metro mike

A Note To Readers

2007-06-23T05:08:00.000-07:00

Here are all of my Boston/New York Metro op-eds from 2005 and 2006.

You can find current material, my blog, photos, and various and sundry whatnot, at mennonnosapiens.com.

2006-08-14T05:10:00.000-07:00

You know it’s got to be bad when we’re nostalgic for 9/11. Much of the praise for “World Trade Center,” Oliver Stone's sentimental take on the terror attacks, focuses on the "togetherness" that being under siege that day inspired in Americans. Those were storied hours, the plebs on the ground scurrying around dodging falling bodies and fireballs while the nation's ruling class disappeared into their secret bunkers in various undisclosed locations. No one can deny it was a day of extraordinary bravery at Ground Zero. But the sad fact is that only by isolating 9/11 to the moment of impact can we tell the heroic tale we all want from that day. The further from Ground Zero we get in space and time, the more difficult it becomes.

The struggle for "The Meaning” of 9/11 began immediately after impact, waged most viciously by those who had watched it unfold from the safety of those secret bunkers. The administration unsurprisingly favored a simple “evil versus good” explanation, where evil is an obscure, indivisible, ahistorical force that needs no encouragement to act, once it is, for unknown reasons—gays? Abortionists? Senator Ted Kennedy?—unleashed. It is compelled wholly by its hatred of good. Don’t try to explain it. Fight fire with fire.

Anyone with a more nuanced interpretation was excoriated in the press. Attempts to understand what in the world had just happened, to contextualize 9/11, were shunned as justifying it, and likely enabling further acts of terror to boot. Don’t try to understand. Hug your children. Go out and buy something, no matter how small. Be good. We’ll take care of everything.

Now, nearly five years later, pandemic incuriosity about the roots of Middle East violence threatens an ever-expanding, never-ending war of “evil versus good,” where we live in ignorance of our enemies’ motives, in constant terror that “evil” will strike again. The administration reminds us daily of the always-present threat of evil, reiterating that, we, the people, are helpless against it. We are good, and evil exists to destroy good. Our only hope is that our protectors will destroy evil before it destroys us.

It’s a recipe for impotence. There have, in fact, been a host of movies lately that deal variously with our sense of helplessness. “World Trade Center” says all we can do is remain pinned in the rubble, and wait for someone to rescue us from darkness. That may have been true of officers Jimenez and McLoughlin, the subjects of Stone’s film, but it is not true beyond Ground Zero. The greater part of the fear we’re now living in stems from ignorance—willful incuriosity about conditions in the wider world. But we can believe both that what happened on that dreadful day was evil, and that it had complex origins in grievances, real and imagined, that we must strive to grasp if we are ever to defeat terror. We’ve been pinned in the darkness long enough. The remedy for darkness is not more darkness. It’s light.

2006-07-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

A favorite tactic of those on the right who cannot defend President Bush on his merits is to characterize those with legitimate criticisms of his administration as “Bush Haters.” Now that Mr. Bush’s poll numbers have flat-lined, ideologues on the right have the unenviable task of having to justify their own heretofore unquestioned adoration of Bush to a nation much worse off now than it was before the coup.

Recently, Bush reaped a whirlwind of ridicule for offering a backrub to Germany’s head of state, Angela Merkel, at the G8 summit. The Chancellor recoiled, looking totally skeezed-out. Dubbed "Liebes-Attacke auf Merkel!" it was flashed around the world via internet. Bloggers went for W’s jugular. According to Alison Stewart of MSNBC's “The Most,” search terms that would return the YouTube video of the “event” were “grope” and “creepy.” One blogger referred to Bush as “commander-in-creep.” The Huffington Post crowned him our latest “lounge-lizard in chief.”

The gibes proved too much for rabid fans of the imperial presidency, arousing the ire of natterers and hacks on the right, who pointed to the popularity of the video as proof positive of widespread “Bush-hating” in the media, and among out-of-touch leftwing blogger-haters. Conservative columnist Joan Vennochi labeled one blogger’s characterization of the backrub as "inappropriate and unrequested" an "extreme level of Bush-bashing,” and went on to remind us that Bush’s predecessor had done much worse. Curiously absent from the right’s outrage over the latest wave of “Bush-bashing” was any mention of the right’s continued no-holds-barred hatred of the Clintons, which actually precipitated a constitutional crisis.

But Bill and Hillary-haters aren’t unreasonable at all, according to the Ann Coulter-Rush Limbaugh logic of the rabid right, because Bill and Hillary are obviously eminently odious. W. clearly is not. Only crazies could see it otherwise. There is actually a lively debate on the left over whether or not Bush is, in fact, hateworthy. The judgment hinges on the same issue that makes the difference between a “guilty” verdict and “innocent by reason of insanity.” If the famously jocular Mr. Bush means well, and doesn’t know any better, how can he be blamed for his actions, personal or political?

The right clearly feels that as an awe-shucks all-around good guy, Mr. Bush is innocent by reason of cluelessness. Were he to be chided for, say, launching a “nucular” attack on Iran, a simple “oops, my bad” would suffice to exonerate him. His defenders have always used his lack of polish as their chief defense of inappropriate behavior, and characterized critics as haters who have no scruples about attacking the differently-abled. And criticism invariably prompts lectures about civil discourse. The irony is that they’re coming from members of the party dedicated to destroying the foundations of civil society: public education, public spaces, public TV. I, myself, don’t feel that Mr. Bush is hateworthy, but as a symbol of a hateful ideology and a host of hatable policies, I can understand how some might confuse the man for what he stands for.

2006-07-24T05:52:00.000-07:00

When Ralph Reed was defeated last week in his primary bid to be Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, it was one small triumph for common sense and moderation among a GOP in desperate need of some. The defeat of Reed, by his own party, may be a sign that voters actually do have limits as to how much brazen hypocrisy they’ll accept from those who would lead them. Who’d have thought? But was Reed’s rout in Georgia really a bellwether, or just a blip?

The former leader of the ironically-named Christian Coalition is only the latest in a long line of creeps cynically using a religious base to propel themselves to political power. But Reed, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the child antichrist of “The Omen,” was a creep’s creep, counting among his closest allies Jack Abramoff, the disgraced lobbyist with ties to the Bush White House.

Reed and Abramoff were friends from way back in their College Republican days, so it was natural that Abramoff would offer Reed a $5 million cut of the take from the Indian tribes he was scamming. And the scam was perfect for Reed. He took money from one tribe to rally his Christian base against casinos proposed by its competitors. These heights of hypocrisy are dizzying. Never mind the depths to which Reed was driven by his greedy demons. By my accounting he’s headed for Circle 8 of Dante’s Inferno, with pimps, panderers, and seducers, grafters, hypocrites, and thieves, evil counselors and deceivers, sowers of discord, scandal, and schism.

But not right away, unfortunately. We have not seen the last of Ralph Reed, not by a long shot. For those with outsized ambitions and no scruples to speak of, there is no such thing as defeat. But for the movement he invented and however perversely personified this is a major blow. It would be foolish to think that the era of political pandering to the religious right is coming to an end. There’s never a shortage of religious hypocrites—it’s still true, after all, that “Where God has his church the Devil will have his chapel.” But that small, seditious sect, only about two million strong, that Reed and the Reverend Pat Robertson founded two decades ago, which has been running roughshod over our national politics, may finally be losing steam.

Or maybe not. At the same time Reed was conceding his defeat, President Bush was signing his very first veto—of a bill to expand federally funded embryonic stem cell research. But what may look like a victory for the very arrogance and ignorance that was defeated in Georgia, will actually turn out to be a last ditch attempt by another brazen hypocrite to claim the moral high ground. Rest assured it’s only a matter of time before common sense prevails over pandering in the stem cell debate. The GOP will have to return at some point to at least the semblance of democratic governance which they’ve abandoned. And zygotes don’t vote.

2006-07-17T04:09:00.000-07:00

J.K. Rowling, the marketing-savvy creator of Harry Potter, recently set off a firestorm by hinting in a television interview that the eponymous hero of the books might not survive the last of them. Fans are gnawing their knuckles at the very thought of it. Overweening parents are wondering how their children can possibly cope. Rowling says she wrote the final chapter of the last book before she started writing the first one. She says she doesn’t want to reveal who dies because she doesn’t want the hate mail. But this Überauthor isn’t a billionaire for nothing. She knows how to work it.

Rumors of Harry’s untimely demise have brought to the fore the question of how and when children should be exposed to the reality of death. But the truth is it’s the adults who can’t handle it. The Me Generation is having a tough time with turning sixty, do you think they’re ready to deal with their own mortality? The conventional wisdom on death these days is “out of sight, out of mind.” Death is the great equalizer, and we have become increasing hostile, in our world of competing entitlements, to any suggestion of rules that apply to all, without exception. We all think of ourselves as more or less exempt. Unfortunately, Death does not.

There is actually mounting evidence that the conventional wisdom on the Hollywood ending is just dead wrong, anyway. Tragedy, as a genre of literature and drama, remains vital and vitally appealing, even in Happyland. As British playwright Howard Barker wrote in his “Arguments for a Theatre”: “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool.” Confronting the reality of death—particularly the eventuality of your own—equips you for life, not least by lending perspective to it.

Even science is starting to refute the wisdom of denial. Findings in the burgeoning field of “Terror Management” seem to point to the arts as a valuable resource for coping with fear of death by deepening our experience of life. “The Appeal of Tragedy: A Terror Management Perspective,” a study whose findings were published recently in “Media Psychology,” found that “vicarious experience of tragedy, such as through film and literature, provides a safe way of approaching the fear associated with one's own mortality.”

The irony of parental concern about the death of Harry Potter is that violent death is everywhere in the media, and we hardly notice it. Our media environment is actually awash in violence and death, but it lacks the context and linearity of narrative. Random and disconnected, on an incomprehensible, inhuman scale, it offers no catharsis. It doesn’t have the impact of tragedy. That’s one reason Neurologist Richard Restak, in “The New Brain: How The Modern Age is Rewiring Your Mind,” urges us to read. Should Rowling decide to kill off her young hero, there may be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the tweenies, but in the end they’ll survive, and be the wiser for it.

2006-07-10T05:33:00.000-07:00

“Music can name the unnamable,” the composer Leonard Bernstein once said, "and communicate the unknowable." The shamanic power of music hit home recently when a friend introduced me to the indescribable Ryuichi Sakamoto, whose compositions, whether starkly minimal or ponderously layered, seem designed to rouse long-forgotten memories and hidden emotions. It’s easy to take music for granted these days, to forget that it can conjure the very demons it seems meant to exorcise.

Music was not always the stealth force it has become, but a funny thing happened on the way to modernity. In Paris along about 1917 early avant-garde composer Eric Satie (best known for his haunting, minimalist “Gymnopédies”) invented something he called “musique d’ameublement,” furniture music. One composition in this category was called “Wall-lining in a chief officer's office.” A couple years later, an enterprising Michigan entrepreneur, George O. Squier, patented “musak.” The rest is history.

Whether driving around in your automotive ambient environment or plugged into your ‘pod, music, like St. Augustine’s God, is everywhere—and nowhere—nowadays. Like the air we breathe, it usually goes unnoticed unless there’s too much or too little of it. Once in a while, though, you find yourself captured by a song in the oddest places—in the condiment aisle at the supermarket, say. Suddenly choosing between peppercorn ranch and creamy parmesan while the Fifth Dimension’s “One Less Bell to Answer” plays in the background is frighteningly poignant. You’re having an existential moment. Yes, music is as powerful as ever.

I’ve been thinking about the power of music and poetry since visiting Project: Think Different last week to see what they’ve been up to since the release of their locally produced hip-hop CD, “Empowerment,” late last year. “Entertaining Change” is both the means and the end at Project: Think Different, a media nonprofit that seeks to entice, encourage, and empower marginalized communities using music, film and video. It’s one of those organizations that is making a real difference in the lives of at-risk youths and communities in and around Boston by inspiring them to engage and create, rather than drop out and destroy. Project: Think Different helps young people who might otherwise not find their voice, and teaches them how to use it for good.

Which, at a time when so much music is borne of nihilism and preaches violence, borders on revolutionary. There is truth in the nihilism and violence, of course, but it’s superficial. It’s the easy truth. And as the poet Rilke once wrote to an apprentice: “we must hold to what is difficult.” Telling unnamable truths—the deeper truth of our humanity, the mystery of all those category-defying unknowables we contain—is at times a political act. Curiously, the less explicitly political art is, the more political it becomes. That’s because art is its own empire. Art defies subjugation, demands transcendence. The Hungarian poet Miklos Radnoti continued to write poetry in Auschwitz. Politics will always be a necessary evil. Art, now as always, is a necessary good.

2006-06-25T08:56:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Eugene Rivers III hosted a “Thug Summit,” at the Ella J. Baker House (www.thebakerhouse.org) in Dorchester last week, to bring together high-risk youth and the former felons from Boston’s mean streets Rivers hopes will mentor them. Rev. Rivers is no stranger to battling despair and violence in Boston. The Baker House has been on the frontlines for nearly twenty years. Nor was the program set forth by Rivers at his summit a new one, but with violence skyrocketing, more funds are obviously needed. He estimates the cost of a beefed-up mentoring program to be a modest $750,000 and is asking the city and the black community to help him raise it. It’s a start. But why stop there?

It’s not hard to see the appeal of the program, which offers redemption for ex-cons, and the possibility of salvation for high-risk kids, two populations our society has relegated to the rubbish-heap. Our willingness to tolerate the idea of throw-away people is part and parcel of the human dignity deficit we have in America today, which surely contributes to the violence on our streets. We do not, as a society, do much to maintain the conditions that allow for the dignity of all our citizens, and we give those at higher risk of succumbing to despair and violence virtually nothing to strive for, and none of the practical tools needed to take their lives in a positive direction. There are those who argue that society doesn’t owe its disadvantaged a hand-up, but we all pay the price, whether you calculate it economically or morally, when we keep our hands in our pockets, shrug our shoulders, and say, “not my problem.”

So while the Thug Summit is a renewed call-to-arms to the hardened warriors at The Baker House, it should serve as a clarion call to the whole community. Because the cautionary tale provided by an ex-con is only a first step away from despair and violence for high-risk youth. If they have nothing to move toward—a practical hope, let’s call it—the work of a few dedicated warriors will still risk falling far short of what we as a community are truly capable of.

Our reluctance to dream big and act boldly for the betterment of society is part of what’s killing at-risk kids. They need more than a vague hope of escaping prison on one hand, and the promise of easy money on the other. Like all kids, they need mentoring by doctors, nurses, economists, engineers, tradesmen, businesswomen, and entrepreneurs. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian. They need meaningful job opportunities that allow for learning through practice, and real possibilities of advancement. They need viable educational alternatives. No one is talking about a free ride here. What we’re talking about is a society that believes in human dignity and potential without exception. One that works earnestly to bring out the best in all of its citizens. We are not such a society, but we can dream. And dream boldly we must.

2006-06-19T04:19:00.000-07:00

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences." This powerful quote from Winston Churchill is the centerpiece of Al Gore’s otherwise strangely languorous call-to-arms, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Even the title is a calculated understatement. The film deals with the issue of global warming with charts and graphs, punctuated by listless reminiscences of Gore’s life and love of nature. But for all the urgency of the issue itself, there’s a sense that to get too excited about it would be indecorous. The occasional tongue-cluck and that trademark exasperated sigh is about as action-packed as it gets here. In “An Inconvenient Truth” Gore cajoles, when clearly the crisis merits a cudgel.

Gore’s audience is well-groomed and eminently well-behaved, shaking their heads in solemn solidarity. Not only are there no wacky Global Warming Deniers here, but no Green Peace types either. Not a hippie in sight. No earth mothers in muumuus and flip-flops. No bearded freaks with bongo drums. No, this is your understatedly upscale, Volvo-driving, Whole Foods crowd. Conscientious consumers, let’s call them. No need for alarm. These are sensible people. Nothing fringy here. Move along.

They’re the ones for whom the Democrats unveiled their “New Direction For America” campaign, a document as timid and uninspiring as their campaign slogan, "Together, America Can Do Better." If this is, indeed, a new era, we are greeting it not with Churchillian determination, but like a nation of wavering Saint Augustines: “O Al, help us to be pure, but not just yet.”

Even the true believers aren’t quite convinced it’s really as bad as all that, although, in their partisan heart of hearts, they may be hoping against hope that it is. Because if it is, it’s not our fault, but Theirs. And we all know who They are. There’s lots of solemn head-shaking and tongue-clucking when Gore points to Katrina, let me tell you. But it never gets nasty. He’s obviously preaching to the choir here, but how remarkably subdued the sermon is. Sadly, as hard as Gore has worked to modulate his tone from openly chiding to gently nudging us in the direction of environmental consciousness, he’s still not cool enough to convert us wholly to his cause.

But Gore is only following our lead. Our casualness when it comes to the moral and political crises of our time—from the reaction to Abu Ghraib (“kids will be kids”), to domestic spying and the new no-knock decision by the Supreme Court (“well, I’m not doing anything wrong, so I’m not worried”), to the fate of New Orleans—belies the real and visible signs of a cancer in the collective life of society and culture. We seem to have developed a strange faith that society can survive on autopilot. We are not yet fully ready to be inconvenienced by the truth. Unfortunately, the truth may not be willing to wait for us.

