the first 11 days of this month, there have already been 234 bodies - men murdered by death squads - dumped around the capital, a dramatic rise from the 137 found in the same period of April. Improving security in Baghdad and reducing death-squad activity was described as one of the key aims of the US surge of 25,000 additional troops, the final units of whom are due to arrive next month.

U.S. combat deaths in Diyala province north of Baghdad have increased by 300% compared to last year, as insurgents have shifted their focus to that region. The commander of U.S. forces in that region complained that he didn't have enough troops to meet the new challenges—still a recurring theme in Iraq, four years into the war.

Meanwhile, 100,000 to 300,000 barrels a day of Iraq's limited oil production has been "siphoned off" through corruption over the last four years. Apparently the proceeds have been used, in part, to fund the insurgency. With an average price of $50 a barrel, and an average diversion of 200,000 barrels a day, that would equal $10 million every day for 1,460 days. Pretty soon we're talking real money (on the order of about $15 billion by my math). That could buy a lot of RPG's and anti-armor munitions, and pay a lot of people to plant IED's along Iraqi roads.

So far in 2007, U.S. military fatalities in Iraq are 50% higher than during the same period (January to mid-May) last year. Looking at April 2007, there have only been three months with more U.S. fatalities since the war began. On average, there were 3.9 U.S. fatalities per day in April, the highest rate since the first few months of the war.

The number of U.S wounded increased by 44% compared to the same period in 2006. Most of the increase in U.S. casualties occurred after the surge began.

Reports of Iraqi casualties are notoriously unreliable, as the recent dispute between the al-Maliki government and the U.N. revealed once again:

In its previous report, in January, the United Nations said 34,452 civilians had died in violence last year, based on information from government ministries, hospitals and medical officials. The Iraqi government put the toll at 12,357. The numbers obtained by the Los Angeles Times indicated civilian deaths numbered 1,991 in January, dropped to 1,646 in February, when the security plan began, and rose to 1,872 in March. [These numbers are very close to those on the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count's website (1)]

Dubya, Cheney and General Odierno may be convinced the U.S. public is prepared to wait until next April for even a preliminary assessment of the surge. But every recent poll reveals that such thinking is delusional, at best.

But the political challenge is clear enough: how to force a change in policy, including a prompt withdrawal from Iraq, before the 2008 election—or, more realistically, before the swearing in of the new president. The Democrats lack the votes to override a veto, much less impeach Bush and Cheney. Congressional Republicans, though they're clearly very nervous about their prospects for 2008, are unlikely to join them in sufficient numbers to force Bush to confront realities in Iraq.

Most likely Bush will grudgingly accept short-term funding of the war and continue to play out the clock until his successor has to contend with his disastrous legacy. Conventional politics inside the beltway don't seem to offer an earlier resolution. Perhaps events, including the effects of intensified political turmoil within the U.S., will intervene in ways that can't now be foreseen.

NOTES

(1) According to the ICCC, Iraqi civilian and military deaths increased by 130% during the "surge months" of March and April 2007 compared to the same two months in 2006. The ICCC site notes: "Iraqi deaths based on news reports. This is not a definitive count. Actual totals for Iraqi deaths are higher than the numbers recorded on this site."

PHOTO: U.S. Marines in Fallujah, Iraq.

Reclaiming Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day! Brave New Foundation presents the true history of Mother's Day and suggests alternative ways to honor it.

Blues Break: Elliott Smith - "Angeles"

Elliott Smith's double album, New Moon, is out today. It's a powerful piece of work, as good as anything that Elliott has done. He was such a prolific songwriter and musician that only 3 of its 24 songs, all accompanied by Elliott's acoustic guitar, have previously been released. It's engineered by Larry Crane, who developed Jackpot Studios in Portland with Elliott in 1997. The songs were recorded between 1994 and 1997. As they've done in the past, Elliott's family will donate a portion of the proceeds to Outside In, a free clinic in Portland for low-income adults and homeless young people.

The Lucky Three video was made by Elliott and Jem Cohen in 1996, two years before Elliott's Oscar nomination for Miss Misery. Filmed in Portland, it was the first video of Elliott's solo career.

On a personal note, I'm proud to claim Elliott—and his wonderful family in Portland, New York and Minnesota—as friends. He is loved and dearly missed by all of us and by his legions of fans around the world.

The people you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still

—Elliott Smith, Between the Bars (from Either/Or, 1997)

Geaghan: Things without parallel

When asked how many of the ten Republican candidates didn't "believe in" evolution at last week's debate, three raised their hands. Turns out that proportionately more R candidates accept evolution than the general population, where the percentage is less than half.

