“It is not enough for us to win. Others must lose.”  - Gore Vidal

When Barack Obama did his best Stone Cold Steve Austin impersonation on the Today Show with Matt Lauer, telling him he needs to find out “whose ass to kick” over the biggest ecological catastrophe in the last one hundred years–the BP oil spill–most people rightfully reacted with a collective yawn. If Stone Cold was attacked on Monday Night Raw, he would promise to kick his enemy’s ass minutes later, and then make due on his threat by the end of the night. He wouldn’t let weeks go by, while consequences multiply, before talking tough. Perhaps Obama should seek the advice of Linda McMahon, co-owner of World Wrestling Entertainment, who is running for Senate in Connecticut. Televisual narratives require immediate action, preceded and followed by clever and emotive scripts of dialogue, to have coherence.

More important than revealing the incompetence, both politically and administratively of Obama, the “whose ass to kick”  statement also reveals the moral impotence of American political culture where no one knows, or is willing to identify, the common enemy of the citizenry, hostile enemy of progress, and dedicated enemy of humanity. The answer to Obama’s inquiry about ass kicking is pretty obvious. It has been obvious not only since the spill, but for the last four decades. The entire oil industry needs to be snuck up on from behind, knocked to the ground, and beaten with bats, chains, and crowbars. They have eviscerated the environment without interruption for years on end, have bludgeoned money-wise and energy efficient technology at every turn, and have mugged the people of the world by routine. They are one of many enemies that needs its ass kicked in the form of aggressive taxation and regulation. Obama’s professed ignorance on this subject shows exactly why he is president, and even though the problems are systemic rather than personal, everyone should be as shocked as Matt Lauer appeared to be, by Obama’s confession that he has not spoken to BP’s CEO, the repugnant Tony Hayward, since the spill.

The failure to to identify and know our enemies is one of the most costly malfunctions of American democracy. It is also primarily a disease of those left of the right-wing lunatic fringe of politics. One of the reasons why the right continues to be successful at organizing, mobilizing, and galvanizing people to their cause is a consistent willingness to blame specific individuals and parties for America’s problems. The best members of the right-wing seem to be misinformed, while the worst are bigoted, blaming Mexican immigrants, poor black people, Muslims, and something called “liberals” for every minor glitch and major catastrophe in public affairs. Their answers may be wildly detached from reality, but at least the Tea Party types give the American people answers. Liberals whine about getting picked on by the big, bad bullies on the playground–Beck, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, et al. They are answering questions no one ever asks.

President Obama and the majority of the Democratic Party are so deracinated, defanged, and declawed that they cannot even summon the righteous rage to condemn the oil industry and respond with reason to the spill by regulating the industry’s practices that caused it. Regardless of the label that is put on the refusal to call enemies “enemies” and issue indictments and punishments accordingly–”bipartisanship,” “civility”–it is actually moral and political cowardice, which translates into weakness to the American people.

On May 16th, 500 members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) issued an appropriate wake up call to Greg Baer–deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America. They stood outside his home, waving signs and denouncing big bank greed. Some protesters took bullhorns and told stories about home foreclosures and debtor harassment.

The media response to the necessary protest was as boring as it was unimaginative. SEIU was bitterly condemned for having the audacity to disturb someone at his home. Nina Easton, apologist for deregulatory class warfare and Fox News analyst, lives right next door to Baer, and characterized the group as a “mob” without any justification for being there or “targeting Baer’s children.” His teenage son, reportedly, was so “frightened” that he “locked himself in the bathroom.”

The proximity, both residential and ideological, of Easton to Baer is a particularly striking illustration of the nexus formed by shared interests between major financial institutions and mainstream media. In this case, they are right next door to each other. However, more importantly, the tone of her analysis of the situation, along with most in the media, reveals the lack of moral consistency in American political culture, along with the inability to hold anyone accountable for anything. It is wrong to disturb a rich family in their home on a “on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon” through protest, but entirely acceptable to seize the homes of working class people without giving them the opportunity to work out an agreement for payment with the bank. The people who are responsible for seizing the homes of millions of Americans are able to enjoy countless “peaceful, sun-crisp” afternoons in their homes, while the media elite vows to protect them from something so offensive as a non-violent demonstration.