2006-06-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

I recently caught part two of PBS’s excellent four-part series, “Edens: Lost & Found,” which highlights four major American cities’ “practical solutions to improve the environment and quality of life.” Boston is not among the cities in the series, and while this doesn’t mean our city doesn’t have its little Edens, there does seem to be a slight reluctance these days to think outside of the box when it comes to bringing more of them about. Mayor Menino, himself a lover of community gardens, nonetheless seems more intent on building luxury-living towers to bring sketchy neighborhoods up to code, than pursuing human-scale, grassroots projects that inspire a sense of ownership and pride of place among residents of our more vulnerable communities.

Don’t get me wrong, Menino has done his share. But Boston can always be better. The community gardens are a start. But our neighborhood parks are in disrepair. Many, like my own Atheneum Park and Meaney Playground, where Ben Affleck recently filmed a scene from his new movie, are in an appalling state. What a shame that Atheneum Park, home to Dorchester’s first meeting house, is now a dilapidated playground where drug deals go down. This is not the city’s fault. The plot is under the jurisdiction of the perennially underfunded, understaffed Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, which is trying to get a “friends groups” program off the ground, to encourage public private partnerships to renew and maintain these parks.

While parts of Boston spiral further into violence, and the leadership of the police force is in disarray, a couple of meager stop-gap measures have been proposed: a gun buy-back and something called the Boston Police Alert Network, which will send scary updates on crimes in your neighborhood right to your cell phone. If you live in a neighborhood like mine and want to be constantly freaked out, subscribe today! The fact is, programs like these won’t do much to cure the epidemic of violence we face.

Which is where “Edens: Lost & Found” comes in. The series proposes something truly revolutionary: that working and playing together, that music and public art rescue individuals and communities from despair, and literally save lives. We seem to routinely forget what all of human history and culture, from the Paleolithic cave paintings of Chauvet to the magnificent public murals in Philly’s inner city reveal: that for human beings, art is not optional. It’s not merely what we do in our free time, it is what we are. It is our essence.

We owe the current rise in violence partly to that periodic resurgence of meanness that has always plagued society. And when I say meanness, I mean that smallness of spirit that esteems greed over all, even when what we hoard, rich and poor alike, gives us no real satisfaction. Our destructive energies are the cancer at the heart of our creative potential. In the absence of hope, violence is a substitute for art.

2006-06-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

Lincoln coined a political truism when he said, "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." With the rise of the science of poll-taking we now know with some degree of accuracy that the percentage of people you can fool all the time seems to hover around thirty. Which is, not incidentally, the President’s current approval rating.

The older I get, and the more election cycles I live through, the more astounded I am that the same tired rhetoric and the same sleazy diversions seem to serve well enough when politicians are in a pinch. What happens to Americans in an election year? Suddenly, issues like a dirty war waged on false premises in bad faith with a break-the-bank price tag of nearly $300 billion so far in which an estimated 40,000 Iraqis and nearly 2,500 Americans have died with many thousands more maimed for life, which continues to fan the flames of radical Islam, isn’t near as vital as the monster threat posed to America by…gay marriage?

With his approval numbers in the toilet, where they belong, in what’s shaping up as a tight election season precisely because the administration and its tools in Congress are running the government into the ground, the president is seeking to aid his beleaguered party by once again ramping up the rhetoric on same-sex unions. The last time the GOP grandstanded on gay marriage was—surprise, surprise—an election year, too. They may claim they’re not doing it to appeal to their base’s baser instincts, but new White House spokesman Tony Snow recently admitted his boss felt the issue was “politically ripe.” But playing politics with good and decent people’s lives is just plain wrong.

Truth is, both parties could get behind same-sex unions without compromising their core values in the least. Democrats should embrace it unapologetically, as they should the basic dignity, civil liberties and equal rights of all citizens. The very idea that visiting a dying partner in the hospital is a so-called “special right” is vile on its face, and it should not take extraordinary courage to say so plainly. Access to family healthcare, immigration rights for same-sex partners, and benefits from a partner’s will are all no-brainers. But social conservatives in the GOP can also embrace same-sex unions as the final triumph of their much vaunted family values campaign. Gay and lesbian parents are among the best, most active in their children’s lives, and most loving around. And their kids are healthy and happy.

Will Americans continue to be fooled by the knaves in Washington every election cycle? We should reject out of hand any attempt by our representatives in the government to turn us against each other, a strategy this administration has employed from the beginning, even through the horror of 9/11. Know this: a politician scapegoating any group clearly hasn’t got a platform to stand on.

2006-05-31T05:01:00.000-07:00

If you are reading this right now, you’re probably on the T, and that means that the fare restructuring plan for 2007 the MBTA recently rolled out probably concerns you somehow, maybe in a casual kind of way, but maybe, if you’re barely getting by as it is, more vitally. With a little more than a week to go in the purely palliative public education and hearing process, it’s fast approaching the time to speak up or forever hold your peace.

I’ve decided, somewhat grudgingly, I’ll admit, that I can live with these fare increases (with a little help from my bike), but I will still be in Copley Square June 6th at 4 PM at a rally sponsored by TJustice.info to demonstrate against the increases before heading to the MBTA hearing at 4:30 at the Boston Public Library, the last such hearing in Boston before the new fares are finalized. Why? Because while the standardization of fares across the system is a good move—and it’s about time—the increased fares address only the current budget shortfall, and do absolutely nothing to fix what’s wrong with the T in the long run. This is at best a quick fix, and the MBTA admits as much. Unless the legislature goes back to the drawing board on the manner in which the T is funded, you can count on more major fare increases in the very foreseeable future.

It’s important to remember that there are four parties that must be involved in the decision-making process here: the public, first and foremost, the legislature, the MBTA management, and the unions. Presently, the public feels alienated, the legislature has washed its hands of the matter of mass transit, and MBTA management is pleading helplessness against an immovable legislature and bullying unions. The unions, for their part, remain silent on the fare hikes, pointing mutely at the management, who says it has been left no choice by the legislature but to raise fares. Sound dysfunctional enough for you? It’ll only get worse if the public doesn’t stand up and say, “enough, already!”

The answer is not merely “more money,” although, as Jeremy Marin, co-chair of the T Rider Oversight Committee (ROC) recently wrote in these pages, “our transit system is in fiscal gridlock.” There is also a culture at the T that’s costing us all big time and must be reformed. But first, the MBTA and the legislature, and groups that dropped the ball on this all need to know that you know that the current manner in which the T is managed, maintained, and funded is not working for those it exists to serve, and that biennial fare hikes are an ineffectual and thus unacceptable way to fix what’s wrong with the T. The legislature needs to go back to work on this. Let them know you know it by signing the petition at tjustice.info and showing up at Copley Square at 4 on the 6th.

2006-05-22T04:23:00.000-07:00

Recently I visited Concord in search of Henry David Thoreau. The little house he built for twenty-eight dollars, twelve-and-a-half cents no longer stands. Still, you’ll know the spot, and not merely by the stone markers. More likely by the many soul-seekers, devoted to living deliberately too, perched around the invisible shack like so many spiritual vultures in search of a carcass. Looking hungry, their sharpened pencils poised above their journals, ready to impale any morsel of Thoreauian truth left rotting in the ruins of his old stone hearth. While Thoreau might not have minded his elevation from hermit to saint, he would certainly have rejected the softening of his jagged edges by fuzzy-headed modern-day sentimentalists.

Yes, there is something undeniably appealing to Thoreau’s mantra: “simplify, simplify, simplify.” Looks good on the T-shirts on sale in the gift shop at Walden Pond. But even our ideas of simplicity have gone utterly rococo. Nowadays you hire someone to simplify your life for you. Perky “professional organizers” echo the sage’s “less is more” philosophy, urging us to “say goodbye to things that don't fit, are out of style or are unflattering.” How thoroughly Thoreauian! Today’s Professionally-trained simplifiers suggest consolidating your credit cards as well, “and in the future use only one or two.” “Don’t buy dry-clean-only clothes,” “screen your calls,” and “watch TV on your own terms.” Henry would have been proud.

Truth is, as Thoreau well knew, it’s hard work living outside of society, and not only materially. Especially in today’s wired world. We may like the idea of Walden on the surface, but Thoreau took self-reliance seriously, to an extreme most of us would find suspicious if not outright scary. Not to worry. Nowadays the same manly men who bloviate about self-reliance from behind the wheel of their monster SUVs are reduced to bed-wetting by three-dollar-a-gallon gas prices. Not only do we not grow our own food, we don’t even know how to light a fire to cook it. We can’t drink hot coffee without detailed warnings and an instruction manual. Is it any wonder we choose empty promises of protection from unseen enemies over the risks of real personal freedom? We’re a nation of obligate parasites. Independent we are decidedly not.

After visiting Walden, I sat down with “Civil Disobedience,” eager for insights into what could be shaping up as a new era of protest, not because people are any more enlightened, but because our government on all levels is ever less so. The essay holds few clues as to how to organize an army of more than one, but Thoreau’s faith in his army of one is unshakable. “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right,” he preaches, “changes things and relations.” For tenacious, uncompromising, and not very likeable Henry David Thoreau protest was a way of life: the hard way. He’s proof that really “speaking truth to power” isn’t pretty. Despite what today’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pros may say, it’s always out of style and unflattering.

2006-05-15T05:18:00.000-07:00

As the controversy over domestic spying heats up, the mantra from pundits on the right, from Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the president’s pick to head the CIA, from National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and from Mr. Bush himself is: domestic spying is “within the law.” This, from a president who believes he has the constitutional authority to bypass laws made by Congress by appending “signing statements” that effectively exempt him from following the law he has just signed. Mr. Bush has found a handy way to make breaking the law “perfectly legal.”

Illegally diverting public funds to secret prisons with no oversight? Legal, according to the president. Torture banned by international law? He reserves the right. In 2004 Congress passed a bill requiring the Justice Department to inform lawmakers about all domestic wiretaps. Mr. Bush signed the bill into law, but attached a signing statement that gave the Justice Department ultimate discretion to disobey it. “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery” is kid’s stuff. This administration’s ideas of “perfectly legal” would have Orwell himself scratching his head and saying “WTF?”

Having spent some years in Eastern Europe in the shadow of Sovietism, I’m not sure how reassuring the administration’s “legality defense” actually is. I’m a little suspicious when the same people who want to spy on you make the laws that allow them to do so while claiming, without disingenuousness, that it’s all “perfectly legal.” Examples of “perfectly legal” behavior on the part of governments past and present: slavery, ghettos, gulags. Legal? Sure. Just? Well, it depends on your race, religion, or party, I guess.

The assumed coincidence of legality and justice in America has been taken for granted for so long, we’ve become utterly complacent about it. But, in history, the marriage of justice and power has been rare, and short-lived. Is America exceptional? Are we exempt from state tyranny? Some people seem to think so. But excessive government secrecy and consolidation of power in fewer and fewer hands—a single party, the executive branch—are not particularly good signs for democracy, when you think about it. The good news: when you don’t think about it, it’s not such a big deal! Carry on!

That seems to be the American way these days, anyway. Since this story broke, perhaps the most unsurprising reaction, aside from the administration’s legality defense (I mean, what would you expect from a bunch of lawyers?) is the big yawn domestic spying has elicited among the poll-taking public. According to numerous polls, half don’t care if Mr. Bush spies on them. Golly, I wonder which half? And how will they feel about Hillary doing it? Every modern state has its party faithful, of course, willing to toss aside freedoms they think they don’t need themselves, or support laws they think won’t apply to them. But history teaches caution in this. “Of all injustice,” as one 17th century English journalist put it, “that is the greatest which goes under the name of law.”

2006-05-08T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Kaavya Viswanathan saga ended last week with a whimper. There was mounting evidence of more plagiarized passages (Opal Mehta Blah Blah Blah turned out to be not a novel so much as an anthology, with contributions, according to some sources, from not only Megan McCafferty, but Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, even Salman Rushdie). The product tainted beyond salvageability, Little, Brown finally dropped the book and the would-be wunderkind, blacklisting the literary Milli-Vanilli, and forcing massive layoffs at Brand Kaavya. And after all the sweat and toil they’d put into typing their jazzy paint-by-numbers Bildungsroman, too. Well, humph.

How Kaavya, Inc., Got Dropped is a tale of bland ambition for our times. Because, truly, their tragedy is the tragedy of our age. To paraphrase “Success in Business” guru, William Feather: so many have ambition, so few ability. But, here’s the thing: it’s really only a tragedy if you don’t recognize which side you’re on. After all, ability can be bought. If you’re ambitious, you find a way to pay for it. Get a second job if you have to. Kaavya, Inc., had half a million bucks to spend and a staff of thousands. Why’d they settle for used, when they had more than enough to buy it new?

Like I said, a lot went into the making of Kaavya, Inc. Kaavya herself is the product of the sort of high-powered marketing effort described in the slap-dash, tag-team novel to which her name was attached like Michael Jordan’s to a Nike shoe. She’s been a marketing phenomenon since her parents paid IvyWise tens of thousands of dollars to package her as Harvard material in the first place. And why stop there? Yes, it’s cynical, and sordid—a little like pimping out your kid to softcore pornographers—but it’s the status-obsessed haute bourgeois version of the same white-trash overgroping that produced Jonbenet Ramsey and Jessica and Ashley Simpson.

And why should publishing really be any different than fast food or soda pop? Or Hollywood, for that matter? Little more than an upper-middlebrow version of “American Idol,” where you garner extra points for expert impersonation? The rivalry between Little, Brown and Random House is just a literary version of the Cola Wars, after all.

Kaavya has been compared to James Frey, but it’s an unfair comparison: Frey had an overactive imagination, Viswanathan doesn’t have one at all. Good thing ambition doesn’t require it. I guarantee you this: we have not heard the last of her. She is destined to become the Omorosa of Harvard Yard. Whether or not she makes the cut of “The Apprentice 6,” I urge her not to abandon ambition out of mere lack of ability. It’s only a minor detail. But, Kaavya, a word of advice: ditch the arty-farty novelista pose, switch your major to Poli Sci, and grab yourself an MBA on your way out. Stick with bland ambition, and someday you could win the ultimate “American Idol”: you could be president.

2006-05-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

With T fares set to go up again, and not by a small increment, I’m more committed than ever to cycling as a viable alternative to cars and mass transit. Not only is it a greener way to get around, it’s a great cardio workout, and it’s cheaper and faster than the T. What more could you want? Since I started biking to work in the Back Bay from Dorchester, I’ve cut my morning commute time in half.

Sure, there are problems with cycling in Boston. The streets are not bicycle-friendly, for the most part, and neither are those using them. And not only are motorists a danger to cyclists. Cyclists are a danger to each other. But part of the reason for this is the lack of dedicated bike lanes. Organizations like Livable Streets (www.livablestreets.info) are struggling to raise awareness of Boston’s enormous potential as a greener, more livable city, but it is an up-hill battle, for sure.

I’ve noticed a lot of things about Boston I didn’t before now that I’m cycling in the city every day. Something I’ve noticed anew, since my commute takes me through the South End, is the city’s rubbish problem. It isn’t just the South End, of course, but it’s there that it seems most visible. Riding through these beautifully gentrified neighborhoods the night before or the day of rubbish collection is like a trip to Fresh Kills Landfill: rubbish spilling out of torn plastic bags piled high and strewn all over the sidewalk.

This is not a new problem, by any means, which is why the lack of a real, viable solution is so discouraging. Residents point to the ragpickers who make their way through the streets before the city’s rubbish and recycling trucks do, tearing open trash bags in search of recyclables, and leaving a mess behind that brings animals to forage after them. But blaming the ragpickers ignores the simple fact that if residents were really recycling, the ragpickers would have nothing to pick out of their garbage. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

But the city’s “rubbish rules” do nothing to discourage it. While the rubbish code states that “There must be sufficient metal or durable plastic barrels for storing of refuse generated in building,” it contradicts this dictate on the very next line: “Disposable 2-ply [or heavier] plastic bags may be used instead of trash barrels for curbside trash collection.” In short: you MUST use trash barrels, but you don’t have to. And a stroll through the South End on rubbish days will attest to the fact that no one does.

A couple years ago I took the utterly futile step of writing Commissioner Casazza, pointing out the absurdity of the city’s rubbish code, and got a rapid reply from an underling that read: “Please contact Code Enforcement. They will send an inspector out and possibly fine the responsible parties.” The problem was, of course, precisely that no one was in violation of any code. Talk about rubbish.

2006-04-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

Another Earth Day done and dusted. All I can say is: Earth, baby, you’ve got a little PR problem. I mean, what’s with you, lately? You used to be so willing. So compliant. We had a deal: “What’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is ours.” Remember? But lately, if it’s not a Category Five Hurricane, it’s a Monster Tsunami or a slew of Super-Tornadoes. If it’s not global warming, it’s global dimming. Seems like there’s no pleasing you. And, yes, it always seems to be about you these days. Well, what about us? What about our needs, Earth? Did you ever stop to think about that?