Today's Washington Post reports that:

A recent Newsweek survey presented people with three explanations for the origins of human life: that humans developed over millions of years, from lesser to more advanced forms of life, while God guided the process; that God played no hand in the process; and that God created humans in their present form.

The first option is a sort of hybrid creation-evolution endorsed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the debate; "I believe in evolution," he said. "But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon . . . that the hand of God is there also."

The second option is evolution as explained by science, and the third summarizes the idea of creationism.

Nearly half the sample, 48 percent, said the creationism option was closest to their beliefs, and 30 percent chose the hybrid option. Just 13 percent of the sample chose evolution alone as the best approximation of their view of human development.

Those results have been mirrored in a series of Gallup polls that have asked nearly the same question at several points over the past 25 years.

According to a 2004 poll mentioned in the article, "61 percent said the creation story in the Bible—that God created the world in six days—is 'literally true.'" Therefore:

The reality is that many Americans see themselves as believers both in a higher power and in science. In a Time poll conducted last fall, 49 percent said it is possible to believe in both evolution and "divine creation by God," whereas 41 percent said the two ideas are incompatible.

But how could 61% declare that the Genesis version is "literally true" if a large portion of that majority also claim to be "believers" in science? From a strictly scientific point of view, the story in Genesis is entitled to no more credence than the Hindu notion that Vaak gave birth to the cosmos through the Golden Womb.

Does the notion of "belief" even apply to science? If so, it's of a very different order—maybe words like "hypothesis" or "high probability" or even "law" convey the texture better. A belief in the Christian creation myth is strictly a matter of faith, while a "belief" in the laws of gravity or thermodynamics is founded on observation and predictability. Whenever journalists write about science and religion in terms of belief, they imply that one worldview is as valid and defensible as any other. One simply "chooses" to believe in creationism, another in evolution, and beliefs become almost interchangeable. So a belief in creationism is entitled to equal time in our classrooms whenever Darwinian evolution is mentioned.

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher, both understood and embraced the central paradox of his own Christian faith: the contrast between the intensity of his belief and the paucity of evidence to support it. His god transcended all human categories such as science, and could never be "known" as we know gravity or evolution:

What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.

Religious believers often express sorrow for the presumed despair of those who can't share their faith. Kierkegaard proposes the opposite: belief in the Christian god requires acceptance of staggering paradoxes, and a faith for which no evidence exists, all of which imposes a heavy burden of doubt and constant anxiety. For Kierkegaard, faith is dynamic and must be constantly replenished. Christians bear heavy subjective baggage, whether they acknowledge it or not, for the "leap of faith" that makes their belief possible. Kierkegaard, for one, acknowledges this central struggle--in fact, it's central to his philosophy.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary, offers a more prosaic notion of faith, which he defined as: "Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

Religious faith and science have nothing whatsoever in common, unless you accept at face value the claim that the god of the Catholic church periodically intervenes in human affairs through miracles. Science's inability to explain all phenomena, due to the limitations of our senses and reason, gives rise to a mystery that can appropriately inspire awe to anyone contemplating the Grand Canyon. But that sense of mystery is not proof, or evidence, of the existence of god.

PHOTO: Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55)

Geaghan: A homegrown surge

Barack Obama's strengthening candidacy has incited hordes of white racists to discard their inhibitions—if they have any at all—in what Dave Niewert at Orcinus* calls the "new racism." He describes this phenomenon in the following terms:

Today CBSNews.com informed its staff via email that they should no longer enable comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The reason for the new policy, according to the email, is that stories about Obama have been attracting too many racist comments.

So far, we have been regaled with the oft-repeated "Hussein" note, the Fox smear of Obama's Muslim background, followed by Limbaugh's astonishing riff on "Barack the Magic Negro". That these reflect a barely concealed racial animus mixed with general white xenophobia should be obvious, and notably, these are all occurring on a national scale, within ostensibly mainstream media sources.

For right-wing audiences, cues like this signal just how far they can take things themselves. So on the public level, the result of this kind of talk is a regular outpouring of old-fashioned racist bile, permission having been granted by leading right-wing voices.

Niewert continues:

This resurgent racism likes to cloak itself in the pretense of rebellious individualism standing up to the oppression of overbearing "political correctness," or else in academic-sounding terms that fling about misinformation regarding the sciences and sociology to construct a pseudo-rationale for what they euphemistically like to call "race realism."

