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I’m afraid that I’m losing my ability to think critically.  See, I sign up for all these right-wing email lists (part of my job as social critic), but today’s missive from Ann Coulter actually made sense.  Well, half of it did.  Does that mean I’m now half stupid?  Maybe, but listen to what the Coulternator is saying:

Dear Fellow Conservative,
“Somehow we just missed that home prices don’t go up forever.”
No, that’s not your idiot brother-in-law explaining how his four home equity loans eventually landed him penniless on a futon in your rec room. It’s the billionaire CEO of JP Morgan, Jamie Dimon.
Dimon was explaining to Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission how he and his fellow Magic Men crashed the entire U.S. economy and then turned to taxpayers for a bail out.
Really? So Dimon’s defense to Wall Street’s utter recklessness with other people’s money is to claim that Wall Street doesn’t really understand how the market works? Again: Really?
But no one on the Commission challenged Dimon because, while the Commission’s stated purpose is “to examine the causes of the financial crisis,” its actual purpose is to conceal those causes — especially the federal government’s own central role in creating the housing bubble.
Further proof that the Commission isn’t serious…

See what I mean?  She’s kinda making sense.  Of course, after this the letter devolves into a typical Coulter tirade where our current economic woes are blamed on Obama, the census, and a lack of commitment to Reaganomics.  Saying Reaganomics will save us from the effects of, well, Reaganomics, is the sort of Alice in Wonderland, nothing makes sense that comes out of the Mad Hatter Coulter’s mouth nonsense with which I find it easy to disagree.

Over at the Nation, Robert Reich makes far more sense when he argues that the current Recession and coming Depression is the result of the rising economic inequality created by the Neoliberal policies of Reaganomics in the first place.  In other words, when you stop taxing the rich, take away the ability of workers to represent their interests, drastically cut the social safety net, and deregulate everything with a fetishistic belief that “the market knows best” you create the circumstances the US is in now and was in in 1929.  According to Reich:

in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America’s two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Get it?  Rising inequality creates economic downturns.  The greedier the rich are the more we all suffer, except of course for the rich.  In fact, the rich are making a killing off the current Recession/Depression Era.  That’s right.  The rich are getting richer.

Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars.”

So given that there is widespread agreement among many of the country’s leading economic experts that rising inequality hurts nearly all of us, why can’t the radical right that Ann Coulter represents get on board and start clamoring for worker representation, rebuilding the social safety net, and taxing the wealthiest among us?

That’s where “class” gets complicated, because although Coulter’s followers are primarily the working and lower-middle class whites who love her brand of vitriol, they are a class of people more interested in protecting their racial privilege with anti-immigrant sentiment and their sexual privilege with traditional marriage rhetoric than in protecting their economic interests.

And that’s too bad.  Because when the likes of Ann Coulter start making half sense to the likes of me, we’re halfway there to a broad-based coalition of Americans who want a distribution of wealth that reflects fairness and opportunity, not selfishness and greed.

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A Texas woman in her 60s recently received a box of chocolates and a thank you note.  When she opened the box, it exploded with a spray of nails and tacks and the woman was forced to undergo emergency surgery.  And why did this happen?  It’s difficult to say, but the woman is married to an oil executive and there is a lot of speculation that this is in response to the BP disaster.  A disaster for which there is more and more evidence was the result of greed and arrogance on the part of company executives.

Indeed, Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak, both on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, recently wrote

In effect, it appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to contain the added risk.”

But what if the cost of those cost-cutting measures that led to a variety of environmental disasters for BP isn’t just the fines and lawsuits that follow?  What if the real cost is that individual executives and their families are now specifically targeted by radical environmental activists?  What if these environmental activists, like other revolutionary groups before them, are trying to stop the system of greed and destruction that is the oil industry by scaring the tar balls out of the individuals in charge?