Oh, yeah, you had us fooled for awhile. Made yourself useful. You were like, “bring it on!” But when the going got tough? Admit it, Earth, you’re passive-aggressive. You’ve been harboring secret resentments all along. Well, how were we supposed to know? You just brood on it, apparently, and then, all the sudden, boom! If you’d just let us know when something’s eating you. But noooooo, you keep it to yourself and then all the sudden there’s a 7.4 on the Richter scale and half of Turkey is toast. So, what’s with the temper tantrums? Nobody likes a party-pooper, and that’s what you’re getting to be, Earth, if you want to know the truth.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so. I hate to break it to you, Earth, but your poll numbers are almost as low as the President’s. People are saying, “well, Earth used to be cool.” Some are even saying, “Earth lied us.” Pretty much everybody agrees: “Earth just isn’t keeping up her end.” It’s a credibility thing, Earth. And, you know, if your numbers keep sliding, we’ll find ourselves another planet. Don’t think we won’t. Hate to break it to you, but we happen to be looking. So kill the attitude. You’re not the only planet in the solar system. We all know there are others that are bigger, have more moons, and some even have rings. We’re talking bling you can see from about a billion miles away. So don’t think you’re All That.

You want to get back in our good graces, Earth? Got some advice for you: Cool down, and, for Pete’s sake, lighten up. Yeah, you used to be fun and exciting, Earth, but lately you’re getting to be a drag. I mean, bungee jumping was about the last cool thing anybody could do with you, and that’s naff now. What have you done for us lately? You act like you’re doing us this big favor just by being here. Put some effort into it, Earth! Give a little. We want more. We expect more. And you’re not cutting it. Here you come along with some pretty little spring flowers, maybe a nice sunset, and expect everybody to ooh and ah. Well, got news for ya: been there, done that. Big yawn. What else ya got? Seriously, make yourself useful. Otherwise, to borrow from the Donald: you're fired.

2006-04-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

When the Vice President was booed as he threw out the first pitch Tuesday at the Washington Nationals’ home opener, it was a clear repudiation as real and significant as what greeted the President at the Coretta Scott King Funeral back in February. Neither was a staged political protest, which is what makes them especially significant. These kinds of spontaneous expressions of popular sentiment are rare in our time, and as ever, represent the greatest danger to the designs of any who would be king. There is no forum more fundamentally American than a baseball stadium, and whereas politics should transcend sport, sports also transcends politics. When a national leader of Mr. Cheney’s stature is booed loudly by a clear majority of fans of the Nationals and the Mets, it’s an ill wind for sure.

Cheney and Bush, the Dr. Evil and Mini-Me of American politics can’t pretend to be regular guys anymore. But it’s no wonder they’ve spent most of the past five and a half years in hiding, Mr. Bush in the brush at Crawford, and Mr. Cheney, in his super-secret bat cave in an “undisclosed location” somewhere deep in the bowels of the capital. I’m sure it’s been this administration’s big conundrum: If you’re out among the people they’ll nail you as phonies in no time, but if you hide out too long, they’ll figure out sooner or later that you’re hiding from them. And conventional wisdom has it that people don’t hide out unless they’ve got something to hide. Nowadays whenever Lenny and Squiggy do pop up it seems like that old carnival game “whack-a-mole.” They’ve been getting nailed by that mallet a lot lately.

There were no exit polls at RFK stadium last Tuesday to determine what all that booing was about, but I suspect it wasn’t any one thing—the war or taxes or healthcare—but the same kind of gut reaction we have to people like that former special ed teacher, Heather Faria, who collected over $60,000 pretending to have stomach cancer. Or Sarah Everson, the woman who somehow feigned having sextuplets, whose husband, Kris, says they did it "out of financial reasons." Or Clayton Daniels, the Texas graverobber who faked his own death for life insurance money using a corpse purloined from a local potter’s field. If any of these people had thrown the first pitch of the season, I imagine they’d have gotten booed, too.

OK, so lying is an acknowledged part of politics, a necessary means to a more noble end, some say. But what happens when there’s no end in sight? Well, people start booing at you, is what. And if you stick around they’ll start throwing things, too. Epithets and curses first, then rotten fruit, and before too long, punches. Because what people hate more than a liar is a liar who thinks he can get away with lying to them again and again and again. If I were Mr. Cheney, I wouldn't stick around for the seventh inning stretch.

2006-04-10T15:42:00.000-07:00

A number of hot-button isms mix and mingle in the current immigration debate. Anything but simple, it’s an issue custom-built for cognitive dissonance. On the right, it’s free marketers versus cultural conservatives . On the left, civil rights and ethnic advocacy groups versus environmentalists and job protectionists. And everyone wants cheap goods and services, no matter what. It’s no wonder Congress couldn’t manage to do anything with it in an election year.

Ism-wise: first off, you’ve got your terrorism, of course. Groups like the wonderfully crotchety WeNeedAFence.com have proposed a “fence” along the Southern border, “based on the highly effective Israeli fences in the West Bank and Gaza... consisting of six parallel physical barriers…40 yards wide at minimum.” Puts the “Great Fence of China”—a pathetic 18 feet wide—to shame, doesn’t it? Whatever happened to the word “wall” by the way? I mean, this isn’t exactly white picket we’re talking about. But the really interesting thing here, on many levels, is the heavily implied comparison of Mexicanos to Palestinian terrorists. Is it hyperbole or flat-out hysteria?

Then you’ve got a little “compassionate classism,” sprinkled with some old-school , 19th Century patrician-style “benevolent racism” in that catchy slogan “they do the jobs Americans won’t.” This clever line briefly unseated “it’s the media’s fault for only reporting the bad news” as the GOP meme of the week. The infallible Mr. Bush proclaimed it in speeches as if it were obvious and indisputable. But the truth is, the assumption that illegals “do the jobs Americans won’t” is obnoxiously imperious, not to mention that it rationalizes employment practices that are unethical at best, and at worst out-and-out immoral.

This is, again, not about workers, legal or illegal, or their humane treatment. It's about a class of people in America who don't want to pay living wages for labor, and another class that has no choice but to suck it up. Illegals “live in the shadows” cast by American businesses and consumers who benefit from the cheap labor only illegals can provide. And the argument against a legal living wage is compelling, particularly for a nation addicted to retail therapy. It takes the form of an insidious threat, and goes something like this: if we pay more for labor, you’ll pay more for goods. Furthermore, if the cost of goods goes up on account of the cost of labor, the living wage will have to increase, too. A raging cycle of exploding costs. Retail terrorism. Let’s build a fence.

For variety, there’s also the comically absurd notion that the grossly incompetent Homeland Security Mafia could round up ten million illegals and send them home, should they decide to do so. Congress was right to throw up its arms, and scurry off to spring break. And our ADD President has moved on as well. With his numbers in the toilet and congressional elections looming, how can he hope to fix immigration? Mr. Bush has finally acknowledged it’s time for regime change… in Iran.

2006-04-03T15:10:00.000-07:00

“April is the cruellest month,” says poet T. S. Eliot. But if the weather so far is any indication, April’s taking her Prozac like a good little month this year. It may be unfair to have blamed April for her wild mood swings in the first place. It could be her relationship with unregenerate March, undeniably a bad influence. If they could be separated April might turn out to be a model month. At any rate, it seems—though it’s probably too early to tell—that April has decided to behave this time around. Promises, promises. I know, we’ve heard it all before. Why do we believe her? Will we never learn? Maybe old Thomas Stearns was right about April after all.

But wasn’t the weekend glorious? OK, so climate change may be the cure for April’s antics, and the cure may be a far cry worse than the disease, but even if global warming is the reason for our newly unseasonable seasons, who could possibly turn down a weekend like the one we just had? Eliot says April is cruel for “mixing memory and desire,” but sometimes, when the weather’s just right, this bedeviling mix can be intoxicating. Sure, there’s something comforting about a New England winter, even if it can be cantankerous at times. But it gets to be like spending Spring Break with your grandparents after awhile, doesn’t it? It tends to drag on a bit.

So, of course, when April came skipping up the walk whistling a tune, pigtails bobbing, and rang the bell, I ran to greet her. Like old friends, we agreed to forgive and forget the past, and start fresh. And what a start! I spent the weekend in the garden, and April was right there with me. I have to say, there are few things that give me as much pure, giddy pleasure as gardening. I came to it during my dad’s illness, when I took over his garden for him. He died in April, so I have my own mixed memories and desires associated with this month, but the joy that the garden brought the both of us in his last days has stuck with me.

What is it about a garden? It’s those very simple but profound reminders about the cycles of life all around you. We know these things already, of course, but we need reminding. I think what a garden gives is a picture of a well-lived life in miniature. There’s the wonder of new life, the excitement of nursing it along to maturity, the satisfaction of its coming to fruition (literally), the pride and pleasure of sharing it with others, and the sweet melancholy of its passing. And there is April at the start of it all. Cruel? Sometimes, perhaps. But let’s not judge too harshly. For all April’s faults, as author Sarah Chauncey Woolsey put it: “Every tear is answered by a blossom,/Every sigh with songs and laughter blent,/April-blooms upon the breezes toss them./April knows her own, and is content.”

2006-03-26T04:26:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago WRKO talk show host John DePetro ignited a firestorm by suggesting that Imette St. Guillen, who was brutally murdered after a night of bar-hopping in New York, should not have been out alone at 4 a.m. DePetro was immediately assailed for “blaming the victim”. Unfortunately his critics offered no real-life ways for young women to deal with real-world dangers. Simply put: Mr. DePetro’s advice was strictly pragmatic, his critics’ complaint strictly ideological. The sad fact is: the pragmatic approach could save a life, while an unwillingness to consider it could cost one.

No one has suggested that the murderer was not 100% responsible for Imette’s tragic death. But are we really “blaming the victim” in this case to suggest that certain minor precautions for a night on the town may have lowered the risk of danger for her? Or might lower the risk of danger for other young women like her? Should we follow the ideological route, as one woman in a chat room discussion on the case put it: “Yeah, we women should all stay locked up and afraid for our lives. Guess freedom in America is for men only, right? Might as well put long veils on us, lest we provoke the inner rapist…in men.” Is encouraging women to be proactive in protecting themselves as much as possible from danger (just as sensible men do, by the way) really tantamount to imprisonment or slavery?

It’s a question. But for a night out on the town the pragmatic approach is probably more useful. It goes something like this: regardless of the activity—whether it’s driving a car, crossing the street, cooking with gas, bowling, or bar-hopping—certain patterns of behavior expose you to more risk than others, and certain choices in conduct reduce risk. If you want to discuss the evils of patriarchy over drinks with strangers, just make sure you’ve got a friend you can count on close by. And just as you wouldn’t let a friend who’s drunk drive, don’t leave a friend who’s been drinking alone in a bar in the wee hours to fend for herself, no matter how much she protests or how fed up you are.

Here are the facts: Imette St. Guillen was at the bar at 4a.m. She was alone. She was drinking. At closing time, she was escorted out by a bouncer. The bouncer was convicted felon Darryl Littlejohn. If any—any—of these particular elements of the equation had been different, odds are Ms. St. Guillen would be alive today. You do the math. There are things we can do as a society to reduce risks like these, and things we can do as individuals to look out for ourselves and each other. It’s vital that we teach our boys to respect women, for one. It’s just as vital that we empower girls to act responsibly on their own behalf, so they never have to rely solely on “the kindness of strangers” at closing time.

2006-03-20T05:14:00.000-08:00

With America entering its third year in an increasingly unstable Iraq at a cost of about $150 million a day, and an administration that breaks the law, disregards civil liberties and human rights at its whim, the question Democrats, Independents and Undecideds are asking these days is: could it get any worse? Well, my friends, consider this: Frist-Romney ’08. The answer is, obviously, yes. But Conservatives should be asking themselves the same. It is their legacy that’s at stake. It’s their party that’s being stolen from them. When the pendulum swings—and it will—what will be left of their gutted Grand Old Party? As the façade of Republican conservatism crumbles, should it surprise anyone that most self-professed conservatives know little or nothing of Edmund Burke and David Hume, never mind Joseph de Maistre and F.A. Hayek? Or that they’re blissfully unaware that, even with their “team” winning, conservatism is in crisis?

We all know there are those on either side of the spectrum who look at political parties as something akin to baseball teams. The rivalry between Republicans and Democrats, like that between the Sox and the Yankees, has little to do with who’s on the roster. It’s the jersey that matters. Just wearing the “wrong” one is enough to condemn you to eternal perdition, according to the guy in the “right” one. But for Republicans who want their party to stand for something, the question of whether Mr. Bush is a conservative has been coming up a lot lately. It is what might be described as an internal squabble that has spilled out into the open because many stalwarts of the conservative movement have been asking it, among them economist Bruce Bartlett, columnist George Will, and the godfather of modern conservatism himself, William F. Buckley, Jr.

Conservatives seem to agree that the war in Iraq, and a policy that assures future such military adventures abroad, is damaging if not flat-out hostile to conservative values. They quote no less an authority than James Madison, father of the Constitution, on the subject: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” Madison also warned of the consolidation of power in the executive that we’re seeing under Bush.

Could it get worse? So long as Democrats remain bankrupt of ideals or the ability to inspire Americans to live up to them, yes. So long as Republican rah-rah team-loyalty trumps “traditional values” like the balance of powers, government ethics, fiscal restraint, and the conservative trinity of peace, property and commerce, yes. One thing’s for sure: the parties are changing, one of them radically. If you’re wearing a red jersey, it’s time you stepped up to the bat and took your team back.

2006-03-12T05:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, the perpetrators of a string of church arsons across Alabama were apprehended. The crimes had perplexed investigators because they lacked the kind of pattern we’re accustomed to seeing in such cases. And when we got our first look at the criminals, what shocked was not their religious fanaticism or racism—but their utter lack of motive, aside from boredom. All three were popular college students from the prosperous suburbs of Birmingham. One, a former class president, is the son of a county constable, another’s the son of a doctor. They told police the arsons were “a prank that spun out of control”.

It’s certainly not the first time shocking acts of vandalism and violence seem to have stemmed from sheer boredom. But serious crimes without motive are on the upswing. Arson, armed robbery, and most troubling of all: more and more young people assaulting the homeless. Last summer in Florida five suburban, church-going teens confessed to the beating death of a homeless man, Michael Roberts. Motive, according to police: “they were bored and wanted to have some fun.” Earlier this year in Ft. Lauderdale, another brutal murder of a homeless man, Norris Gaynor, was caught on tape. The suburban teenage “thrill-seekers” had no motive. Last August here in Boston, Mario Acosta Chavez died after being beaten by two teens. In the North End not two weeks ago a homeless man was assaulted and set on fire while asleep in Langone Park.

Homeless assaults have surged in recent years. Some have blamed a series of fast-selling low-budget videos available on the web that glorify violence towards (and among) the homeless. But this alone can’t explain 386 reported attacks against homeless people nationwide from 1999 to 2004, resulting in a staggering 156 deaths. In the words of Michael Stoops of the National Coalition for the Homeless: it’s “a national epidemic.” First let’s house the homeless. We have the resources to do it. Then we need to ask ourselves, why are children of privilege in a prosperous nation preying on the poor for sport? It’s obscene, but the problem of boredom in leisure is a serious one.

Economists like John Maynard Keynes and Roy Harrod warned of the violent consequences of prosperity. Keynes said it would lead to “a general nervous breakdown.” Harrod foresaw “a return to the war, violence and blood sports of the Middle Ages.” Tibor Scitovsky’s classic “The Joyless Economy,” listed boredom as chief among the ravages of general prosperity, with violence as its outcome. And “the remedy for violence,” he wrote, “is civilization.” Now that we’ve mastered the production process, we must master leisure. His solutions seem quaint and not a little naïve to us now. Parents: turn off the TV and Play Station. Start parenting. Schools: recognize the vital importance of arts and humanities, which are as important in forming balanced, conscientious adults as organized sports. According to Scitovsky, we’ll discover in the humanities not only non-violent relief from boredom, but, potentially, real pleasure in leisure.

2006-03-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

The recent Pew Research Center Social Trends Report “Are We Happy Yet?” is a sad comment on the state of happiness if ever there was one, full of specious correlations between quantifiable data like income, party affiliation, and church attendance, and an indefinable, unquantifiable and necessarily impermanent emotional state, elucidation of which has traditionally been the province of poets and philosophers, not pollsters and politicians. Of course, what really got my attention (and, yes, my goat, too) was the much ballyhooed “finding” that Republicans are happier by far than their foes. Yes, they’ve won the ultimate victory. It’s official: it’s a rout. Looks like the GOP’s the only disco in town now. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not quite ready to join the Stepford Republicans smiling so vehemently their faces twitch and so spitefully their clenched teeth crack. If this is happiness, I’d rather cry in my beer with the losers, thanks. Seems like more fun, frankly.

I don’t put much stock in polls myself. Remember that politeness poll that found that Americans believe poor manners are increasing, yet 80 percent rated their own as "excellent”? Mm-hmm. There’s a larger question here about scientific inquiry into our conscious experience of, reflection on, and ways of communicating subjective, emotional states. Multiple choice leaves something to be desired. The very nature of a poll tells us our answers will be compared to others’, implying our internal states are somehow comparative, too. Savvy as we are at taking polls, we want to be on the “right” side when the data are compiled. Even if we have to exaggerate a bit. Let’s take church attendance. The Christian Century Foundation found that “actual church attendance was about half the rate indicated by national public opinion polls.” According to them, “most overreporting occurs among those who consider themselves to be regular church attenders,” but in reality are not. They’d like to be, or imagine they should be, or don’t want to be classed with those who aren’t. Are you happy? Is this a trick question?