But pull the cloak aside, and the same old, decrepit racism of a century ago is there, festering like a decaying zombie who refuses to die.

And as the summer goes on, and the presidential campaign picks up steam, and Obama solidifies his already formidable position as a front runner ... well, expect to see a lot more of those zombies crawling the streets of our public discourse.

Or, as I wrote last month in reference to the Imus controversy:

Imus is part of a nauseating (and apparently growing) cultural phenomenon founded on an in-your-face racism, sexism and homophobia that proudly flaunt what they call their "political incorrectness." In reality, "politically incorrect" is nothing more a euphemism for language and symbols that are meant to hurt other people, especially minorities and women. When someone objects, they're accused of being "hypersensitive" and urged to get over it.

And we still have eighteen months until the election. If either Clinton or Obama emerges as a nominee, it's hard to imagine how deep the effluent will get between now and then.

Meanwhile, Harvard has put together an online test (the Implicit Association Test) intended to evaluate whether a person has an automatic preference for one race over another. It's free and takes about 10 minutes. While I have some questions for the assumptions and utility of the test as designed, here are the results for the "European American - African American IAT:"


The most important result: 70% of the respondents had a preference for whites that ranged from "slight" to "strong." 54% had a "moderate" or "strong" preference for whites. About 12% showed a "slight" to "strong" preference for blacks, or about the same percentage as African Americans in the U.S. population. Less than one out of five people had "no preference."

The results could be significant, since 732,881 people took the IAT between 2000 and 2006. But who chooses to take these tests, and why? I suspect that overt racists would be less likely to take it, but the data still reflects a 70% preference for whites.

It's not too surprising that people would have a "preference" for those of their own "race" (whatever that is). Still, it's hard to believe that this is a healthy condition in a very diverse society.

NOTES

*Thanks to Digby at Hullabaloo for the link to Orcinus.

NOTE: There are many other types of IAT's available at Harvard's site.


PHOTO: Sens. Barack Obama and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) tour a Russian base where mobile missiles were being destroyed as part of the Nunn-Lugar program.

Blues Break: Jim Hendrix - "Voodoo Child"

Hendrix and The Experience perform "Voodoo Child" on the BBC in 1969. Hardcore fans of this classic (also listed as "Voodoo Chile" in some versions) will also appreciate the late Stevie Ray Vaughan's cover.

Cruel and usual punishment

New scientific evidence suggests that supposedly humane executions by lethal injection are medically and morally suspect because some prisoners remain conscious, and experience intense pain, through all or part of the procedure.

In particular, the three components of lethal injections may not work together as intended to cause prisoners to lose consciousness before dying of paralysis and cardiac arrest. Some unknown percentage of prisoners may appear to be in a comatose state when in fact they remain or become conscious (a phenomenon known as "anaesthesia awareness") as their lungs stop functioning and they slowly die of "chemical asphixiation."

All this from a study reported in PLoS (Public Library of Science) that found:

Most US executions are beset by procedural problems that could lead to insufficient anesthesia in executions. This hypothesis has been supported by findings of low postmortem blood thiopental levels and eyewitness accounts of problematic executions. Herein we report evidence that the design of the drug scheme itself is flawed.

The study concluded that:

Execution outcomes from North Carolina and California together with interspecies dosage scaling of thiopental effects suggest that in the current practice of lethal injection, thiopental might not be fatal and might be insufficient to induce surgical anesthesia for the duration of the execution. Furthermore, evidence from North Carolina, California, and Virginia indicates that potassium chloride in lethal injection does not reliably induce cardiac arrest.

And:

We were able to analyze only a limited number of executions. However, our findings suggest that current lethal injection protocols may not reliably effect death through the mechanisms intended, indicating a failure of design and implementation. If thiopental and potassium chloride fail to cause anesthesia and cardiac arrest, potentially aware inmates could die through pancuronium-induced asphyxiation. Thus the conventional view of lethal injection leading to an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable.

...potentially aware inmates could die through asphyxiation induced by the muscle paralysis caused by pancuronium.

...even if lethal injection is administered without technical error, those executed may experience suffocation, and therefore... “the conventional view of lethal injection as an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable.”

Lethal injection is currently authorized for use by 37 states, the federal government and the military. Its use has recently been suspended in 11 states due to questions about its efficacy and possible violations of the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment."