It’s not that far fetched a political strategy.  It’s been around at least since the Decembrists (no, not the Indie rock group- the Russian upstarts of the 1800s). Yet bombing the indivduals responsible is still the tactic of revolutionary groups.   States and state-like entities, like the US or Al Qaeda, prefer to bomb innocent civilian populations.  And although this is a tactic of power, it is really not a great way to get people on your side.  But when the powerless start taking out the individuals (and perhaps their families) who directly profit from the greed that is the oil industry, something revolutionary is afoot.

Bombing oil executives is an immediate way to get people to notice that things like the BP oil spill didn’t just happen by accident or as the result of some human-less system.  The oil spill happened  because individuals in charge made decisions that put all of us at risk so that they could increase profit.  Instead, we are given a story that BP and the oil industry are these big machines that are unstoppable in their destruction of the environment.  But in fact, actual humans made the decisions that creates such horror.   The Gulf wasn’t destroyed without individuals choosing to increase their wealth and the company’s profit.

I have to admit that whoever did this may have made a mistake by targeting the wife of the oil exec and not the exec himself, but perhaps they were trying to send a message not to the American people, but to the oil industry itself.  In other words, if this sort of greed is how you operate, you or your family might be at risk.  And that’s a message that so far has not been heard.

Sure- I know we’re all guilty by association.  I drive a car.  I heat my home.  I have more electronics than could possibly be ethical.  But my complicity is not at the same level as an oil executive and neither is yours.  At least I hope complicity is different than guilt in the eyes of environmental revolutionaries.  Otherwise, the next exploding box of chocolates could be for us.

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Remember the case of South African runner Caster Semenya?  Her gender was questioned by the International Association of Athletic Federations after she competed in Berlin last summer for  the World Athletics Championships.  At question for the last ten months was whether or not Semenya was female or not.  Fortunately for Semenya, medical experts decided yesterday that she was female enough to continue competing.

That’s good news for Semenya, who has endured ten months of scientific scrutiny as well as media attention.

According to many observers, the lesson to be learned is that athletes’ privacy should be protected.

Woman and Children’s Minister Noluthando Mayende Sibiya said

The privacy of Caster was violated very, very seriously.  We need to ensure that the laws of the country are tightened so that the rights of people are observed and protected in that regard.”

The minister had written a letter to the United Nations last year complaining about the “blatant disregard for Caster’s human dignity.  Nobody should be made to suffer in the way Caster was made to suffer in the past several months,” she wrote.

But the need for privacy is surely not the only lesson to be learned from Semenya’s case.  Instead, the real lesson is that binary sex, the foundation of modern sporting competition, is a fiction.   The truth is, sex is far more messy than a binary.  As we know from the Semenya case, but a variety of other athletes as well, bodies and chromosomes come in more shades than black or white,  penis or vagina or XX or XY.

Indeed, there are women with XNull chromosomes and even XXY chromosomes.  There are bodies with both testes and a vagina.  And to make matters even more difficult to figure out, there are a variety of persons taking hormones for a variety of reasons– from birth control to a desire to be more “masculine” or more “feminine.”  In other words, between intersexed bodies, transgendered bodies, and hypergendered bodies, how are we supposed to find a nice separation between male and female in the future when that separation was always far from stable?

And can sports survive without imagining sex as either this or that?  Modern sports were founded on the assumption that men required physical activity to remain masculine in the face of an increasing “office-i-cation” of labor.  As farmers and factory workers moved into white collar or at least service sector jobs, they lost the physicality of labor.  Thus “sports” were invented- as part of schools as well as communities- to turn boys into men.

Women’s sports were more complicated, more dangerous to the sexual binary.  If sports could make a man out of a boy, what could they do to a woman?  And masculinized women were dangerous not just to the sexual binary, but to heterosexuality as well since she was always assumed to be a lesbian.  Still, despite the dangers of sports to women, girls pursued them with a passion, especially after the passage of Title IX.  Sure they worked hard to feminize sports- to wear “cute” little outfits or flock to sports that made them thin (like track or tennis) and not sports that might bulk them up (like rugby or bodybuilding).  But still, despite the anxiety over sports as a masculinizing influence, women’s sports grew alongside men’s.