The dating website tickle.com offers a pretty typical “PhD Certified” Happiness Test. I don’t think of myself as a gloomy gus, but I’m no grinning fool. I figured I’d see how happy I really was, according to the pollsters. The test was True/False. Number one: “I feel my life is on the right track.” That’s where the trouble began. I mean, say I don’t see my life on a track at all. What am I, a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit? A thoroughbred in blinders or a locomotive racing against the clock? Even if you see life as a journey along a path, say you’re an ambler. Sometimes on the path, sometimes off it. Say you are the path. What if happiness is “off the charts” for you? What do the pollsters have to say about that? None of which is to say that Republicans don’t think they’re perfectly happy on their own hedonic treadmill. Maybe the rest of us are just thinking outside of the box.

2006-02-26T16:11:00.000-08:00

The Olympics are done and dusted, and Team America comes home with a perfectly respectable 25 medals. Problem is, America doesn’t want to be respectable. We’d rather be feared for our shock and awe than respected for our poise and decency. So it seems. It certainly wasn’t the respectable Olympians the media used as promotional fodder. Bad boys like the almost inconceivably self-centered Bode Miller, and the equally self-promoting and over-exposed Jeremy Bloom, to name a couple, were ubiquitous in commercials advertising network coverage of The Games, accompanied by the loutish shout-down “USA! USA! USA!” which made the Olympics seem more like a World Wrestling Entertainment event than a world-class showcase for winter sports.

It’s difficult not to draw some parallels between our poor choices in sports heroes and our poor choices in politicians. For The Games the media chose to hype self-indulgent pretty-boy rebels who failed to produce results. Brash, bullying big-mouths who shout down the opposition, but whose shock and awe turns out to be mostly smoke and mirrors. The Bad Boys of the 2006 Games might have left Torino with their tales between their legs, but they may yet have a shot in American politics.

Bode Miller, packaged as an “American maverick” was the biggest flop of ‘em all. I look forward to possibly seeing him excoriated by Oprah ala James Frey. And he’s been asking for it. His take on Torino: “I'm not a martyr, and I'm not a do-gooder. I just want to go out and rock. And man, I rocked here." As clueless as he seems, if Beastie Boy Bode’d brought home a medal or two, wouldn’t we still be stroking him for the ‘tude that garnered him millions in endorsements in the first place? But is the only thing wrong with Bode Miller that he didn’t win? Hmm. If Bode doesn’t end up on “Oprah” he should go out for American Idol, which stomped the Olympics in the ratings. Or why not add “Idol” to the list of Olympic events and be done with it? From skiing, skating and luging to trash-talk, smackdown and “Idol”. The networks would make a killing, that’s for sure.

Of course, I’m as guilty as the next guy of dwelling on Team America’s bad apples, when we have every reason to be proud of those who exemplified the spirit of the games. The inspiring Speedskater Joey Cheek chief among them. He donated the $40,000 from his gold and silver medal bonuses to Right To Play, and is heading off to Zambia to work for the charity group. After his win, Joey told reporters, “I wanted to make it meaningful. It's empowering to think of someone else." Now, that’s the Olympic spirit. So it’s fitting and just that Joey was chosen to bear the US flag at the closing ceremonies. Joey Cheek behaved like a true Olympian, demonstrating that the Olympics is not just about pursuing your dream, it’s about the honor of sharing it with your country and the world.

2006-02-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

Are there fates worse than sex? I’m beginning to wonder, what with increased Federal funding for abstinence-only sex ed in public schools and increasing hysteria over tweenie websites like myspace.com. As for the latter, it’s important to keep in perspective that while online predators are a real problem that parents and kids should face together, the disconcerting fact is that still upwards of ninety per cent of child sex abuse victims actually know their perpetrators, at least a third of whom are underage, too. What may be scarier for parents than online predators is the “secret life” of teens themselves, which they’re pursuing by and large with the tacit consent of adults but without much adult guidance. In a culture that worships youth and is obsessed with sex, teenage sexuality is the elephant in the room.

There seem to be two options: dumb ‘em down or smarten ‘em up. Throw out the cell phones and TVs and dismantle the internet, or (gasp) communicate with teens. Daily. Prepare them for the adult world by treating them like adults. Oh, and there’s a third option, of course: Chastity belts. Which is what abstinence-only advocates like The Family Research Council would be handing out in sex ed classes across the nation if they could get the government to spring for it. So far they’ve had to settle for the use of ignorance and ostracism to spread fear of social and sexual contamination instead. Their agenda has more to do with opposition to the women’s movement and gay rights than in empowering young adults with the practical tools to make informed choices about intimate matters anyway.

The Abstinence Clearing House’s idea of useful advice? “If you want to practice abstinence, try avoiding high-pressure situations like empty dorm rooms and the back seat of automobiles.” And, hey kids, if your dare to leave the house, don’t forget your chastity belts! They come in punky peach and passion pink, and have a way kewl pocket for your ipod on the side! Well, you can’t blame them for trying. And in what’s become a Valentine’s Day tradition, hundreds of youths across the nation took a vow to preserve their sexual “purity”. I’m not knocking it. But according to a comprehensive study conducted by Peter Bearman of Columbia University published in the Journal of Adolescent Health last year: of 2,500,000 youths who took the vow in ‘95, only 12 per cent managed to keep it.

But here’s the real problem with abstinence-only sex ed: although many pledgers refrained from vaginal sex, they were six times more likely than their non-pledging peers to engage in oral sex, four times more likely to have anal sex, and significantly less likely to use condoms, except as water balloons at after-school events. Of course, it’s no surprise this administration has so aggressively promoted abstinence-only programs, which rely more on fear than facts to get results. Nor that these results seem to perpetuate the problem. After all, these days that’s just politics as usual.

2006-02-12T09:50:00.000-08:00

Last week was a reminder that black history is American history. Lithonia joins Montgomery, Little Rock, Greensboro, Birmingham, and Selma, on the list of stops along our nation’s freedom trail where we witnessed the imperative to speak truth to power in action. And just as you can’t separate the African from the American in our history, you can’t separate The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., or his wife Coretta Scott King, from their legacy of social and political activism. They were pacifists, it’s true, but never passive.

Critics like conservative talk radio queen Blanquita Cullum, watching Coretta Scott King’s funeral from a safe distance, complained of “tasteless” and “inappropriate” comments—neither personal nor defamatory, merely true—by Joe Lowery and Jimmy Carter, that made her and her Commander-in-Chief “feel uncomfortable.” Well, heaven forbid. But the real problem was not principally Lowery, Carter, & Co., it was the thousands at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church who wholeheartedly agreed with them, if the thunderous applause and standing ovations accompanying their remarks were any indication. Turns out manipulated intelligence, wars without end, domestic spying, eviscerated social programs and inept emergency responses make the rest of us a little uncomfortable.

Unfortunately for the President, his handlers were unable to screen this audience. There were no loyalty oaths at the entrance, no bouncers to bodily remove anyone showing signs of ideological impurity. This was a rare trip outside the bubble for Mr. Bush. Even his beautifully stage-managed forays to a mythical New Orleans, complete with symbolic set-pieces worthy of La Scala, bore no resemblance to reality. In Lithonia he finally got a taste of the bitter harvest his administration has sown. He was finally forced to feel a little of what the other half feels. Uncomfortable? It’s a start. Lesson? Uncomfortable realities don’t disappear just because it makes you uncomfortable to acknowledge them.

What is the lesson for the rest of us? Those of us who have gone about our business these last several years, as the gap between rich and poor has grown obscene? Those of us who’ve sat by, helpless, hopeless, as ill-conceived and badly executed wars based on lies have driven our nation to shame in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and in secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those of us angered but impotent in the face of an eviscerated FEMA’s tardy, lackluster response to tragedy on the gulf coast? Those of us driven to silent cynicism by bald lies and widespread corruption in the capital? We should remember that these abuses by those in power have a direct correlate in the lack of courage of those who put them there, who pay lip service to equality and human rights, but sit silent as they’re subverted. This is plain passivity, not pacifism. Those of us comfortable with business as usual have expected others to speak truth to power for themselves, as if “the least of these” were no concern of ours. But the enemies of our democracy are not only the corrupt. We, the complacent, are their co-conspirators.

2006-02-06T05:17:00.000-08:00

Two facts that sum up the State of the Union: (1) just before the President’s SOTU Address Exxon Mobil posted record profits for any U.S. company — we’re talking the highest quarter earnings to cap the largest annual net income in U.S. history. (2) At the same time, Americans’ personal savings rate fell below zero for the first time since the Great Depression. In political terms this may be indicative of willful arrogance on the one hand, but it is also a sign of willed ignorance on the other.

A President’s SOTU addresses are always enlightening. Last year’s speech was a monumental paean to war. This year, with a nation wearier from natural disasters and warier of war, the speech was more intimate. The theme: self-help. Take America’s oil addiction. Did anyone detect a playful irony in the Pusher-in-chief giving his citizen-addicts what-for? Was it a bit of wink wink nudge nudge? The day after the unveiling of his grand new “Advanced Energy Initiative” news broke of a fifteen per cent cut in the Department of Energy’s R&D budget, and significant lay-offs in its wind and ethanol research labs. Oh, don’t act all surprised! Outrage is outré. I mean, check out Cindy Sheehan, with her withery, droopy-dog looks and deadpan inflection. This is the face of American outrage today.

So was the President lying? This President? Never. Just as our Protector-in-chief is above the law when it comes to spying on Americans, he is clearly light-years beyond good and evil. We can no more know his grand purpose than we can know the Almighty’s he has sworn to represent on earth. What may seem like deception to faithless citizens is really just disregard for truth. Rest easy. Just as what seems like “a timetable for Iraq” is really “isolationism,” kidnapping by our secret police is really “rendition,” and what looks a lot like hostage-taking in Iraq by our own armed forces is really “leveraging.” In Mr. Bush’s own exalted phrase, oft-repeated in his speech, we live in “a hopeful society,” not a truthful one. Didn’t you get the memo?

“A hopeful society” trusts in its Protector-in-chief’s plan. We may doubt on occasion, but it’s because we’re deceiving ourselves, as is so often the case with addicts. More specifically, although the President didn’t want to mention it on account of it might discourage us from seeking treatment, America has been diagnosed with Dependent Personality Disorder (DPD). According to the National Association of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Counselors (NAADAC) and the DSM-IV, “Clients with DPD feel helpless and incompetent.... They will subordinate their desires and refrain from making demands; they may tolerate abuse to maintain a relationship,…deny or minimize trouble,…avoid tension and limit their awareness of both themselves and others. They appear friendly, naive, and self-effacing.”

It’s OK. DPD is as American as apple pie. And we have a perfect Protector-in-chief who’s looking out for us, and knows what’s what. He’s said it himself: “Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again.”

2006-01-30T03:47:00.000-08:00

By the time you read this Samuel A. Alito, Jr., will be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, despite his troubling record on ethics (a stubborn refusal to recuse himself in cases involving conflicts of interest that nearly rivals Nino Scalia’s), a disturbing tendency to side with the government and big business against the individual, and, of course, his documented stance on the issue of abortion. Once again, it seemed to come down to Roe v. Wade. And once again Roe’s opponents prevailed.

Has Roe become a liability to Democrats? It seems to hit the headlines every time there’s an election, disappearing from the news when it’s no longer useful as a wedge issue. It is as much an effective tool of the right as the left, but it’s the right that has exploited it masterfully in the last several elections by insisting that abortion is a black-and-white issue, and forcing the left to approach it as an end-game as well. This all-or-nothing approach is great theater, but belies the truth of daily life and the common sense with which most approach living it, and which our politics should reflect.

Although the sentiment is certainly not new, Democrats have recently had some success as “pro-choice/anti-abortion” candidates, and this has pundits asking if it’s possible for a political party, or those who pledge allegiance to it, to be pro-choice and anti-abortion at the same time. And the short answer is yes. Yes transcends the issue itself and brings us face-to-face with the democratic ideal. It’s not only an acknowledgment of the other's private, autonomous existence, and her right to make her own way in the world—an idea ostensibly advocated by conservatives—but also an acknowledgment of a shared reality where private selves intersect in sometimes very significant ways, as equals, in the crucible of lived experience. The polarizing dogma that has defined this debate up to now is indicative of a general trend towards orthodoxy, the goal of which is order through coercion. Democracy strives for something much higher, and harder: order through consensus, which requires compromise.

The game plan on the right is to polarize the populace on deeply personal issues. And they are winning. Their success has driven the left to oppose orthodoxy with orthodoxy. But this is a losing proposition for Democrats, who should not be ashamed to be liberal in the old-fashioned sense: not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas. Unfortunately, Democrats have proven inept at connecting issues like full reproductive- and marriage-rights to the lives of people who don’t see themselves personally impacted, whether negatively in the absence of such rights or positively by their expansion. And the Dems will continue to be played by the GOP until they can articulate, with true conviction, in the vernacular, why anyone but those immediately affected should care. Or at the very least, why they should not be threatened, as the GOP suggests, by the rights of others.

2006-01-22T15:42:00.000-08:00

On my daily schlep from Chinatown to Copley Square I walk past St. Francis House and Arlington Street Church, down Boylston Street, which averages five beggars per block, I’d say, stationed strategically outside overpriced cafes or serving as drugstore doormen. Every society has its beggars, of course. They often serve a religious function. In Judaism, where wealth is on loan from God and the poor have a legitimate claim to it, alms-giving is a means of atonement. Mendicants in China are seen as intermediaries between humans and deities, passing messages back and forth. In India it's dharma you're dealing with, and a class of beggars called sadhus beg only for food, never for money. In Bangladesh beggars are unionized. In San Francisco they take credit cards. Most Americans balk at giving to panhandlers. Though it’s usually just spare change, it’s not a question of spending the money so much as how the money’s spent.

Truth is, while beggars are the most visible and vocal of the poor, the majority aren’t homeless. And the lion’s share of homeless people aren’t beggars. The homeless remain for the most part out of sight and mind, unless you work in one of Boston’s overburdened shelters or in its severely stressed social services sector. According to a 2005 study by the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) the number of homeless families and individuals more than doubled between 1990-2000, and continues to rise. Shelters for individuals are, as a matter of course, filled beyond capacity. As for families: 10,000 were homeless at some time last year. Massachusetts has space for 1,800.

The plight of the chronically homeless, for whom serious mental illness often plays a major role, remains the most intractable. But there’s a sensible solution. Dr. Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania found in his definitive study of nearly 10,000 chronically homeless people that the cost of leaving them to fend for themselves is equal to if not greater than that of housing them. The New York/New York Agreement of 1989, which reduced the single-adult homeless shelter population by nearly forty percent in the early ‘90s, has shown the way.

There’s some recognition at the federal and state levels of the need for long-term solutions to chronic homelessness. In 2003 the feds announced partnerships with local authorities. Acronymous committees were commissioned and staffed, executive orders issued, millions of dollars appropriated to various and sundry well-meaning organizations. Still, according to a 2005 report to Massachusetts legislators by the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association: “Even as study after study, including a recent report by a special commission appointed by the Governor, have continued to affirm that investing in homeless prevention services and housing subsidies is far less expensive both in dollars and human toll than providing emergency shelter, the State has largely failed to act on this knowledge.” The lesson of the NY/NY Agreement is this: it’s not a question of spending the money so much as how the money’s spent.

2006-01-16T05:43:00.000-08:00

Happy days are here again, with the Dow topping that heady 11,000 mark for the first time since the 9/11 terror attacks! Woo-hoo! Things are so rosy, Congress has treated itself to raises every year since 2001, $20,800-worth, for a current annual income of $162,100 (and that’s before graft is factored in). The total annual compensation of your average CEO of a major company’s skyrocketed to $10 million. These are, indeed, the best of times. But wait a minute. At $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage hasn’t budged in a decade, and real median household income remains stagnant at just under $45,000 per annum. While the Dow surges, companies rush to freeze or terminate pensions. Like so many things in our gilded economy these days, the benefits of the bottom line look a lot better from the top rung of the corporate ladder. For many, these are (still) the worst of times. But, chin up! Some day we’ll all be millionaires, right?

A recent study by Columbia University Sociologist Thomas A. DiPrete, “Is This a Great Country? Upward Mobility and the Chance for Riches in Contemporary America,” begins to explain why so many Americans voted against their own economic interests in recent elections, and persist in siding with the top 1% of the country in its efforts to bankrupt the rest of us. As DiPrete puts it: “[A]n incorrect understanding of the risks and benefits of different medical procedures can interfere with the sensible choice when it comes to major decisions about health care. Misinformation about American income distribution and one’s chances for becoming rich can make it similarly difficult for Americans to take sensible positions on tax policy.” So DiPrete set out to debunk the Get Rich Myth. He found that while an astonishing 51% of Americans between the ages of 18-29 (including 58% of males in this age range) thought it was likely they’d be rich some day, in reality the figure is closer to 5-6%, and depends on your being well-off to begin with. Across demographics, the story’s the same: most Americans consider themselves “pre-rich.” But the truth is, just like the old adage says, it’s mainly the rich who are getting richer.