Only one of 53 executions in the U.S. during 2006 utilized a method other than lethal injection. The PLoS report makes it clear that lethal injection became the most widely used method of execution in the U.S. despite the lack of peer-reviewed scientific evaluations on the effects of the three chemicals. In fact, the methods used on animals have received far more attention, resulting in strict guidelines:

In the United States and Europe, techniques of animal euthanasia for clinical, laboratory, and agricultural applications are rigorously evaluated and governed by professional, institutional, and regulatory oversight. In university and laboratory settings, local oversight bodies known as Animal Care and Use Committees typically follow the American Veterinary Medical Association's guidelines on euthanasia, which consider all aspects of euthanasia methods, including drugs, tools, and expertise of personnel in order to minimize pain and distress to the animal. Under those guidelines, lethal injections of companion or laboratory animals are limited to injection by qualified personnel of certain clinically tested, Food and Drug Administration–approved anesthetics or euthanasics, while monitoring for awareness.

In stark contrast to animal euthanasia, lethal injection for judicial execution was designed and implemented with no clinical or basic research whatsoever [my emphasis]. To our knowledge, no ethical or oversight groups have ever evaluated the protocols and outcomes in lethal injection. Furthermore, there are no published clinical or experimental data regarding the safety and efficacy of the three-drug lethal injection protocol. Until the unprecedented and controversial use of bispectral index monitoring in the last two North Carolina lethal injections, no monitoring for anesthesia was performed.

The biologist who led the study commented: "You wouldn't be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami" without more proof that it worked as intended. The researchers also found that doses were not adjusted to reflect a prisoner's weight or other variables. In cases where the dosage was wrong:

"The person would feel either asphyxiation or the burning sensation associated with the potassium," said Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon and co-author at the University of Miami. "The potassium would cause extreme discomfort, something like being put on fire."

The study was limited in scope to just four states and about 40 prisoners due to "the secrecy surrounding lethal injections" in the U.S. The authors propose "that the secrecy surrounding protocol design and implementation should be broken. The available data or lack of data should be made public and deliberations should be open and transparent."

A prosecutor in Indiana described a response that many people, faced with this evidence, would probably share: "It doesn't matter a whole lot to me that someone may have felt some pain before they were administered poison as a method of execution." I always thought that the intentional infliction of significant pain on someone is a form of cruelty. Apparently this prosecutor's Con Law class bypassed the last half of the Bill of Rights.

Others have protested that the evidence supporting the study is a bit thin, reflecting a Catch-22 paradox: the execution protocols have never been seriously evaluated by scientists in the first place, and much of the limited data has been kept secret, so there's precious little evidence available for study.

Capital punishment is a travesty in itself no matter how it is implemented. But this latest study suggests that its basic moral infirmity is compounded by a reckless and inexcusable failure to make sure that executions do not result in prolonged agony for unknown numbers of prisoners.

PHOTO: A gurney used for executions by lethal injection in Florida.

Performing conflatio in Michigan

In a speech in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, on April 20th, George W. Bush mostly talked about events in Iraq and his boundless hopes for his current escalation of the conflict. He managed to mention September 11th eight times, continuing his efforts to meld Iraq, al Qaeda and 9/11 in the public imagination.

Bush and Cheney should spend more time reading the official publications of the U.S. Army. In his indispensible Fiasco (2006), Thomas E. Ricks quotes a study of the Iraq "war of choice" published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the Army War College:

Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat...

"This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored crucial differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action. The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda. The war against Iraq was not integral to the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] but rather a detour from it...

[The occupation of Iraq] has stressed the U.S> Army to the breaking point.

Ricks adds, in case we missed it the first time: "This was not some politician or pundit offering that assessment but an official publication of the U.S. Army" [though a disclaimer in the report's introduction states, in familiar boilerplate language, that the views expressed "do not necessarily reflect the offi cial policy or position" of the Army, Defense Department or U.S government].

The SSI report (available online) also notes:

The administration has postulated a multiplicity of enemies, including rogue states; weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferators; terrorist organizations of global, regional, and national scope; and terrorism itself. It also seems to have conflated them into a monolithic threat, and in so doing has subordinated strategic clarity to the moral clarity it strives for in foreign policy and may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no serious threat to the United States.

The SSI report, published in December 2003, has proven all too prophetic.


PHOTO: Aftermath of a suicide bombing in Baghdad, August 2006.

Lowering the flags — again

A visitor from Neptune might easily conclude that, unlike other national flags, the Stars and Stripes were meant to hang only at half-staff. Or so it often seems. There's almost always some good reason to mourn: the slaughter in Blacksburg, the death in Iraqi combat of another member of the Oregon National Guard. But something is seriously amiss in a country that devotes so much time to mourning the violent deaths of its citizens.