Greg Baer and his ilk are responsible for destroying American families, the American economy, and America itself. Tony Hayward, along with the rest of the oil executives, have devastated the planet and for their efforts receive pampering from Washington. If the SEIU members are considered villains for protesting Baer at his home, while Baer is granted immunity, and Obama spends weeks sitting on his hands while the ocean is poisoned, fishermen are bankrupted, and the gulf is decimated, because he can’t figure out “whose ass to kick,” then there is no hope and there is certainly no chance for change.

Silent acceptance of two ongoing wars–both unnecessary and unjust–has swept across the nation rendering the continual deaths of individuals in combat zones and destruction of families in residential zones as boring, tiresome routines of reality in a country too anxious over economic problems to care.

President Obama shows no signs of seriously committing to any of the tentatively firm (or firmly tentative?) withdrawal dates he has set for Iraq. Most Americans and British doubt that the August 31 draw down date is anything more than political posturing, not too mention the irrelevant Iraqi people (it is only their country) who are also skeptical. As with most modern cases of cynicism, this one is well-founded. Two weeks ago, the Department of the Defense announced that it is “reconsidering the pace” of its withdrawal plans. It doesn’t take a soothsayer to see that similar announcements will be forthcoming until finally the “official” withdrawal timetable is extended, for the second time, due to “security concerns”–as if those are ever going to entirely vanish in a war torn nation rife with sectarian conflict.

Meanwhile, it has become clear that we have committed to perpetual war in Afghanistan, where there have been more U.S. military deaths in the last 10 months of the Afghan war than in the first five years of the conflict. The US death toll in Afghanistan has surpassed 1,000, which adds up too innumerable daughters and sons without fathers, mothers and fathers without daughters and sons, young men and women without brothers or sisters, widows without husbands, friends without friends, and on and on and on.

The catastrophes overseas multiply into tragedies at home that are not limited to fatalities. Thousands of lives have been ruined by severe wartime injuries, which will often add to the pile of wreckage with broken marriages and bankrupted families. On the campaign trail, Obama waxed eloquently about treating the pain and serving the needs of returning soldiers. In the White House, he has refused to break with Bush. Veterans health services, especially on the psychological side, are “woefully inadequate,” in the words of the DOD’s own Mental Health Advisory Team.

One of the most scandalous and sickening hardships of military life comes for female soldiers who are sexually assaulted in high number by their male counterparts, and receive nearly no support from the Pentagon when they report the crime. After being raped in the barracks, they are systematically raped by self-serving military elite and indifferent political elite, who would rather enforce an omerta on the issue than give brave women the protection and justice they deserve.

Needless death of young people with full lives ahead of them, the worlds of survivors and their families miserably altered by paralysis, brain damage, and other severe injuries, financial devastation from caring for these wounds, psychological trauma for those lucky enough to come home in good physical condition, and violated women are a few things to remember throughout all of the political posturing that will undoubtedly go on today. The men responsible for creating the hell that working class, military families live in will read from poetic scripts about “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “patriotism,” and then go back to the work of hell maintenance tomorrow.

In other news, it is raining in Chicago:

Thousands of drenched people left a Memorial Day Ceremony in Elwood, Illinois without hearing President Barack Obama’s speech.

The Memorial Day program at the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Cemetery started out hazy and hot. But just moments before President Obama showed up, the winds picked up and the rain came down.

The immigration insanity in Arizona present an unusual opportunity for the American left—an opportunity for self-transformation and an opportunity to, after many that have been missed, grab moral authority in the confused and cloudy debate over the future of American politics.