So, not only is there an increasingly obscene income gap in America, but also a widening gap between the perception and reality of income mobility. Still, the Wall Street Journal editorial that inspired DiPrete’s study got it right: “Americans vote not on their envy but their aspirations.” Optimism is the greatest of American virtues; blind optimism our greatest vice. Next time out let’s aspire to share the American dream rather than limit it to those already living it. This will require a sober look at the reality of class and class mobility in America today. Don’t stop dreaming, because it’s not the American Dream that’s broken. It’s just that it will take more than idle dreaming to make it a reality for more than a tiny minority of already privileged Americans.

2006-01-09T05:48:00.000-08:00

Several recent movies set out to offer insight into the so-called War on Terror, that never-ending struggle that seems to be turning our own nation, by not-so-subtle degrees, into a rogue state. A couple big-budget terror-era thrillers have reached the Cineplex and are worth seeing. Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” has Israel’s Prime Minister, Golda Meir, telling her top-secret Committee X that sometimes it’s necessary to negotiate compromises with core values, before sending Mossad agents to revenge the deaths of the Olympic athletes slaughtered by Black September. The rest of the film deals with the fall-out. The last scene, after revenge has been wrought, frames the Twin Towers in a pre-9/11 Lower Manhattan. In “Syriana” Director Stephen Gaghan provides a serpentine descent into the dark depths of Big Oil. In both movies the protagonists end up not knowing who they’re working for, whose interests they’re serving, or exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing. Not to worry, neither film is quite seditious. “Munich” is too transparent, “Syriana” too opaque to be mistaken for agitprop.

Both deal to a disarming degree with individuals serving as cogs in a political process so vast and complicated it simply cannot be comprehended in toto. The engine of this incredible machine may be oil, Gaghan suggests, but oil stands for greed, and greed is what keeps it humming. This notion is itself seditious to some, but as various characters in “Syriana” never hesitate to tell us, the U.S., with 5% of world population, consumes roughly 50% of the world’s oil. Being reminded that our appetites have consequences, both political and personal, around the world, offends some delicate sensibilities, alas. But acknowledging this universal truth is essential in determining what our true core values are, and assessing which of them we’re willing to compromise, and to what end.

Both movies clearly warn of becoming what we profess to despise, echoing tales as ancient as civilization itself. Take, as a random example, the Hindu tale of the fearsome demon Raktabija, a tough one to vanquish, because every drop of his blood, when it hit the ground, became another demon just like him. The lesser gods, at their wit’s end, called for back-up. Kali, goddess of destruction, came galloping into the fray, and with her formidable tongue, caught every drop of the demon’s blood before it could hit the ground. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But then, drunk on the demon’s blood, Kali, not known for her restraint in the first place, went on her own blind, bloody rampage across the universe. It took the more meditative Shiva, roused from a trance, to bring her back to her senses.

What happened in Munich September 5th, 1972, and in America September 11th, 2001, is not subject to debate. But what these events set in motion must be vigorously, passionately, and publicly debated. These movies bring important issues to the fore. We mustn’t be afraid to “go there”. That’s when the terrorists—whether states or the stateless—have won.

2006-01-02T03:34:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed? Un-PC is the new black. I had dinner last week with a friend of mine who’s a member of a popular comedy troupe* in town, known for their bawdy humor, outrageous musical numbers and cross-dressing. He assured me that their new show was set to be their most “un-PC” yet. Which reminded me of movie critic A.O. Scott’s review of Sarah Silverman’s supposedly very un-PC concert movie, “Jesus is Magic”: “mocking political correctness has become a form of political correctness in its own right.” Interestingly, it’s not the whiners on the right (the ones constantly assailing the whiners on the left for their Politically Correct excesses) but the lefties themselves—who supposedly invented PC—who are eager to subvert it. So it seems “un-PC” is indeed the new PC.

But should it surprise anyone that blacks, Jews, gays, immigrants, and uppity women (or any combination thereof)—the supposedly PC crowd, in other words—provide us with our most cutting-edge, taboo-busting, un-PC entertainment? Not really. PC has less to do with political preference, per se, than with an orientation towards ideological orthodoxy. And most Americans, accustomed to the dynamism of democracy, bristle at orthodoxy’s chilling effect. But if you stick to The Script, PC is part of a vast, insidiously encroaching, liberal conspiracy. In the script, "PC" is the McCarthyism of the left, even though it has no Joseph McCarthy and no House Committee on Un-American Activities. I know: pesky details.

Truth is, PC is nowadays largely a bugaboo of the right, whose obsession with it long ago eclipsed the loony left’s actual political correctness. The Great Christmas Tree Controversy of 2005 was only the latest battle in the mostly imaginary PC wars, and showed how strained the efforts to keep ‘em raging have gotten. I mean, what if you threw a Culture War and no one came? Harping on the excesses of Political Correctness, real or imagined, does have its purposes, though. It’s a way of framing issues, first of all. But mostly it’s a way to rail against diversity, affirmative action, sexual harassment suits, gay marriage, even handicap parking, without having to own up to outright bigotry. It’s the triumph of I’m-rubber-you’re-gluism in American politics.

One of the peculiar strengths of our nation, its dynamic culture, and its form of government is that it gives a voice to those who are outnumbered. I would say “minorities,” but consulting a definitive lexicon of PC terms, I see this means “any PC group that can claim it is oppressed,” where “oppression” is PC code for “the state of holding PC status while not receiving enough special benefits and attention.” That’s according to the proudly un-PC authors, who clearly believe that their opponents’ perceived political correctness conveniently discredits all of the latter’s political claims. Now, you may think me PC, but I’m happy to call a spade a spade: scratch the surface of someone obsessed with the vast PC conspiracy and I guarantee you’ll find an old-school bigot.

*the troupe is called Fresh Fruit. They can be found on the web here.

2005-12-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

First of all, I like Ansel Adams. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. His monumental images of the American West are practically inseparable from our experience of the West itself. His images from Yosemite, his photos of the Tetons—I saw them long before I saw the real thing, and they intensified the majesty of the landscape for me when I finally did. No need to photograph them myself, though, because Adams had already done it, and nobody’s ever done it better. As for the exhibition of his work at the Museum of Fine Arts: save yourself some money and aggravation, just buy the catalog—the pictures in it are about the same size as the ones hanging on the wall, and you'll be able to view them better in the comfort of your own home.

The choice of an Adams exhibition is in line with the MFA's goal of showing very pretty, very nice, and very irrelevant art. Or worse: showing still-relevant art that could move us in a way that expressly doesn’t, except to move us along as quickly as possible through the exhibition hall and into the gift shop, where, in this case, we could show our appreciation by buying Ansel Adams coffee mugs, coasters, and key fobs. But this easy commodification of Adams and his images was clearly part of the appeal of the artist to the MFA. Adams is a big-name draw, whose utterly uncontroversial work offers the same high-class austerity as Ralph Lauren’s Batmobiles. The exhibition was informative, but in the end presented objects, not ideas. Perfect for the new upscale Mall-of-America MFA.

But the most disappointing thing about the experience is becoming commonplace in Boston: the only people of color I saw during my visit were at the coat check and behind the counter at the gift shop. An anthropologist visiting from Mars would see a division of leisure and labor, at least in the service sector, that looked to be based, the lion’s share of the time, on race. You could tell him, hey, it's the marketplace, not a reflection of our values, but the truth is it's increasingly obvious that we’re a nation that’s given up on the idea that equality is both everyone's right and everyone's responsibility.

Of course, the MFA under Malcolm Rogers has Wal-Martized its workforce, but that doesn’t explain why, on a crowded Sunday morning, there were no people of color attending the show. The truth is, the museum has done its part to price “undesirables” out, and to offer art of no consequence, divorced from the vitality of our lives. It has instead actively marketed a peculiarly Bostonian brand of haute-bourgeois art-snobbery that effectively excludes those for whom art has meaning beyond status, and determines the types of shows: always more decorative than declamatory, as strains of modern art can be—and above all, tasteful. Because you’re not going to buy a set of coasters that doesn’t go with your sofa, now, are you?

2005-12-11T14:21:00.000-08:00

Just before I left Boston last Thursday for a week in Miami, I was walking down Washington Street through Downtown Crossing. It was not yet five o’clock, and already dark. A street vendor with a pushcart came darting across the street, right across my path. For a moment, we were at an impasse, and the mutual loathing was palpable. The sidewalk belonged to both of us. There was no reason either of us should yield it to the other. We could’ve remained there indefinitely, like the North-going Zax and the South-going Zax in the Dr. Seuss story, who found themselves in the same predicament. Both refused to budge an inch to the East or West—forever.

Well, I had things to do, so I yielded. But it disturbed me how easily I’d become embroiled in this needlessly hostile encounter. Neither of us had behaved graciously even though it would’ve cost us nothing. It highlighted something I’d been talking about with a couple of Latin American students visiting Boston during our most recent cold-snap. They’d noticed the bad attitude Boston is becoming known for. When asked what it was about, they both said, “it’s the weather.” People are bitter and cold in Boston because it’s bitter cold half the year, one said. They seem to want to conserve their heat, so they close shop emotionally in the winter months, the other added.

While I was riding my bike in South Beach Friday afternoon in nothing but shorts, flip-flops and my RayBans, soaking up the sun, not a care in the world, I thought about that encounter at Downtown Crossing. In the bitter cold and darkness of a long New England winter, people—myself included—seem willing to waste heat on hate, because you pretty much always know the reaction you’re going to get when you give it. But when you’re nice, half the time you get hate back, too. So why chance it? There’s also the misery-loves-company angle to consider. Foul weather, a foul mood, and foul language all seem to go together. Everybody’s rude, but at least we’re all on the same page.

The funny thing about rudeness is that, when surveyed, most people protest their complete innocence. It’s always someone else. In the Associated Press-Ipsos poll on public attitudes about rudeness, you’ll find such absurd claims as this: 87% of respondents claim never to have "made an obscene gesture at another person while driving a car.” And a whopping 91% claim never—never!—to have used their cell phone “in a loud or annoying manner in public.” Yeah, right. The first step in changing the culture of rudeness is to own it, people. The rudeness meme passes from person to person, and like the flu, it seems more common in colder climes. For my part, continued “light therapy” on the beach is just what the doctor ordered. I’ve made a shocking discovery in Miami: people actually smile in December. Can you believe it?

2005-12-04T14:04:00.000-08:00

So, to recap: the right, blaming the left, launched their annual high-profile campaign to “save Christmas.” But if Bill O'Reilly, Jerry Falwell, and Fox News are truly representative of American Christianity these days, the ones Christmas most needs saving from are these so-called Christians themselves.

But can it be true that these loudmouths with their noxious, fear-filled, hate-fueled agenda are really representative of America’s Christians? I refuse to believe it. Faith is something deeply personal to most people, not something they crow about, preening in public, pointing out the sins of others, and preaching a gospel of divisiveness at the top of their lungs at the least provocation. They can call themselves whatever they like, I call them political opportunists, pure and simple.

Many good Christians believe that they can practice their faith best in a secular society, not one that mandates certain beliefs and practices for them, or others. And many of us who grew up Christian have watched in dismay as the highly politicized right wing has hijacked the label of “Christian” for what certainly seems to be an un-Christian, if not anti-Christian agenda, one that extols materialism over poverty, fawning on the haves and have-mores while scorning the poor. Again, call it what you will, I call it hypocrisy.

Recently I happened upon a self-proclaimed Christian website that purported to have instant answers to 73,403 Bible Questions. Everything that’s wrong with this counterfeit Christianity could be found on the site, starting with the claim of instant answers. Christ himself spoke in parables, suggesting the answers are never easy, much less instant. Most conscientious folks, whatever their creed, do indeed think deeply about the vital questions religion seeks to address.

One of the website’s FAQs was "Are we to love the sinner but hate the sin?" The counterfeit-Christian answer, in part: "The difference between us and God in regard to loving and hating is vast…. God can [love and hate] perfectly well, because He is God! God can hate without any sinful intent at all. Therefore, he can hate the sin and the sinner in a perfectly holy way!" QED. So “God is hate.” Call it what you will, I call it twisted.

This complete co-opting of Christianity by the right is something Christians of a liberal or humanist bent are hard-pressed to know how to react to. No reasonable soul wants to dignify such doggerel with a thoughtful rebuttal. But reasonable people of all faiths should pay closer attention to the growing radicalism of the right. We need to think seriously and deeply about the social, political and economic forces that have given rise to religious radicalism in this country, especially with our domestic and foreign policies being set by those who subscribe to such skewed belief systems. Until moderates speak up and confront these fakes and bullies they will continue to poison our public discourse. Say what you will, but I say enough.

2005-11-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Yuletide Season is upon us, with its attendant culture war crusade! This year’s most promising battle is Boston’s “Great Christmas Tree Controversy”: the city’s annual Nova Scotia spruce is being officially referred to as a “holiday tree” instead of a “Christmas tree,” awakening the ire of right-wingers nationwide. "There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas," Rev. Jerry Falwell fumed on Fox. CBS conducted a poll that found that 64% of respondents thought that “Christmas has become too politically correct.”

Now, for Falwell’s fundies, PC is only the most pernicious example of their ememies’ excessive approbation of difference, because the radical right opposes the very diversity—of peoples, traditions, histories, and viewpoints—that is the life-blood of modern free and open societies. Right-wingers, clinging to a belief that nothing ever changes, or at least mustn’t be allowed to, claim to object to the left’s shifty semantics. But the truth is, as most people know, things change. And when worlds change, words do, too. What the right really objects to is the acknowledgment—never mind the celebration—of difference and change. We Americans are clever enough nowadays not to talk about race and ethnicity straightforwardly, partly because it’s no longer simply black-and-white. We often cloak our fears and prejudices in other issues, from immigration to school prayer, but Christmas trees will do nicely, too.

The religious right is better at keeping the controversy than the Christ in Christmas, that’s for sure. Every yuletide is a new chapter in their cultural jihad. Last year it was a boycott of shops advertising “holiday sales” or sporting signage wishing “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”—never mind that the relentless commercialization of Christmas, by self-professed Christians as much as anyone—is itself a distraction from the true spirit of the season. So this year, it’s “The Great Christmas Tree Controversy”. The only problem is, there is nothing essentially Christian about a Christmas tree. It’s the right that’s playing semantics here. Newsflash: Jesus was not born under the evergreen. The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah inveighed against the pagan practice of cutting down and decorating trees as a form of idolatry. The puritan fathers called the practice a “pagan mockery”. So, Rev. Falwell, who stole what from whom?

Clearly “holiday tree” is unacceptable precisely because it’s inclusive, and fails to acknowledge the primacy of one tribe over the others. The right’s shrill insistence on institutionalizing religious supremacy is indeed a reflection of tribalization in troubled times. Sure, there’s justifiable fear of the ascendancy of immigrant cultures, with different customs, beliefs, and skin colors. But the right’s rigidity won’t halt their rise. They should take a hint from the tradition they claim as their own, and embrace the Other. 'Tis the season.

Can’t get over the semantics? Here’s a suggestion: I recently came upon an ad for e-cards online, urging me to “get into the Christmahanukwanzakah spirit!” I thought, right on. Why not rename Boston’s “holiday tree” the “Christmahanukwanzakah tree”?

2005-11-21T11:20:00.000-08:00

Lies, damned lies, and plummeting poll numbers! The Bush administration, after its customary deer-in-the-headlights act, suddenly sprang back to life last week. The big headline: Bush has been exonerated! Cleared of any suspicion of having misled the public in his quest to unseat Saddam! If you weren’t paying attention you might have thought there was a real story here. But the fact is, he was “exonerated” by one of his own political appointees, National Security Advisor Steve Hadley. You’re doin’ a heck of a job, Stevie!

After having his good name cleared (whew, that was a close one!), Mr. Bush lashed out at Democrats: didn’t they know by now that it’s “irresponsible” and unpatriotic to criticize him? His coward’s cabal then set about trashing thrice-decorated Vietnam vet and Representative from Pennsylvania John Murtha for daring to do so, linking the legislator, bizarrely, to documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. Apparently that’s all it takes to throw someone’s sanity into question nowadays. But if we’re talking insanity, it’s the pot calling the kettle black here. Curious, while there was endless analysis in the press and around the water cooler of Clinton, Bush, arguably a worthier subject, has utterly escaped it. Admittedly, Clinton’s adolescent libido was riper for ridicule that Bush’s pre-adolescent omnipotence complex, which we’d all rather just ignore in the hopes that eventually he’ll outgrow it. (He won’t.)

Personally, I think it’s high time all our presidents were evaluated as a matter of protocol, before they took office. We would at least be better prepared for the spurious wars and wrecked budgets the loonies leave in their wake. May I recommend the Hare Psychopathy Checklist- Revised (PCL-R), which consists of several items, each scored 0-2 (0 = trait absent, 1 = possibly/partially present, 2 = present)? The higher the score, the greater the likelihood of psychopathy. Simple. But don’t take my word for it. Put down your “su doku” and take a minute to tally up Mr. Bush’s score yourself (in the brackets to the left of the noxious trait):

Factor 1, aggressive narcissism: [ ] Glibness/superficial charm; [ ] Grandiose sense of self-worth; [ ] Pathological lying; [ ] Cunning/manipulative; [ ]Lack of remorse or guilt; [ ] Shallow affect; [ ] Callous/lack of empathy; [ ] Failure to accept responsibility for own actions. Factor 2, socially deviant lifestyle: [ ] Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom; [ ] Parasitic lifestyle; [ ] Poor behavioral controls; [ ] Early behavioral problems; [ ] Lack of realistic, long-term goals; [ ] Impulsivity; [ ] Irresponsibility; [ ] Juvenile delinquency; [ ] Continual acceptance of antisocial behavior.