Lately The Oregonian, our newspaper of record, has published numerous letters echoing familiar themes, and the usual clichés, on the seemingly dormant issue of gun control. The Democrats have apparently surrendered the field to the four million members of the National Rifle Association and their many sycophants in the GOP. Those who even raise the issue are accused of disrespecting the dead during a time of national mourning. So no one has to answer pointed questions like: why should a person with a history of mental illness, like Cho, be allowed to own semiautomatic pistols like the Walther P22 and the Glock Model 19 9-millimeter. Not to mention popular assault rifles like the AR-15.

Walther's website glowingly describes its P22:

Whether you are looking for a pistol for affordable training or simply the excitement of shooting, the P22 is the pistol for you. The WALTHER P22 is fascinating in its compact size, while still maintaining all of the features of a full-size pistol.

"Affordable training" to do what, exactly? Guns & Ammo's Handguns site adds that "this little rig would make a great way to get the next generation started."

As for the Glock 19, one admirer notes that "it's 100% reliable, and easy to shoot well, and very simple to operate. Small enough to conceal, but big enough to kill." As we now know.

The endless profusion of rifles and handguns, now numbering some 200 million, may have created a lethal feedback loop—a kind of arms race. As the number of weapons increases, owners feel compelled to buy ever more powerful guns to protect themselves from perceived threats. All this plays into the constant reinforcement of the notion, so widespread in movies, television and computer games, that violence is an effective and even acceptable way to resolve conflict.

In response to the VT killings, Congress will soon be looking at a bill that would place further restrictions on gun purchases by those with a history of serious mental illness. The reintroduction of the assault weapons ban (HR 1022) in Congress is likely to lead to another political dead end. Larger questions will be buried with Cho's victims.

Meanwhile, George Bush deigned to speak at a memorial service at VT after four years of not attending a single funeral for those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Frank Rich of the NY Times pointed out this weekend:

President Bush has skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo’s end-of-life medical care. Mr. Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis, and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics. Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to show his face — and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va., by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on the administration.

As for Cho, too many of these mass murders have been perpetrated by young men who, like Tim McVeigh and the killers at Columbine, have been marginalized in one way or another. Cho was shy, spoke with a Korean accent, had acne and lacked minimal social skills—not to mention his history of psychosis. Years of humiliation led to his isolation and final eruption in a catharsis of murderous rage.

Now I have no intent whatsoever to make excuses for Cho, or any other murderers, but it still might be useful to consider what in our culture might be promoting this kind of alienation and extreme violence. After all, this is a culture that worships financial success and celebrity and disdains those who stumble into the ditch. The cultural icons of the day are CEO's, celebrities and arrogant billionaires like Donald Trump who all demonstrate that, as some say, "money is life's report card." It's a culture that rewards CEO's, even unsuccessful ones, with "executive pay packages that typically equal 500 times the salaries of workers at those companies."

As for the rest, especially those who aren't on the make in their careers or personal lives, Randy Newman (in Bad Love) has a line: "I only know we're living / in an unforgiving land." And another:

Just like I'm glad I'm living in the land of the free
Where the rich just get richer
And the poor you don't ever have to see

There are signs that this harsh ideology, best described as a kind of social Darwinism founded on extreme individualism, has begun to erode. Disasters in Iraq and New Orleans, combined with the absurdity of 46 million people with no health insurance, have shifted the political focus to collective solutions for a few persistent national problems.

Though it's often overlooked in the minutia of legal interpretation and "strict construction" of its language, the Constitution unequivocally proclaims overarching collective goals in its preamble:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Individual solutions to collective problems are appealing for the wealthy minority that can afford them. But the Founders, through their Constitution, have declared that we have a certain responsibility for each other, commonly known as compassion. That's precisely what's missing in the current state of our culture.


PHOTO: Flag at half-mast outside the U.S. Supreme Court (apparently in mourning over the erosion of women's right to choose in last week's 5-4 abortion decision).

McCain confronts McCain

Apparently McCain is taking his cues from George Allen, who was YouTubed during last fall's gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. Does McCain think no one's paying close attention to these contraditions? Meanwhile, he grimly supports the Bush surge, apparently in the belief that a miracle in Iraq will save his campaign in time for Iowa and New Hampshire.