And yet, what to do when someone like Semenya comes along?  Clearly muscular, clearly fast, clearly not trying to look feminine, Semenya’s body and gender presentation acts as threat to the supposedly clear separation between men and women.  Indeed, her body is so threatening that it had to be studied for ten months to decide to which sex it belongs.

And the conclusion of the experts: female.  But the conclusion of the rest of us:  sex is messy.

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Ah, Americans love a good romance.  It’s our most popular genre of literature.  If you consider romantic comedies, it’s one of our most popular genres of film.  And there are a plethora of reality TV shows, from “Buy the Dress” to the seemingly unstoppable “Bachelor” and “Bachelorette.”  But a huge part of the ideology of  romance is the US is not so much about the smoochy smoochy mushy stuff, but about the romance of individualism.

Think about it.  How many weddings have you been to where the couple said: We wanted to do something different.  So they had their wedding in a falling down farmhouse in Tuscany or a warehouse in Brooklyn.  They wore red, or jeans and tee shirts.  They hiked a mountain or got married underwater.  I have a friend whose daughter is trying to get married- as in perform the ceremony- while skydiving.

And the wedding isn’t the only place to display the romance of individualism.  Proposals are getting increasingly elaborate and “unique.”  In fact, potential grooms are told that if they don’t propose in a unique way, they will regret it for the rest of their lives.  According to RomanceTips,

After all, you want the proposal to be very original and memorable. You want her to marvel at your creativity and planning. After all, you only ask someone to marry you once. You want her to have a great story to tell to her mother, girlfriends, and, someday, your children.

The increasingly elaborate proposal now must involve a trip somewhere, or a thousand candles in the backyard, or skywriting, or a nationally televised sporting event, or anything that marks the groom as “unique” and “creative.”  One of the interesting things about the “traditional” marriage proposal as we know it, the down on bended knee in a restaurant, is it was invented by the diamond industry as a way to mark the diamond as a not everyday item, as sacred if you will.  Prior to the 1940s, proposals were between grooms and prospective father-in-laws and did not involve an elaborate ritual.  But with the increasing popularity of the diamond engagement ring, in part because of the brilliance of DeBeers’ “Diamonds are forever” advertising campaign, the diamond sellers thought they should sell a special way of presenting their goods.  In order to really sell us the ritual, DeBeers didn’t just sell it in ads, but convinced Hollywood to put the bended knee proposal into their movies.

And now the “uniqueness” of our romances must be displayed not just in the weddings themselves and the proposals, but in the ritual “first date.”  According to a story in today’s New York Times, a new dating site allows single New Yorkers to propose their first date rather than the usual dating profiles of “likes” and “dislikes.”  The first dates proposed are not only highly idiosyncratic, but they tend to happen in waves.  In other words, the hip, young New Yorkers looking for the perfectly individualistic romance are doing the exact same things as other hip young New Yorkers looking for the same thing.

New data from a Web site suggests that not only do many people plan similar dates, but like lemmings, they also collectively migrate from one theme to the next. In March, scores of New Yorkers opted to have their first dates over tacos: fish tacos, dried cricket tacos, taco tours of Brooklyn, even post-surfing tacos at Rockaway Beach in Queens. But by month’s end, tacos went out of vogue, and fondue became the fare of choice for first dates. In mid-April, singles relinquished their cheese forks and embraced bring-your-own-beer dates instead. A few weeks later, outings for lobster rolls were all the rage. By mid-May daters cooled on lobster rolls and were eating oysters.

The interesting thing is not that primarily educated, primarily white, primarily young New Yorkers would all engage in the same sort of activities.  Sociologists have shown over and over again that our position in the social world determines our “taste.”  What’s interesting is that they are so committed to seeing romance, the most formulaic of undertakings, as a chance to express individualism.

Avoiding romance in the US at this point in time is a bit like avoiding taxes.  The government grants us rights and privileges based on marital status (over a 1,000 of them).   Gay and lesbian Americans, at least the ones who are primarily white and educated themselves, fight bitterly for the “right” to marry.  Most of our culture is obsessed with “true love” and “happily ever after.”   And so, even though most Americans are in fact unmarried, those of us who are part of the ruling romantic elite- or at least would like to be- do what everyone is supposed to do:

We go on a date, fall in love, get married.