It reads like W’s CV, doesn’t it? To give you an idea of the competition: although I’ve omitted a few criteria due to space, a normal score is five. Prison inmates average around 22. This may be the one test the prez could pass with flying colors, graduating at the very top of his class!

2005-11-14T03:39:00.000-08:00

Last week was a critical one for Democrats around the nation. They celebrated victories in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey; rashly defeated all of Governor Schwarzenegger’s ballot initiatives in California—more a repudiation of the governator than a judgment on the wisdom of the measures themselves, I’m afraid; and, in Pennsylvania, all eight members of a school board that single-mindedly sought to force “intelligent design” into the science curriculum were trounced, leading Pat Robertson to warn the good people of Dover, PA: "If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God …and don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there.”

I quote the Reverend Robertson at length here because he is the single best argument against Intelligent Design that I know of. ID is nothing if not an irrational reaction to what is perceived as liberalism’s threat—political, not religious in nature—and all it really seeks to do is lend legitimacy to the fear of The Other and of pragmatic inquiry into the nature of things that is at the core of modern-day evangelicalism. ID brooks no argument, spawns no debate, and calls for no further investigation. Its adherents argue, simply, that certain forms in nature are too complex to have evolved through natural selection and must have been created by a "designer." That’s where debate ends, and prostration and praise begin, apparently. Is it a kind of desperate plea to stuff the genie back in the bottle, to not look any further into the mysteries that science is daily revealing to us—in genetics, physics, astronomy? Of course it is. Does it fit into a politics rife with xenophobia, homophobia, and fear-mongering in general? Very nicely. Because we fear what we cannot understand, and ID helps us—indeed, encourages us to understand nothing.

The God of Reverend Robertson is in many ways pre-Christian. He reminds me of the Gnostic demiurge more than any—pardon the expression—fully evolved Christian God. He’s the petulant child-god of Mark Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger: reveling in his omnipotence, oblivious to empathy, he’s capable of appalling acts of evil. He would gladly wipe out a Pennsylvania town for its impudence in denying his existence.

There have been times in our history when fruitful debate of mortal questions was possible. Revelations of World War II atrocities sparked a brief period of painful discussion on the nature of God. Humanism, a term that has been demonized by the right, seemed an alternative to religious belief that allowed men to justify as godly their hatred of other men. And in an era when “God is in the White House” and ready to veto legislation outlawing torture, Humanism still seems like a pretty good alternative to me.

2005-11-08T07:56:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Blame Game. You know the Right’s in trouble when all that’s left in their arsenal is “blame Clinton.” This has been the fool’s chorus ever since Mr. Bush took office, but now the whole Republican party is singing along. Last week, when it became obvious the Democrats were not going to drop their investigation of sexed-up intelligence on WMD, the call from conservative quarters was “blame Clinton!” The ubiquitous David Brooks quoted a Clinton staffer as saying: "The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons." So, if you have a problem with the war in Iraq, or the nearly 2,050 US soldiers dead, the over 15,000 wounded, or the nearly $220 billion spent there so far, blame Clinton.

The problem is, whatever Clinton or his staffers may have believed, they did not spin intelligence or create it out of whole cloth for the sole purpose of starting an unnecessary and costly war with no thought as to an exit strategy. Nor did Clinton or his staffers seek to revenge themselves on their critics by revealing any of their critics’ wives’ undercover status. Sorry, but for these and other related crimes, the blame falls squarely on Mr. Bush and his own band of brothers. Of course, we’ve known all along that W has trouble taking the blame. When, during the last of the presidential debates with John Kerry, he was asked to “give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision” he could not come up with even one.

The desperation of the “blame Clinton” defense is obvious. The surprising thing is that, for the moment at least, it has even eclipsed the “blame the liberal media” defense favored by the Right. Funny, we bandy about the L-word without really thinking what it means to live in what is accurately called a “liberal democratic society.” Traditional liberalism argues that defense of individual liberty and private property are the purposes of government. One of its chief tenets is the right of dissent. It is utterly opposed to totalitarian and collectivist ideologies like communism. If you look at it this way, all media in a democracy, if true to the purpose of the media, should be liberal.

The problem with our supposedly liberal media is that it has been so thoroughly infected by politics. Of course the press is by nature political—not because it is mired in a particular ideology, but because it is moored to the liberal ideal, and thus threatens to expose the pretense, hypocrisy, and decadence of politics with truth-telling, which, when a nation is governed by dogma, is a form of dissent. I would actually like to be able to blame the press for Bush’s problems, but unfortunately, our press is beholden to the same interests as our politicians. No, this time the blame is entirely Bush’s own to bear.

2005-11-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

Last week was rough for Bush & Co. The American death toll in Iraq reached the grim milestone of 2000. The Harriet Miers fiasco ended in her unceremonious withdrawal. And a Grand Jury indicted Darth Cheney’s alter ego, Scooter Libby, on five counts. This, on top of the general stink of corruption in the upper echelons of the GOP, has Democrats gloating, some gleefully speculating that the Bush Administration may finally be imploding.

This has been the singular, desperate hope of the Democrats for years now, and it’s a sad comment on the state of the opposition, which offered no leadership of its own to fill the vacuum in Katrina’s wake, to name just one recent and glaring example. The Bush administration has not been subtle in its contempt for ordinary Americans here at home (in New Orleans) and abroad (in Iraq). Working class and poor people are good for cannon fodder and the occasional photo op, and that’s about it. But Democrats have yet to show any backbone in opposing this regime. Instead of reacting to crises with real, viable, alternate solutions that show that good government is still possible, Democrats seem to have nothing better to offer than hand-wringing, crowing critiques, and speculation that this could be the moment the enemy self-destructs. In the modern Democrat’s version of things, you can lose all the battles and still win the war by default.

But even if the President himself is cannibalized by his own runaway congress, while it may be a personal defeat for him, it will not spell victory for the opposition, much less ordinary Americans. Big business is still the biggest constituent of both parties, often the only one that matters, and elections are still being bought right and left. The conditions that gave Bush & Co. carte blanche remain the status quo, and it’s in neither parties’ interests to seek real reform. And real reform is the only route to real choices in governance.

Of course, we’re all entitled to a little well-earned Schadenfreude every so often. But before we get too smug, let’s remember: these failures are ours. Anytime our system is systematically abused and we come to accept corruption as business as usual, we all lose. When we choose the rhetoric of bald propaganda over facts, regardless of party affiliation, we all lose. And this time there is no “how did this happen?” It happened not only because the administration took liberties (literally and figuratively), but because the political opposition, and Americans in general, could not muster the will to stand up and speak, and demand the truth right under our noses. It’s a credit to our system that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald could, but corruption will continue, and deepen, unless Americans step up to the task of self-government. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It’s not merely the White house that’s to blame for abuses of power. We the People are to blame for letting it get this far.

2005-10-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey kicked off her Blond Ambition tour recently with a scintillating little scandal. Paris Hilton may have a diamond the size of the Ritz, but if Kerry’s Hubby, Sean, has his way, he’ll be buying his Material Girl the State House, golden dome and all, for a cool thirteen million! Now, that’s love, people. Problem is, on the road to more riches, Mr. Healey may have abused the state's corporate welfare system. Not only that, but, with the aid of Mentor Mittney, a tax office report critical of, among others, Mr. Healey’s multibillion dollar Affiliated Managers Group Inc.’s over-exuberant applications for tax credits may have been squelched. When news of the watered-down report broke, Mrs. Healey reacted like a practiced politician: defensive, she denied and prevaricated. Some are saying it’s all over for Healey, just as it’s beginning, but as with Governor Romney, personal ambition will trump any sense of shame in the end.

It is—and isn’t—about the money. The million dollar tax credits, which, according to Inspector General Gregory Sullivan, were handed out to companies “as favors” amount to a corporate pittance, a sort of nicety, the equivalent of an annual fruit basket sent to friends of Mitt & Co., courtesy the taxpayer. But when you consider the intended use of the tax credit, namely to encourage development of blighted neighborhoods, the pettiness and greed the wealthy among us are capable of begins to seem boundless. A Representative from Healey’s AMG insists, of course, that their tax credit was awarded in “full compliance of the law,” but as Henry Ward Beecher once preached: “all ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.” Loopholes can’t justify such abuses. Legal or not, the assumptions undergirding this application of the law are obscene.

Meanwhile, Mittney’s taking a little time off his national tour to reform the way we pay for healthcare in Massachusetts, itself an enormously ambitious project. There’s no question something needs to be done to ensure that quality healthcare is available at reasonable rates to rich and poor alike. But Romney’s assumptions about those he says abuse the current system rankle. In his opinion, “about 200,000 of the state's roughly 500,000 uninsured make enough money to afford private insurance,” and are thus apparently, at least potentially, bilking the State. But what does the governor really know about scraping by on minimum wage? Even twice the minimum is not a living wage in Boston, a city where, as John McDonough of Health Care for All has observed, “you've got families… paying over their income for rent." And that’s the problem with this administration. Mittney and his Material Girl either never knew or have forgotten what it’s like to be barely making ends meet. But in their shameless, desperate pursuit of personal glory they would both do well to recall some words of wisdom on the subject: “ambition,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is the last refuge of failure.”

2005-10-15T07:55:00.000-07:00

Not even midway through W’s second term and already I’ve got hypocrisy fatigue. I had to roll my eyes when Bush’s lackeys were caught red-handed last week coaching soldiers for another of the Pretender-in-Cheat’s propaganda pieces pushing his $200 billion war in Iraq. The soldiers were instructed to fawn over the would-be Emperor, while their superiors, just off-stage, were ordered to thump ‘em if they didn’t stroke him with enough ardor. Remember the unholy stink the administration raised over the soldier who questioned Donald Rumsfeld about the shortage of body armor? How it turned out he’d been coached by a journalist? Well, touché.

So the press made a big to-do about Bush’s phony conference call last week. But come on: is there anyone who doesn’t know that all of Bush’s public appearances are staged, except maybe Mr. Bush himself, who sometimes reminds me of a complacent version of Jim Carrey’s clueless Truman Burbank? The rest of us are merely extras in “The W Show.” To express shock at the phoniness of it all seems just a tad disingenuous at this point. In fact, it borders on doublethink. The vain hope of those who point to proof of hypocrisy in these faith-based times, when proof is a mere annoyance to be brushed away by some invisible hand, is that sensible people will start scratching their heads and replace the megachurch mantra “WWJD” with the more fitting “WTF?”

Bush’s hypocrisy when it comes to Harriet Miers, his latest Supreme Court nominee (and maybe not his last—Justice Stevens is pushing ninety) has been well-publicized, too. While a nominee, the topic of newly appointed Chief Justice John Roberts’ faith was off-limits, according to Republicans. When, during confirmation hearings, Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat, asked Roberts how his Roman Catholic faith might affect his court rulings, he was upbraided by Republican John Cornyn, who reminded him, “we have no religious tests for public office in this country.” It seems Ms. Miers is the exception to Article VI, Clause 3 of the US Constitution. To hear Bush tell it, Miers’ religion is about her only qualification. But the post she’s up for is not High Priestess of the Cult of Reverend Dobson, it’s Justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S. of A. I mean, WTF?

Rest assured, there’s more hypocrisy on the way. When Democrats bring up Miers’ religion in what’s sure to be a spectacle of brazen stupidity to rival the Clarence Thomas confirmation, they’ll be accused by Republicans of both politicizing deeply held religious beliefs and violating article VI, clause 3. Shame on them! The danger of this kind of theater is that sooner or later not only the stale lines of the administration but their critics’ chorus of outrage and indignation ring utterly false. That the antics of Bush’s brat pack brings some satisfaction to its critics is understandable, but until they pursue the truth as doggedly as they do their opponent, all we’ve got is “WTF?”

2005-10-11T07:52:00.000-07:00

I recently did the unthinkable: broke down and got a cell phone. I didn’t really want to, but in our modern mobile world, cell phones have become a necessary evil. I found a no-frills phone and a simple pay-as-you-go plan that fit my pocketbook. The one thing I failed to consider was that a phone is no longer simply a phone—it’s an accessory every bit as vital to your identity as that Sox cap on your head, the Starbucks mug in your fist, or the chihuahua on your arm.

What clued me into this fact was the cache of preloaded ring tones. What came standard? A hip-hop sample called "krunktone". I could not imagine replacing the old “give me a ring” with “give me a krunk,” whatever that is, so I set about searching my phone for a "ring-a-ding-ding" or even "ring-a-ling,” to no avail. Instead I found other ring tones with names like "creepy," "evilpizz," "galloping metal," "low rider," and (of course) "more krunkness." Nothing even remotely resembling a "ring" as we once knew it. I tried to picture myself at a restaurant with a friend, and "low rider" sounds from my pants pocket. Or being on the T and answering to "evilpizz." Or teaching a class and hearing the sounds of "galloping metal" coming from my backpack. It’s just not me, I’m afraid. The search for a ring tone continued.

I soon discovered a treasure trove of ring tones online, at a minimum of two bucks a pop. I was amazed at the inventory of noises: bicycle bells, church bells, car horns, police sirens. Bleating, belching, mewling, howling. Everything from Brahms’ “Trio, opus 40” to Britney’s "Oops, I did it again!" But nothing that was not a statement, serious or satirical, about who you are or would like to be perceived to be. I contemplated Beethoven’s Polonaise in C but when I had downloaded it and my phone rang it was like someone screaming “snob!” from my pants pocket. It seemed to say: I think I'm too good for "Krunktone," too righteous for "low rider,” too sophisticated for "evilpizz." But that’s not it at all. I don’t even know who or what “krunk” is. It’s like those people who get a Chinese character tattooed on their arms, thinking it means “power” when actually it could say “muttonhead” for all they know.

It’s more work than I wanted to put into a device I could do without were it not for the irritating exigencies of modern life, that’s for sure. But I couldn't possibly go on with "Krunktone" as my theme song. When finally I stumbled on a phone-like sound among the menagerie, I realized that even a simple ring is a statement of a sort. There was no avoiding it. It’s nostalgia, sure, but at least I can still tell my friends to “give me a ring.”

2005-10-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever been to Rome, and visited the Vatican, you can’t have missed Saint Peter’s Basilica. The first thing you’ll notice, and arguably the most impressive thing about it, is its sheer size. No one I’ve ever spoken to who’s been there has described it as cozy or welcoming. It’s not that sort of place. It’s designed to dwarf the visitor, presumably to humble the worshiper. There’s no escaping that it’s a testament to power. If you’re looking for some of that much-touted mercy Christ went on about, you might want to look elsewhere.

That’s the paradox of religion in modern times, though, isn’t it? The notion that mercy should play a central role (much less THE central role) in religious or civic life is a fairly new one. Judaism, out of which Christianity emerged, was not a universal religion, but a tribal—and necessarily a martial—one. It still is. Most religions, particularly monotheistic ones, maintain this us-against-them mentality. My God is bigger than your God. That kind of thing. Early Christianity’s innovation, which Peter resisted and Paul pushed for, was, in fact, its universalizing message. The word “catholic” (with a little c) actually means “universal”. Without Saint Paul, and his insistence on expanding the scope of the early church, allowing gentiles to join, there would be no Saint Peter’s.

Paul was also what some might call misogynistic, and modern people can certainly read something like homophobia in some of his epistles. But then Paul was struggling to found an institution, and institutions cannot survive without hierarchies and rules, without a power structure. That’s another paradox of Christianity: Christ was certainly not its founder.

Now we find the Church in the midst of another in a long line of infamous purges. No one does inquisitions better, that’s for sure. Even Boston’s Archbishop O’Malley, when he arrived in his lowly cassock, showed the ruthlessness of a medieval monk, and shrewdly shifting attention away from the misdeeds of the Church, entered the political fray over gay marriage. Rather than make the institutional hierarchy more accountable for its crimes, and aiming for more transparency in the leadership of the Church and all along the chain of command, the Church under Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to answer the victimization of one group with the victimization of another.

Why does this matter to non-Catholics? First of all, because churches have increasing power and influence in politics today. Second, because any institution with the scope and resources of the Church, particularly in the social realm, that advocates scapegoating and argues for essentially second-class status for any class of citizens, is a danger to an open society. The Catholic Church is not simply a private club, and this is not merely about restricting its membership. This is about right versus wrong, about power versus mercy. The Church has once again forgotten its basic truth: that, in fact, mercy IS power. That’s the very catholic message of an increasingly un-catholic Catholic Church.

2005-09-26T07:54:00.000-07:00

Who’s playing politics with Katrina now? The cynicism of this administration and its minions should never be underestimated. Hordes of Republican lawmakers gathered in front of the Capitol last week to offer ideas for budget cuts to pay for billions in no-bid contracts awarded to their buddies for hurricane recovery. It goes without saying that none suggested foregoing extending the massive tax cuts for the rich. If it’s up to them (and it is), PBS, Amtrak, and foreign aid will all be down the drain. This is the best thing to happen to the GOP since the War in Iraq. They’re loving it. Slash and burn, baby, burn!