The 1,000-year R majority hits some bumps

As Alberto Gonzales nears the end of his career as Attorney General, thanks to his bumbling performance before a Senate committee last week, maybe the focus will shift to the broader issues that got him in so much trouble: the radical politicization of the Department of Justice, along with every other branch of the federal government, in pursuit of long-term Republican dominance. The firing of U.S. Attorneys who resisted the White House's political agenda only revealed a small slice of this agenda, notably Karl Rove's obsession with pursuing spurious "voter fraud" prosecutions as a way of intimidating the political opposition.

In his column for the New York Observer, Joe Conason described the "broader scheme" that was designed to nurture fantasies of a thousand-year Republican majority:

Developed by deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, the President’s top political aide, that scheme was evidently designed to advance his objective of discouraging minority voters and others with the bad habit of supporting Democratic candidates. In Republican parlance, such attempts to hamper registration, intimidate citizens and reduce turnout in targeted communities are lauded as “combating voter fraud.” Several of the fired U.S. Attorneys had angered party operatives, including Mr. Rove, because they had shown so little enthusiasm for trumping up fraud cases against Democrats.

Following the 2004 election, David Iglesias, then serving as the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, set up a task force to investigate Republican allegations of fraud. Those accusations boiled down to a single case where a woman had created a handful of phony registrations. (She did so for financial reasons, rather than out of any desire to manipulate the election.) When Mr. Iglesias declined prosecution for lack of airtight evidence, local Republicans began to demand his replacement with a more pliable and less professional prosecutor—a demand eventually fulfilled by Mr. Rove and President Bush.

The Biskupic case in Wisconsin, as noted in a previous posting, fits the overall pattern nicely:

In Wisconsin, by contrast, U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic prosecuted voter-fraud allegations regardless of merit, winning big headlines when he indicted 14 black Milwaukee residents for casting ballots illegally. Nine of those cases were either tossed out or lost in court—an awful result compared with the normal conviction rate of over 90 percent. But at least the mediocre Mr. Biskupic—whose conviction of a Democratic state official was just overturned on appeal—managed to remain in the good graces of the White House and keep his job.

The Republican cry of “voter fraud” is a specious complaint, amplified by right-wing hacks to conceal the fact that in recent years, the most sustained efforts to interfere with orderly elections and voting rights can be traced to the Republican National Committee.

Harassing minority voters with bogus claims of fraud is a venerable tradition in the G.O.P., as anyone familiar with the career of the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist would know. Back in the early 60’s, when Rehnquist was just another ambitious young lawyer in Arizona, he ran a partisan campaign to confront black and Hispanic voters over their “qualifications.” Along with many of today’s generation of Republican leaders, he was a stalwart of the Goldwater campaign in 1964, which garnered its handful of electoral votes in the South by opposing the Voting Rights Act.

Karl Rove came on the political scene during the Nixon era. Conason notes:

Under his leadership, the G.O.P. has repeatedly been disgraced by conspiracies to diminish voter participation.

In 2002, Republican operatives used a telemarketing firm to illegally jam Democratic phone banks in New Hampshire to win the U.S. Senate seat now held by John Sununu. In 2004, Florida state officials sent armed officers into certain Orlando neighborhoods to scare elderly black registrants, while Republicans sought to challenge minority voters en masse in communities in Kentucky, Nevada, South Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and paid for the destruction of Democratic voter registrations in Nevada and Oregon.

Actual voter fraud of the kind decried in Republican propaganda is rare, according to nonpartisan experts. Although the White House recently rewrote a careful federal study by the Election Assistance Commission to hide that basic fact, it remains true that very few individuals intentionally seek to fabricate a registration or cast an illegal ballot.

Naturally there are exceptions, as Conason is quick to observe, "most notably illustrated by Republican celebrity Ann Coulter:"

When the far-right columnist and television personality registered to vote in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005, she wrote down the address of her realtor’s office rather than her own home address. She then signed the form, despite its plain warning that falsifying any information on it would make her liable to felony prosecution—and which she, as a lawyer, surely understood. According to Palm Beach County election officials, she also voted in the wrong precinct the following year, disregarding a poll worker who explained her error. (Coulter fans can view her dubious voter-registration form online at www.bradblog.com.) [And a lot more here.]

If proved, those acts would be crimes punishable by prison terms of up to five years, but Ms. Coulter has stonewalled the ongoing investigation. (She says the Palm Beach officials are syphilitic and mentally defective.) No charges have been filed so far, perhaps because her lawyer is a prominent Republican who worked on Bush v. Gore in 2000—and whom the President then appointed as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. He must know a lot about voter fraud.

But now back to Wisconsin and USA Biskupic's humiliating attempt to prosecute Georgia Thompson on corrupation charges.