At some level of the cultural unconscious, we know we are in fact doing exactly what is expected of us, what everyone ought to be doing.  And so, we attempt to both march lockstep with the ruling ideology of romance and simultaneously mark it as “our own.”  Imagine lemmings each in a different brightly colored wig as they fall off the cliff that is true love.

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Democracy.  A word and an ideology that have spawned revolutions and wars ever-lasting.  And yet, as July 4th rolls around, even someone as jaded as I can admit there is something quite extraordinary about the idea of democracy.  A place where informed citizens are given the chance to both represent themselves and pursue happiness, at least in its property-acquisition form.  The shift from “subjects” to “citizens” that heralded the French and the American Revolution was a promise, not a reality, but nonetheless a compelling one that for the first 150 years seemed increasingly possible.  And who was this citizen?  At first, a property-owning white male, but as time went on, all white men, then all men, then women.  And these citizens were different from subjects.

Subjects bowed to the authority of the state; citizens were the state.  Subjects behaved in courtly ways in front of the king; like barbarians when out of the court.  Citizens, highly disciplined by new forms of power, were always civil.

These promises of democracy sound quaint these days in the US, with a populace so uninformed that they are easily misled by demagogues and charlatans into acting in the most undemocratic of ways.  And what is to blame for the breakdown of civility and citizenship in America?  I’d like to blame it all on Fox News and the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush LImbaugh, but the truth is  the erosion of American democracy predates the appearance of fascism.  America the Undemocratic began with the destruction of equal opportunity that was contained in the educational system.  As the 20th century progressed, education became the engine of American democracy.  Taking children and young people out of factories and mandating public high school educations lifted an entire generation of Americans out of sweatshop labor.  After World War II, the GI Bill sent tens of thousands of working men into universities.  By the 1970s, the American educational system was increasingly open to women and/or Black and Latino Americans.

And then a little revolution called Neoliberalism came along and democracy came to screeching halt.  We didn’t realize it at first.  The seeds were planted, but it was only decades later that the undemocratic impulses of Neoliberalism would bear fruit.  Today, your chances of going to college if your parents didn’t are lower than they have been at anytime since before World War II.  To make matters worse, if you go to college, you will probably have to take on large amounts of debt and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to drop out of school before you even finish your degree. In fact, half of all student loan recipients never receive a degree.

The result:  a population that believes that Evolution is just a theory as is global warming, but whole-heartedly embraces the belief that space aliens and illegal aliens are here to destroy our lives.

And what is to be done?  Unlike two centuries ago when France followed America in a democratic revolution, now the US would do well to follow France’s lead in fostering democracy.  Instead of Rousseau, our leaders should read the latest government decree on democratizing higher ed. At this point, fewer than 10% of the students at the top universities in France, the Grandes Ecoles, are from the poorest strata of French society.  In the near future, nearly 30% of the Grandes Ecole students will be from Frances poorest families.  This will radically shake up France’s ruling elite, which is both overwhelmingly white and from bourgeois backgrounds.

Imagine such an experiment in the US.  Suddenly places like Harvard and Stanford or even Middlebury College where I teach, would not be primarily for young Americans with so much privilege that they spend thousands of dollars on elite SAT tutors, go to private high schools that cost more than my annual salary, and spend their summers doing prestigious internships.  Instead, university students would be the smartest among us, not necessarily the best prepared.  Although elite schools like mine would have to do more basic instruction to get students ready to study- more writing classes, research instruction, etc.- the student body would be more dynamic, more diverse, and yes, far more DEMOCRATIC.

And then, when American students left these top universities and went on to take jobs in finance or education or medicine, to take over as America’s ruling elite, they would be there not because their parents could afford the time and money  to groom them for leadership, but because they were smart and hard-working enough to merit such a role.  That would be a truly democratic revolution.