To recap: while Congress contemplates cutting already meager funding for public programs, it’s also preparing to funnel billions in public funds to well-connected, often dubiously qualified private firms. As the New York Times reported Monday, “More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts signed by FEMA [so far] were awarded without bidding or with limited competition”—not surprisingly to Republican contributors and the party faithful. The largest no-bid contract so far was for over half a billion for debris removal going to a buddy of Mississippi’s Republican governor. The Army Corps of Engineers has admitted the undisputed asking price for that contract may have been grossly inflated. Also not surprising: two of the major contractors so far are subsidiaries of Halliburton, represented by a lobbyist who was a former campaign manager for Bush. Hmm. That’s subtle.

Bush was slow in responding to the poor folks down South left stranded in the storm, but he’s been quick to respond to his true constituency, “the haves and have-mores,” as he’s fond of calling them (and they are no doubt fond of being called). Bush himself has been called the CEO president, and like a good CEO he has delivered terrific profits to his shareholders (not the taxpayers, mind you, but his super-rich Republican patrons) and rewarded his executives, while stiffing the rest of us. None of this has been done on the sly—this administration has never been particularly subtle—and there’s no reason to expect Katrina, a human catastrophe, will warrant a new and different approach. In fact, the only difference between Katrina and that other human catastrophe, the war in Iraq, is that the president didn’t have to go to the trouble of floating false intelligence to whip up the latest storm. So much the better.

Because Bush really can’t be bothered. The truth is, watching the president reclining in an easy chair for a briefing on Hurricane Rita at Randolph Air Force Base last weekend, the very picture of perfect lassitude, I was reminded of his performance in the first of his presidential debates with John Kerry, where he struggled to stay awake, sighed, and stifled the occasional yawn. It’s past time to offer our bored CEO-in-chief his golden parachute, and send him back to Crawford, where he would be happier, and we would all be better off.

2005-09-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

Mere days into the latest natural catastrophe I began hearing about “Katrina fatigue”: a term meant to describe not the condition of hurricane victims, but that of their television audience, growing bored with the spectacle. The opening act was riveting, but the second has been overlong, stagy, and full of more bluster than the storm itself. Can you imagine staying for the third? Let’s sneak out during intermission, and go on a bender instead.

While the first act ended with a tortured chorus from the Superdome and heartbreaking arias from the rooftops of New Orleans, the second has culminated in a solemn recitative in a deserted Jackson Square. From the masses to The Man. From the struggle for life and limb, to the fight for political survival. But while the plot has taken a turn, the sets remain stunning. The lone, besieged protagonist in front of a hauntingly lit-up St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans was some of Karl Rove’s best work to date. Truly, he is Washington’s answer to Puccini. The atmospherics, tone and content of the set piece achieved, to the relief of us all, I’m sure, what Rove & Co. are known and loved for: a retreat from reality into formalist fantasy. Jackson Square was transformed into a stark, minimalist stage, emptied of any signs of the chaos leading up to and necessitating the president’s stirring soliloquy. Such expert stagecraft explains why the administration has put Rove in charge of the “recovery” effort. Whose recovery, exactly? You could be forgiven for asking.

If the setting was surreal, the speech itself approached the sublime. This president, ostensibly an advocate of “starving the beast” has truly created a monster: a bloated, pitiful giant incapable of assisting those in need at home or affecting positive change abroad. He has presided over the greatest expansion of government bureaucracy in the nation’s history, while simultaneously slashing the budget. We now have a government that serves at the pleasure of its corporate sponsors, as a go-between, funneling honest, hard-working Americans’ tax dollars to the wealthy. This is government’s raison d'être, after all, isn’t it? The Gulf Coast catastrophe left no question whom the government serves. With Katrina, as with the war in Iraq, you can bet Bush & Co. will find enterprising ways to make money from the misery of others.

Katrina: from tragedy to farce in three weeks flat. It’s true, as postmodern opera this latest disaster has been pretty much tapped out. It takes shockingly little time to suck the marrow out of human catastrophe these days. We are cataloguers by nature, and once we have put things in order, chosen a couple of iconic images, and decided on an interpretation that suits us, we’re ready to move on. Even though Mr. Rove’s “Masterpiece Theater Presents” was pure nonsense, we appreciate someone tidying things up for us. A few kind words from the president. Applause. Curtain. There will be another act, after intermission, but by then the theater will be nearly empty.

2005-09-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, that’s for sure. By now we have all heard the appalling comments Mama Bush made last week as she toured the Houston Astrodome surveying the sea of cots for Katrina’s refugees: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working [she chuckles here] very well for them.” Even England’s royals are held to a higher standard by the people and the press. Here in America, we don’t seem to mind the ruling class’s disdain for the rest of us. That we are so generous with our oblivious aristocrats is, frankly, baffling.

Some on the left would like to think that perhaps America’s patience with, not to mention indulgence of our royalty is finally wearing thin. After all, the middle class has been duped into fighting their wars, for which the poor have paid with their lives. And now along comes Katrina, exposing our enfant terrible-in-chief as a garden variety spoiled brat, and his playmates as mean, petty, and petulant. Appalled in their own right that anyone would suggest any of them should be held accountable for anything. No matter how hard you spin it, this bunch of apples is bad. It is as if we have abandoned our government to a gang of vicious children, as if Washington had become the evil island of William Golding’s 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies. And no, by the way, they don’t feel your pain.

But we get the government we deserve, somehow. Though most of our politicians on the national stage do not resemble or represent us, they may represent something we’re striving for: a society in which each is entitled to what he can grab, and accountable to no one. But then why were so many on the right appalled by the looting in New Orleans? After all, this has been going on in the capital for years now. But there’s a logic to it, I guess: the poor are accountable to the rich as servants to their masters, while the rich are accountable to no one. Isn’t this the natural order of things?

But it is not merely about class. We Americans have grown increasingly complacent about race. There is a curious acceptance of our de facto American Apartheid. There are inescapable correlations between race and poverty in the United States. No one is to blame and no one is accountable, of course. It’s the fault of the market, and we reassure ourselves that eventually the rising tide will lift all boats. Which is OK so long as you’ve got a boat. But the truth is, in rising waters, as we have seen, those without one drown. Still, we are dazzled by the gorgeous yachts and speedboats of our ruling class. Those of us in dinghies and rafts are just riding the tide, caught between our admiration for the rich and our pity for the ones treading water.

2005-09-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

Rapper Kanye West went off-script last Friday night. During a star-studded telethon for victims of Katrina, West went free-style, saying, among other things: “[America is set up] to help the poor, the black people, the less well-off as slow as possible,” and “George Bush doesn't care about black people.” NBC cut away as soon as their censors realized West had dumped their saccharine script, and immediately released a statement condemning his comments. Whether you agree with West or not, his rage was real, and representative of what many people watching this nightmare unfold have been feeling. Meanwhile, the administration drags its feet, feigning ignorance. Our own Commander-in-Chief lamely alleged: “I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.” Think again, Mr. President. No wonder there’s a lack of trust out there.

Understandably, Mr. Bush, himself, is rarely allowed to go off-script in public. It’s a tangled web, and unscripted comments often expose fissures in the official version of things. But it’s truly surprising his handlers have been so lackluster in their response to this latest crisis. All week they had the Commander-in-Chief muttering banalities. After a visit to the disaster area for his photo op, for instance, he once again stated the obvious as if it were revelatory: “I understand the devastation requires more than one day’s attention.” He was clearly happy it would take at least until the following Wednesday, so he’d have a good excuse to cancel his meeting with China’s President Hu Jintao (big yawn). Shocking as it is, it took his speech-writers a full week to come up with something nominally inspiring, like “we’ll once again show the world that the worst adversities bring out the best in America.” But by then it was too little, too late. The administration’s “compassionate conservatism” had (once again) been exposed as a sham.

Mr. Bush’s big idea is that the responsibility for society’s well-being belongs to the private sector. But then, why, exactly, do we need a government in the first place? Just to line the pockets of the top two percent, whose soon-to-be permanent tax cuts provided impetus for eviscerating FEMA’s budget? Don’t forget: funding for flood prevention was slashed by 80 per cent under Bush.

The media towed the official line at first. There were touching tales of children emptying their piggy banks for flood victims. Not to be outdone, corporations, seeing a massive PR opportunity, trumpeted their own contributions on the evening news. All well and good. But as much as we’d like to believe the glass is half-full, sometimes it’s necessary to acknowledge that for many among us, it’s empty. What Kanye West was getting at is that in America today, while the cup is overflowing for Bush & Co., shamefully, many are left with nothing at all. The government should be there for them, too. We don’t talk about that much. It’s not in the script. But maybe America would be a better place for all if more of us went off-script more often.

2005-08-29T07:47:00.000-07:00

I’ll admit that a lot of what Pat Robertson and his pals in The Christian Coalition profess to believe might not sound very Christian to the layperson, but my sources on the inside have uncovered a lost text from the Gospels that sheds new light on the religion of Reverend Robertson & Co. According to the text, unearthed in Robertson’s sock drawer, the following passage right after the Sermon on the Mount was somehow omitted, leading to two millennia of mistaken notions about Jesus’s true message:

“When Jesus came down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him. He ditched them, muttering ‘losers,’ and taking his disciples aside, said unto them, ‘all that BS about blessed this and blessed that and judge not lest ye be judged—forget about it—that’s for suckers. You’ll never get ahead in life thinking like that. Here’s what I really wanted to say. Now listen close.’

“The disciples pricked up their ears, and Jesus went on: “first of all, greed is good. Good for the economy, good for you, good for me. Binging, hoarding, cheating, conniving. Go for it. Any of those bleeding-heart liberals get in your way, remember: God is a Republican. So beat ‘em back. Tell ‘em, “get your own damn box!” And if they mouth off to you, cut out their tongues! And if they look at you funny, pluck out their eyes! If they’re the leader of an oil rich country, have special ops take ‘em out! It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than starting a war! And if somebody cries foul, you were a victim of bad intelligence! Remember: always the victim!’

“Jesus continued: ‘and that line about loving thy neighbor, and blabbidy bla. Good one, eh?’ The disciples nodded their appreciation. ‘Well, it blows both ways: hate your neighbor as yourself works just as good. And speaking of good, did I mention greed is good?’ The disciples grinned. ‘Yes, Lord,’ said Peter. ‘I always liked you, Peter,’ Jesus said. ‘I’m gonna call you The Rock.’ ‘Cool,’ said Peter. ‘Can I be called “Matty Mambo”?’ asked Matthew. ‘Sure,’ said Jesus. ‘I got dibs on Ace!’ said Andrew. ‘I wanna be called Queen Jaineba!’ cried Thaddeus. ‘Oh, Thad,’ said Jesus, rolling his eyes.

“Thomas cleared his throat. ‘But Lord, what about the, erm, poor?’ ‘Oh, them again?’ Jesus huffed. ‘Well, greed is good for them, too. In fact, if they were only a little better at being greedy, they’d be set. I mean, no one can be greedy for them. How’s that saying go? Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to rob a fisherman and he’s got sushi for life! So, go on out there and be robbers of fishermen! And remember: if all else fails, blame the Jews—oh, wait, I’m a Jew.’ Jesus knotted His brow in consternation. ‘Blame the gays and uppity women. Speaking of which: where is Mary Magdalene? I need my foot massage!’”

2005-08-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

Since September 11th, America, in the thrall of political opportunists and nutcase neoconservatives, has gone through the looking glass, where reality is created not by consensus, but by fiat. The Bush administration has not been shy or subtle with their psychotic break from reality, either. Condoleezza Rice stalks Europe dressed like Catwoman. Dick Cheney does his uncanny Dr. Strangelove imitation from an undisclosed safe place miles below the capital. And the boy in the bubble retreats to his Neverland ranch in Crawford for month-and-a-half-long vacations clearing brush while the nation’s sons and daughters are being blown to smithereens on the battlefield that is Iraq. And for what?

That’s what Cindy Sheehan wanted to know. And while the question should be easy enough to answer, it irks the right because they know it’s a taunt: the administration cannot answer it without admitting to a pattern of conscious deception and systematic dissimulation. But Iraq is not only about the administration’s bald lies. It is also very much about the nation’s willingness to believe them, or, if you prefer, our unwillingness to contravene them. The emperor clearly has no clothes, but we have all agreed up to now to ignore this inconvenient reality. All except Ms. Sheehan. But when reality by consensus clashes with reality by fiat, things can get ugly.

In answer to Sheehan’s outrageous, improper, and quite possibly seditious question the Neocons, who conned America into a desperate and costly real-life war based on imaginary threats, did not repeat the sinister words a senior advisor to Bush intoned to journalist Ron Suskind back in 2002: “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Cue evil laughter.) Not surprisingly, they did not deign to answer Ms. Sheehan at all. Instead they unleashed their attack dogs, who set to, chewing her up and spitting her out.

And Sheehan is an easy enough target: a mother bereft at the loss of her 24 year old son, Casey, and going through a divorce. She is openly emotional at times, too earnest for our ironic culture, full of self-righteous indignation that doesn’t play well on TV. She’s no polished politician, that’s for sure, despite the right’s insistence that she is a pawn of the “loony left”. Which, indeed, she has become, to a point. The Gold Star Families for Peace commercial starring Sheehan smacks of political opportunism. But whatever Cindy Sheehan’s take on politics, however off-base it might be in some respects, there is the undeniable reality of her son’s death. And the inability of this administration to address that reality, lest the one they’ve created out of whole cloth unravel.

The pioneering psychiatrist Karl Jaspers outlined three criteria for identifying delusional beliefs: certainty, incorrigibility (not changeable by proof to the contrary), and impossibility or falsity of content. Which pretty much sums up this administration’s policy portfolio. Time for a reality check.

2005-08-16T07:44:00.000-07:00

The death of Peter Jennings last week and the news that Dana Reeves has lung cancer brought me back to my own father’s death from the disease a little over a year ago. Like Jennings, my dad had been a smoker, but quit years ago. And like Jennings, by the time he was diagnosed, it was too late for a cure: from diagnoses to death was a mere six months. A blink of an eye in retrospect, but agonizing and seemingly endless at the time.

It was a lot to deal with for a career soldier like my dad. It was hard for him to imagine a battle he’d lost before he’d even begun to fight it, and sitting around waiting for death was not his style. So he decided on a course of chemotherapy that may or may not have extended his life by a few weeks at most, but caused a good deal of pain itself in the process. Up to the very end, he insisted he’d be cured, even though his doctor had stressed the treatment was purely palliative. For my father, treatment, even when it was not working to slow the cancer, and caused a host of other ills, was about fighting the good fight, and became a stand-in for hope. And hope in the face of an aggressive, debilitating, and ultimately fatal disease is a real dilemma for the terminally ill and their loved ones.

Towards the end we entered the home hospice program, which I credit with allowing my dad to die a good death. He spent his last weeks at home surrounded by the people he loved. Caring for him was the hardest thing any of us had ever done, but his death taught us a lot about love and loss, and courage and pain—in other words, about life.

Which came in handy when, only a few short weeks after my dad’s passing last April, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. If my father’s quiet courage in the face of his disease had inspired us, it was nothing compared to my mother’s mettle dealing with hers. A little over a year later, and she’s a survivor, a hero to her kids and grandkids, with her whole life ahead of her.

My admiration for my parents has grown immeasurably in the last two years. I think back on my dad’s last months, when I moved in to take on the role of caregiver, and it’s not the bouts of bitterness and despair that stick with me, but the (sometimes very black) humor, the hope, and the humanity. And the sense that dying is a part of life, and not disconnected from it, and that it’s important to cherish every last minute of our lives together, which home hospice helped us to do. Instead of alienating and isolating us from one another, my dad’s death—as good and gentle a death as was possible—was as much a gift as his life had been.

2005-08-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

Went to see the excellent documentary, “Murderball,” last weekend at Coolidge Corner. For a movie that cost very little to make, it was far more entertaining and affecting than any of the summer’s bajillion dollar blockbusters from Spielberg or Lucas, with their canned plots and two-dimensional heroes. Unflinchingly unsentimental, “Murderball” is the story of the US quadriplegic rugby team’s journey to the 2004 Paralympics in Athens. But it is an intensely personal film as well, following the lives of team members, who face the challenges of life with disabilities with courage, tenacity, and humor. And not a little rage, which is why the sport now called quadriplegic rugby was dubbed “murderball” in the first place.

One of the best things about the movie is its raw humanity, something Hollywood hasn’t delivered since the edgy, character-driven dramas of the ‘70s. If there is a culture war on, it is in large part a continuation of the old struggle between propriety and authenticity. In an era when “reality TV” seems faker than a cartoon like “The Simpsons,” when what used to be marks of gritty authenticity (tattoos, or a pair of well-worn Levis, for example, not to mention whole schools of thoughts or belief systems) have become symbols of bourgeois self-indulgence, it’s authenticity that’s taken a battering. In an age of “x-treme individualism” there is an eerie sameness underneath the superficial differences. What is admirable about someone like Mark Zupan, cocky, foul-mouthed spokesman for the US quadriplegic rugby team, is that intrinsic spark of unstoppable humanity, his rude, in-your-face insistence on remaining fully human, on being much more, not less than what he appears. The same goes for his teammates.