The three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has just (April 20th) issued a unanimous 14-page opinion supporting its extraordinary decision to free Thompson on April 5th. She was accused of obtaining a "private benefit" from her decision to award a state contract to a travel agency which had made a political contribution to a (surprise!) Democratic candidate for governer. The court held (on page 13) that "neither an increase in salary for doing what one’s superiors deem a good job, nor an addition to one’s peace of mind, is a 'private benefit' for the purpose of [a federal criminal prosecution]." The opinion concludes:

This prosecution, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of a civil servant for conduct that, as far as this record shows, was designed to pursue the public interest as the employee understood it, may well induce Congress to take another look at the wisdom of enacting ambulatory criminal prohibitions. Haziness designed to avoid loopholes through which bad persons can wriggle can impose high costs on people the statute was not designed to catch.

In the end, the Thompson case demonstrates the effects of combining overly broad federal laws with a zealous prosecutor who has transparent political motives.


PHOTO: Ann Coulter spewing venom at the Republican convention in 2004.

Blues Break: NIN travels to Mars - "Sunspots"

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover makes its way across the solar system, accompanied by Nine Inch Nails'/Trent Reznor's "Sunspots." Outstanding animation by Daniel Maas.

Protecting the "inerrant Bible"

The ever-alert Digby at Hullabaloo has turned up a bill designed to protect "intellectual diversity" that recently passed the Missouri House of Representatives. It contains a clause that requires state colleges to file an annual report on their progress toward goals that include the following:

(e) Include intellectual diversity concerns in the institution's guidelines on teaching and program development and such concerns shall include but not be limited to the protection of religious freedom including the viewpoint that the Bible is inerrant [my emphasis];

The annual report must describe the colleges' general progress as well as the specific steps it has taken to achieve "intellectual freedom." The criteria for evaluating the reports include whether they:

(g) Develop hiring, tenure, and promotion policies that protect individuals against viewpoint discrimination and track any reported grievances in that regard;

l) Hold meetings periodically with students to determine if the students believe they are receiving a sound and respectful education; or

(m) Create an institutional ombudsman on intellectual diversity.

Much of the bill seems entirely reasonable, but its implications seem clear enough: a fundamentalist Christian student, for example, could file a formal grievance or appeal to the "ombudsman" because he feels that his zoology professor hasn't taught evolution in a way that acknowledges the "viewpoint that the Bible is inerrant."

Biblical literalism, then, becomes just another "viewpoint" that deserves consideration in a science class alongside evidence that the Vishnu Schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is two billion years old. In a philosophy class on epistemology (the theory of knowledge), a professor could be challenged under the Missouri "diversity" code if she fails to teach the doctrine of biblical infallibility along with empiricism, constructivism and rationalism. A physics professor teaching the Big Bang could be denounced by any student who feels that he hasn't been sufficiently "respectful" of the biblical notion that the universe was created in six days.

As much as the proposed law seems to disfavor "viewpoint" discrimination, it takes an aggressive role in doing exactly that by specifically promoting biblical literalism. And the bill's political context is clear enough: the Missouri House has joined David Horowitz's hysterical assault on the perceived—perceived by the right, that is—domination of academia by leftist faculty members.

With 81% of the U.S. population describing itself as "Christian," the Missouri House's anxieties about the infringement of religious freedoms seem misplaced. The non-Christian and atheist minorities would have a lot more to worry about if this Missouri bill is ever signed into law.

The bill was prompted by a lawsuit filed by a grad student against Missouri State University based on its alleged retaliation for her refusal to sign a letter (part of a class project) supporting gay adoption. That lawsuit was settled out of court last November.

Whatever the merits of the lawsuit, the bill directly injects the state legislature into curriculum management for Missouri's public colleges and universities, with a specifically Christian agenda. That's both an infringement on the religious freedom of non-Christians and the kind of "law respecting an establishment of religion" that's forbidden by the First Amendment.


PHOTO: The Missouri House in session. The state motto on the podium, "Salus populi suprema lex [esto]," means "the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law." Not the Bible?

Geaghan: Sunday Snippets from the paper of record

Since she began writing a regular column for the New York Times in 1995, Maureen Dowd's career has been distinguished by an almost indiscriminate series of personal hit pieces on everyone from the Clintons to Al Gore to the Bush dynasty and, this week, Paul Wolfowitz. Her name has even become a verb in some quarters, as in "to dowdify." If she has ever written a kind word about anyone in politics, I must have missed it. (I readily admit, however, that there may be few reasons to write anything positive about our political classes.)