Instinctually, a large number of Americans, even those that are frightened by talk of threats coming from the border and respond a certain way in most polls, recognize the immorality and inhumanity of police officers stopping people according to a race and ethnicity criteria of judgment and proceeding to demand to see their “papers,” as if they were pedigrees in an elite dog show. Those with historical memory or sufficient powers of imagination also know that this will end badly. It was under Mayor Rudolph Giulani’s similar plain clothes police “stop-and-search” program of racial profiling in New York City that Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant, was killed when reaching for his wallet because he could not understand the police officers’ English, regardless of how loud they shouted in it.

Many Americans may appreciate this on a legal level and others on a social one. But, the real opportunity for communication is on the spiritual level. According to the Pew Research Center, between 70 and 75 percent of Americans are Christians, meaning they voluntarily enlist themselves into a religion that places great value, in the form of moral integrity and human dignity, to the outsider. From the Good Samaritan story to the selection of the disciples to the woman at the well, the stories of the New Testament affirm the priceless humanity of the dispossessed, dislocated, and disenfranchised. Jesus Christ himself was born to parents who were hunted down by their Earthly king and would grow up to perform miracles for the oppressed and be executed by the Roman Empire alongside two thieves.

In a nation where a majority of people pride themselves on devotion to this religion, hospitality, not paranoia, should be the guiding principle throughout interaction with immigrants, illegal or otherwise, as long as those here illegally are given a fair opportunity to earn legal status, which under the current mountain of bureaucracy they are not. Moral language, spoken in directly religious terminology, should be used to win this argument not in the court of law, but in the court of public opinion. Appealing to the religious sensibility of the American people is not only morally honest of those who share that sensibility, but also politically persuasive.

Karl Rove cleverly convinced Bush to attack his opponents where they are strong rather than where they are weak. The John Kerry “swift boat” campaign was part of this strategy. Rove’s tactics may have been smarmy, but the overall strategy was wise. The left should take Rove’s cue, and attack the right where they are strong—religion. For much too long, the right has effectively claimed religion as their personal property, all while violating the moral imperative to assist the poor, protect the weak, and police the elite.

Religious language is not only necessary for clarifying the social stakes and moral consequences of important issues—financial reform and greed, poverty and justice, immigration and hospitality—but also necessary for influencing religious people, the overwhelming majority of Americans, with political discourse.

The current controversy over Arizona’s draconian immigration policy gives the left a chance to inject religious language, story, and metaphor into their argument, especially considering the respect given to the outsider throughout much of the Christian narrative. Other opportunities for the application of moral and religious language abound. It should have been at the center, rather than the margins, in the health care debate, and it should also guide the discussion over how to create an economy where poverty is not a non-thought, job creation is not an afterthought, and middle-class stability is not a second thought. These concerns, along with inequality, should be paramount in the economic debate, and the left could help make them so by reminding Americans of the religious, especially the Christian, demand to take care of the poor, along with the repeated Biblical warnings against wealth.

Matthew 25: 37-40 provides the template:

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’ “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

The connection between these verses and immigration, health care, and the economy are clear. How one treats the hungry and homeless is how one treats God. It almost makes Karl Mark look like Glenn Beck, and certainly doesn’t endorse stopping Latinos at random and demanding citizenship papers.

There are things that are wrong and things that are right. Greed is wrong and should be called sinful instead of “irresponsible.” Predatory discrimination is wrong and recognized as a violation of common humanity. America is a religious nation, and most Americans share a spiritual geography when exploring moral territory. For too long, a cowardly, meek, and elitist left has sacrificed this territory by refusing to fight for the values of their faith in the public eye.

Redemption is waiting in Arizona.

Richard Blumenthal, who is running for Senate in Connecticut, does not have any Vietnam War combat experience. But he said he did. 

The only thing shocking about this creepy combover’s lies is the stupidity that makes them possible. Any public figure living in a televisual media era where TV news, newspapers, and radio interact to provide constant coverage, questions of quality not withstanding, of politics and pop culture able to incessantly lie about such an easily verifiable part of his life is delusional, fatuous, and naive. Inject the internet into this media mix and the lies become so incredibly idiotic that one should question the sanity of their speaker.