Wolfowitz, the neocon who played a central role in selling and quickly botching the Iraq war, is now embroiled in a scandal involving nepotism, among other things, in his new gig as president of the World Bank. As with Iraq, he seems incapable of recognizing his mistakes. Dowd, as she often does, skewers her target nicely:

Like W., Wolfie is dangerous precisely because he’s so persuaded of his own virtue.

Not surprisingly, people who are so convinced of their own infallibility can do no wrong and are not bound by the same limitations (including the law) that constrain the rest of us. Or so they believe.

Meanwhile, Frank Rich's columns can be equally (and appropriately) devastating for his subjects, except he frequently transcends personal vilification and shifts his focus to the culture at large. In today's column, for example, he explores the fallout from last week's firing of Don Imus by CBS:

The biggest cliché of the debate so far is the constant reiteration that this will be a moment for a national “conversation” about race and sex and culture. Do people really want to have this conversation, or just talk about having it? If they really want to, it means we have to ask ourselves why this debacle has given permission to talking heads on television to repeat Imus’s offensive words so insistently that cable news could hardly take time out to note the shocking bombing in the Baghdad Green Zone...

If we really want to have this conversation, it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, “Borat,” “South Park” and maybe Larry David, too.

Though we've been hearing rumors about a national "conversation" on racism for decades, it's not happening now and won't even begin unless our political, cultural or religious leaders are willing to confront some very difficult questions about both our history and current social realities.

Instead, we're seeing a sustained reaction against "political correctness" and "victimology" that's analogous to, and part of, the opposition to feminism documented by Susan Faludi in 1991 in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1).

That reaction is based on a simple premise: women, blacks and other minorities may have had some legitimate complaints about systematic discrimination in the past, but American society has evolved towards greater equality. So their litany of complaints is entirely out of proportion to current realities and, thanks to programs like affirmative action, serves only to victimize the white majority (and especially white males). As long as that all-too-convenient perception exists, any "conversation" will be impossible or, at best, unproductive.

The right has added its own variation on this theme: the inequality of African Americans is the result of years of paternalistic federal programs created by Democratic administrations and congresses. These programs have created an unhealthy dependency that has prevented blacks from taking initiatives that might allow them to enter and thrive in the free-market system. As the inflammatory Dinesh D'Souza once wrote, "the American obsession with race is fueled by a civil rights establishment that has a vested interest in perpetuating black dependency" (4).

The reasons for the backlash? Faludi's comments in a 1999 interview still seem valid today:

Look, it's hardly a time of great jubilation for anyone. But it's much harder for men in many respects because they have this feeling that women are rising just as men are falling. The truth is, of course, that women are moving from the subbasement to the basement. By any objective measure -- pay, representation in boardrooms, status -- men are still ahead. But psychologically it's much harder to fall than to climb, even if you land at a higher point than those who are just beginning to rise.

By most measures, of course, African Americans haven't experienced even the limited social and economic mobility that Faludi describes for women (2). Until we have our national "conversation," that reality seems unlikely to change.

NOTES

(1) Followed by Faludi's Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man in 1999.

(2) The scope of the problem, contrary to popular perceptions about minority preferences in hiring, was revealed by a 2003 study conducted by researchers from MIT and the University of Chicago. They submitted a large number of job applications that were substantially the same in terms of education and prior experience, but they differed in one respect: half the "applicants" had names that "sounded" African American. Those applicants were 50% less likely to be invited in for interviews, and the percentage was even lower for better paying, more responsible positions. [See also this article by Tim Wise and our posting on the U.S. "Punishment Culture."]

(3) In a January posting, we attempted to apply the academic construct known, awkwardly, as "cultural pseudosubspeciation" to Iraq. That concept has equal application to racial, ethnic and gender relations in the U.S. and elsewhere. Our friend Ellis at Disambiguation (which has been far too quiet of late) has privately expressed some disagreement with our use of that notion. Maybe we can elicit a comment from him, or our hordes of readers, on this subject.

(4) In his lengthy analysis of race relations in The End of Racism (1996), D'Souza also wrote: "Activists recommend federal jobs programs and recruitment into the private sector. Yet it seems unrealistic, bordering on the surreal, to imagine underclass blacks with their gold chains, limping walk, obscene language, and arsenal of weapons doing nine-to-five jobs at Procter and Gamble or the State Department."

PHOTO: The gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times, designed by Renzo Piano, on 8th Avenue in Manhattan.