Despite all of this, politicians keep lying about petty nonsense, and thereby reinforcing most people’s idea that everyone in the political game is full of shit. An increasingly soundbite driven and image-based news media lives for the onanistic thrill of what dishonest politicians who have always been got call “gotcha journalism.”

This is the status quo of American politics and political news, and it plays out most predictably every four years during what political journalists have to settle for because they don’t get to cover the Super Bowl: presidential campaigns. Most candidates and journalists pretend to be pensive, while they do this complicated dance in which they alternate courting favor with each other and then attack each other over primarily minor discrepancies in speech or voting records. The Blumenthal Vietnam lie is the latest part of this ongoing process, only it comes during a midterm election campaign, which is akin to the Masters Golf Tournament–interesting, but exciting only to those weirdos who are into that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, everyone is satisfied. Members of the media appear heroic for the public, and are all too eager to congratulate themselves for “speaking truth to power” and “taking on the man” at every opportunity. Cynical voters feel informed, sophisticated, and anything but bamboozled by the transparent lies of tacky politicians. And what about them? Well, that’s the best part.

This complicated dance allows politicians to perpetuate the big lie that is vital to their entire operation: The lie that they have any connection to the public interest and common good. The lie that they are not highly paid employees of the oil companies, pharmaceutical industry, defense contractors, insurance agencies, credit card companies, investment banks, and on and on and on.

University of Massachusetts political science professor Thomas Ferguson describes political business as usual as the “investment theory of party competition.” Ferguson thoroughly documents and brilliantly analyzes how business elites, rather than voters, control political systems, most especially the American political system (watch an excellent documentary on the theory that has the same title as Ferguson’s seminal text, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Politics).

The Investment Theory provides a crucial insight into the big lie, and if journalists performed as they should in a functional democracy, they would use it as a guide for questioning, cross-examining, and investigating candidates for Sheriff, Senate, and President.

Blumenthal lied about Vietnam. Palin lied about the “Bridge to Nowhere.” Charlie Crist lied about supporting President Obama’s stimulus package. Citizens are better educated, better off, and hopefully better voters for knowing about these lies and those that are similar. But, ignorance will continue to dominate the demos as long as the big lie, which shrouds the legalized bribery of American politics, remains untorn.

Only when journalists and citizens come together to rip, tear, and shred the shroud will our democracy begin to climb its way out of its bone filled grave.

From my article published today on the Daily Yonder:

Stanley Crouch writes that whenever people pretentiously and proudly announce, “I don’t watch television,” they should follow it up with “I don’t look at America either.” 

Between cartoonish reality shows and grotesque game shows, there isn’t much dramatic television giving big, clear windows into America.

 However, on the rare occasion that TV does get it right, it is often the stuff of pure emotive and intellectual brilliance. In the 21st century, American television is a home run hitter with a very low batting average. 

One of its most beautiful and powerful homeruns was David Simon’s The Wire. From 2002 to 2008, the HBO series moved a magnifying glass over the underbelly of urban America. From crime and poverty to police incompetence and political corruption, The Wire gave viewers a rare, and brutally honest, insight into the afflictions of American cities. 

Although not as comprehensive in scope, Friday Night Lights, which just started its fourth season on NBC, put viewers through the looking glass of rural America, allowing them to explore family, faith, and of course, football with sociological savvy and emotional maturity. 

Working class struggles, educational difficulty, and communal solidarity loom large in the background in this program that, on paper, is about a high school football coach named Eric Taylor, his family, his players, and their families. 

As the FNL characters have progressed through triumph and tragedy, the series has come to represent much more than one coach’s fight to take his team of dedicated upperclassmen to the Texas High School State Football Championship. It is about small towns in modern America, and what their families do to maintain communal strength, familial love, and individual excellence under unfriendly economic conditions, intense social divisions, and limited local opportunity. 

Read the rest here.