In one of the last scenes of the film, Team USA visits Walter Reed Army Medical Center for a demo murderball match for new quads and amputee soldiers fresh from Iraq. Most barely out of the teens, the reality of their condition has not fully set in. They look dazed and confused, shell-shocked, hesitant to embrace their rage, unaware in their hospital environs of the indifference of society.

As far as I know, there aren’t any veterans on Team USA. The plight of vets seems unique. According to the latest figures from The Department of Defense, in addition to the almost 1,900 US fatalities in Iraq so far, there have been over 13,000 wounded, many with lost limbs. Nations are generally lousy at providing for their permanently disabled vets. At best they’re given too little to live on, at worst they’re ignored altogether. Maybe it’s because they serve as too painful a reminder of the ongoing cost of wars that never seem to yield the peace and prosperity politicians promise. They’re mostly invisible to us. Aside from the occasional propaganda piece about what excellent care our new population of amputees is receiving and how well-adjusted they are, and rare inspirational tales of wounded soldiers struggling to get back to the battlefield, their rage, in this age of propriety, is strictly off-limits.

2005-08-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

This summer I went back to Budapest, my home through much of the nineties, for a vacation of sorts. It’s a beautiful, if still somewhat ramshackle city in the heart of Europe, where East meets West and North meets South, full of the same plain-spoken, hard-living scrappy sorts I knew from my own working-class childhood. But as I drove into the heart of Pest from the airport, I was dismayed that so little of the urban landscape had changed over the past half-decade. It seems the frantic pace of the early days of freedom from Soviet rule, the euphoria that accompanied the collapse of the Evil Empire, has given way to a new and just as corrosive cynicism when it comes to the promise of democracy.

In Central Europe, the go-go ‘90s brought a crash-course in “rogue capitalism”. There was the lightning-speed redistribution of wealth, the shock and awe of an invasion of multinationals, an explosion in sex-tourism fueled by the internet, new and seemingly endless possibilities for organized crime. Those highly-placed in the Communist Party in the previous regime were poised to seize state-owned industries and became overnight millionaires. By the time Victor Orban, a young politician who’d made his name speaking out against the Soviets, was installed as Prime Minister in 1998, the new government apparatus was already functioning as a well-oiled money-making machine, benefiting a handful of the population at the expense of the rest. Orban squandered countless opportunities to create a more transparent government and a more open society, and in 2002, the Socialists, led, ironically, by a former Soviet spy, were back in power, where they remain to this day. Call them what you will, the new bosses are basically the same as the old bosses.

That the old-school party faithful were able to adapt with such ease to a new ideology diametrically opposed to the one they had pledged absolute allegiance to for half a century to the detriment of their own nation and people, says a lot about a certain kind of human nature. There were those who flourished under the Soviets while most merely maintained. The interesting thing is that in large part, under the new regime, those flourishing and those maintaining are essentially the same as before (though maintaining is getting harder), and a new category has been added: those barely surviving at all. Homelessness, unknown in the previous era, is dramatically on the rise.

Having seen first-hand the devastation wrought by half a century of Soviet rule, I don’t harbor any illusions about state socialism. Unfortunately, the so-called “third-way” approach favored by Clinton and Blaire in the nineties, which argues for a middle-way between socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, has fallen out of favor for not providing adequate perks to the ruling class. As a result, the optimism of those early years has curdled, and cooperation and cohesion has given way to meanness and brutality in the endless struggle for lucre. Sound familiar? It’s the same old New World Order.

2005-07-25T07:41:00.000-07:00

George W. Bush has been, without a doubt, the luckiest American President in history. A character as bumbling as any ever played by the beloved Jimmy Stewart, apparently as earnest but without the charm, W. has stammered and stumbled through the almost complete transformation of the American economic and political landscape, blithely unaware, it seems, that for all but a percent or two of the population, most of whom happen to be his closest friends, the change is for the worse.

His winning streak began on 9/11, a day of loss for the nation. The American people demanded both revenge abroad and assurances of security at home, a patently impossible combination of just the sort politicians love: perfect for their theater of the absurd, rife with opportunities to primp and prance and pose, reciting soliloquies to freedom and democracy, while backstage all manner of skullduggery’s afoot. The audience will forgive them the shoddy production values, we all want so badly to suspend disbelief these days.

So we’ve spoiled them. W’s troupe has come to expect alligator tears or riotous laughter on cue, and standing ovations when they flash their handy “Mission Accomplished” sign, and for the most part we’ve delivered. But some of the scenes in this splatstick comedy aren’t so funny. With every roadside bomb, Abu Ghraib, or Valerie Plame, the protagonists look a little more like the villains and the plot threatens to unravel. In fact, the outing of Valerie Plame is the Überscandal that should bring down the house, not merely because it exposes W. and his administration as petty, vengeful neo-Nixonian super-scoundrels, but because the paper trail leads right up to the President himself, and will prove once and for all that he knowingly misled a traumatized nation into an unnecessary war that promises only to exacerbate the violence they fear.

Will the Plame affair turn into another Watergate, then, forcing the President to step down or face impeachment? The Democrats are licking their lips, but it’s highly unlikely. The fear that has led to this tolerance for bald corruption in exchange for lies about safety and security is more powerful than any outrage that might be generated by this latest and greatest of scandals. No, our charmed President will bumble through the rest of his term, blinking like a deer in the headlights, and scamper off to Crawford in the end to clear his beloved brush for the remainder of his devil-may-care days. And if, before he has a chance to exit stage right to wild applause, the plot should begin to unravel, one of his trusty stagehands will surely shout “fire!” creating a panic and clearing the house, but leaving the players onstage unscathed, to have the last laugh.

2005-07-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

I was sitting in a little restaurant in Back Bay the other day. At one point all of the patrons were talking on their cell phones simultaneously. There was a young couple sitting across the room, facing each other, both talking animatedly into their phones (to each other perhaps—who knows). Others were sitting alone doing it. At a nearby table, one visibly irritated man without a cell looked at me and blurted, “what?” It took me a moment to realize that he wasn't speaking to me, but into a tiny headset, repeating the mantra of cell phone abusers everywhere: “What? What? What did you say? What?” Especially on trains (remember, despite security concerns, the T will soon go wireless) and in crowded public places “what” seems to constitute close to 95% of cell phone conversation. After awhile it sounds like the quacking of agitated ducks. If, like Rip Van Winkle, I had just awoken from a ten-year nap, I’d have thought the world had gone barking mad.

So the new trend is to ditch the phone for a headset. We have come with startling speed to accept as perfectly ordinary people walking down the street, both hands free, hearing voices no one else hears and barking nonsense. This used to get you burnt at the stake, or in more genteel times a trip to a padded room where you could go quietly crazy in private. It takes the virtual into another dimension. Holding a phone at least gives the speaker some surrogate object, a prop, while with a headset he is somewhere completely virtual. He imagines himself into a space between here and there for which he needs no surrogate object. The man at the table was both/neither at the table and/nor not at the table, like Schrödinger’s cat with wifi. Should he be quizzed in a week’s time about his actual whereabouts during the conversation, my guess is he would have no earthly idea. And real people all around him are either unseen, or obstacles. Reality becomes an irritant, an inconvenience at best, the white noise to be tuned out. That’s the thing: the colonization of real space by the virtual seems to always degrade the former. After all, the Nowhere of the latter can be reached from nearly anywhere.

But what is most aggravating about cell phones is that they allow the user to constantly reassert the priorities of self over that of the nameless, faceless mass of humanity around him. There is in a public space a certain rhapsody, a communion of souls, which is as important, I think, for developing the sense of empathy necessary to function and enjoy life in society as the sense of self-reliance. The shrill of mobiles ringing on the metro, and the shrill of the one-sided conversation we are so often then assaulted with smacks of protest against our existence, that is, the existence of a we in which we lose for a happy moment our very selves.

2005-07-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

The celebrity reality show craze has already crossed over into politics, and I’m not talking about C-Span. Last year millionaire Mitch Daniel, running for governor of Indiana, aired his own reality show. Hand -held cameras followed him around the state as he visited Hoosier hamlets far and wide, kissing babies and pressing the flesh. You could watch the orgy online anytime, or catch the hour-long TV version once a week. Daniels, who had no prior experience in elected office, made minced meat of the incumbent.

But ordinarily celebrity reality shows are a last ditch attempt to resuscitate a fading star’s career: check out “Chasing Farrah,” “Being Bobby Brown,” or “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic.” What unites these cyber-age freakshows is not only their second-rate celebrities, but that indomitable spirit that has swept America in recent years: making a virtue of failure and futility. This is the true nexus between celebrity and politics in America today.

Here in our home state, we may not be able to claim any stars of the Whitney or Britney caliber, but we do have Mittney, who is poised to bust a move on the national stage. Like his B-list celebrity counterparts in the reality TV business he has become adept at capitalizing on his failures in office, and hopes to parlay them into a big victory in 2008. I fully expect to see him at the dais at the next Republican National Convention in a tight bodice complete with cone bra and tassels, Bill Frist and Trent Lott his scantily clad back-ups, dirty-dancing to a sexed-up medley of Mormon hymns.

Golly, but politicians sure love a good old-fashioned fete. Aside from conventions, the next best thing to a fund-raiser is a terror attack. You can be sure Mittney kicked into high gear when terrorists struck London last week. The way politicians have so successfully exploited 9/11 for their own ends, it kind of makes you wonder whose side the terrorists are on. The London attack was a freebee for Mittney, who, playing state paterfamilias, announced a stepped-up (or at least more visible, and certainly temporary) police presence on the T, though there was no greater threat than usual. Late Sunday night on my way home from the movies, there were more MBTA police than passengers in the subway. Aside from feeling ever-so-safe with the additional security, riders were treated, every five minutes, to the soothing sound of Mittney’s smash hit, “Terror Attacks Is Whack.” His PSA for TransitWatch repeated ad nauseam on the T’s public address system.

Mittney has spent over $1.5 million so far this year on a publicity blitz designed to boost his national name recognition. He’s not really a governor, but he plays one on TV. He doesn’t care if it’s good press or bad press he gets, so long as his voice is in your ear and his name is on your tongue. Like Whitney and Britney, he may be washed-up, but at least you know his name.

2005-07-04T07:36:00.000-07:00

Imagine an era when the literary critic Lionel Trilling could write: “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition…. [T]here are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” That’s from his 1950 collection of essays, “The Liberal Imagination.” Half a century later and what imagination liberals may have had has all but dried up. They’ve been relegated to waiting for conservatives (whose “impulses” Trilling likened to “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas”) to get tired and give up. Even if it takes another half century. With one Supreme Court Justice retiring and another sure to follow in the coming months, it may well be longer.

There’s no arguing there’s a lot wrong with the right, but these days the left is the province of “irritable mental gestures” that stand in for ideas. Remember ABB—Anybody But Bush? Pretty inspiring, eh? Part of the problem is that the left takes a lot for granted, and though loath to admit it, shares with the radical right an often unexamined teleology: the idea that history is an inexorable progression towards an end. While the right is obsessed with a cataclysmic final judgment followed by a universe in which nothing ever changes, the left tends towards a utopianism sans the sword: a world in which everyone’s equal, racial and class disparity are vanquished, and we all live in perfect harmony, amen. Counterintuitive as it is, given finite resources and competing interests, many on the left seem to believe this utopia is inevitable, even imminent. A foregone conclusion. If only Bush had been defeated we’d be halfway there by now!

The problem is, as we are forever finding out, Democracy offers no such final resting place. Far from promising to dissolve dispute it opens the door to ever more interests fighting over ever fewer resources. Democracy is the one form of government that encourages endless dispute. It’s a lot of work. And the work is never finished. The ground rules are about the only things that don’t change—in fact, they were written precisely to accommodate change. The democratic spirit is actually a habit of mind that must be learned and practiced by each new generation, and taught to the next so that they can negotiate for themselves change in their time. It requires trust—in each other, and in the future.

There is nothing inherently liberal or conservative about many of the issues we are debating these days: if our politics were truly secular, a woman’s right to choose and gay marriage, two so-called “wedge” issues, could easily cross party lines. The failure to articulate that the struggle is not between liberals and conservatives in a democratic society but between the democratic process itself and the totalitarian will to power is only the most glaring evidence of complacency among today’s Democrats. Now it looks like we’ll all be paying for their complacency for at least the next half-century.

2005-06-23T07:34:00.000-07:00

As Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz wrote in his splendid book, “The Double Flame”: politics is the great enemy of love. In the warmer months (and in warmer climes in general) love is ascendant. Politics is winter sport. We could not be so cynical all year round. We’d turn into reptiles. In the summertime we don't want to hear about the dark machinations of those supercreeps in the capital. Summer's here, where’s the beach? It’s not hard to resist the encroachment of the political into every part of our lives when it’s 90° in the shade.

There is something Grimms’ Tale enchanting about our reactions to the change of seasons. The maiden who’s fallen under the sorcerer’s spell awakened by a prince’s (or princess’s) kiss. Particularly up North, after an always brutal winter, the spring cycle seems like a magnificent discovery, something utterly new and marvelous, a rebirth. Winter is long, dark, epic, and we forget, burrowed deep in our holes, curled up in a ball, that love is what we live for. In all its various and sundry uncontainable forms. It almost makes the cruel winters here worthwhile, just for that moment of awakening.

The tyranny of politics and how to escape it defined the last century. A great book about the fatal opposition of politics and love is, of course, Pasternak's “Doctor Zsivago.” What makes Yuri Zsivago such a compelling figure is his defiant and ultimately doomed choice of love over politics in a totalitarian society where politics has taken over every aspect of life, where there is no unmapped private, inner place. That's what totalitarianism is about, after all: the false order of politics we impose on the chaos of human feeling, of love. Orwell explored the same territory in “1984.”

Both the extreme left and right have totalitarian tendencies, and never before have they been equipped with such perfect means to realize them as they are today. But human nature is the weed in their perfectly manicured gardens, and it can’t be stamped out, thank the gods. It keeps cropping up. The winter might be long, but once the thaw comes, all hell breaks loose. In winter politics is an end in itself. In summer it’s but an imperfect means to the pursuit of happiness.

Nowadays there’s a good deal of guilt attached to the idea of abandoning politics for love. But I think the guilt is a ruse. The big factor is fear. We are much more comfortable in our abstract world with the cynical predictability of politics. Plus we have a lot to lose when we open ourselves to love. Because love is by its very nature catastrophic, the Shiva of emotions, whether eros, agape, or philia. Politics divides, love unites to conquer. One is forever turning freedom to slavery, the other slavery to freedom. Of course, sometimes they’re hard to tell apart. A lot depends on the weather.

2005-06-15T07:32:00.000-07:00

Last week there was a great hue and cry over supposedly controversial comments made by Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee. The outrage was mostly from members of his own party, of course. If the GOP is like a pack of rabid dogs, the Democrats, with their constant in-fighting and back-biting, are a bunch of conniving cats.

The controversy? Dr. Dean had had the outright audacity to go on live TV and call House majority leader Tom DeLay a crook, which he is; the GOP a “white, Christian party,” which it is; and the Republicans a bunch of bums who “had never made an honest living in their lives,” which they are. Yawn. Is this what passes for news these days?

Of course, what’s really offensive to those in Dr. Dean’s pretty much equally crooked, white, Christian, deadbeat party is that he had the gall to utter the obvious. In this faith-based age of the emperor’s dazzling new clothes, we don’t like it when someone comes along and points to the emperor’s bare butt. It offends our delicate sensibilities, you see.

That Democrats are worried about how actually uttering obvious truths will hurt their chances shows just how deep the rot is. Propriety apparently trumps trivialities like the suspension of the Geneva Conventions. I mean, here we are dealing with the lyingest administration in memory. That yet more new documents have shown knowingly twisted intelligence to whip up a very costly quagmire in Iraq. That has consciously employed fake journalists like Jeff Gannon for White House press conferences, and has admitted to paying real ones like Armstrong Williams with taxpayers’ money to spread lies about its failed education policies. Last week a pattern of deception by White House Council on Environmental Quality Philip A. Cooney, a former oil industry lobbyist, came to light. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Obviously—and that is the key word here—this parade of lies in every arena of public policy is not an unlikely series of coincidences, but a full-blown modus operandi.

Where’s the outrage, you ask? Well, outrage is usually reserved for things that somehow shock us. But when you’re living in a culture of lies, you become inured to lying—it’s telling the truth that causes outrage. And you know the truth must be pretty bad if people are willing to believe—actually insist on believing the utter malarkey politicians of all stripes and the media—liberal, conservative, whatever—have been serving up for the past five years.

Why are so many in the Democratic leadership more vocal in criticizing Dr. Dean for telling the truth than in criticizing the administration for its relentless campaign of lies? I may be risking stating the obvious myself here: because they, too, are part of the culture of lies.

2005-06-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

Andrea Kaiser and her neighbors in Dorchester have a dream: to build a community center that will truly serve the needs of the youth in a part of Boston where a hand up at the right time could make all the difference in a kid’s life. But despite detailed plans, cooperation with the City of Boston, and extensive fundraising, the new Bird Street Community Center (birdstreet.org) remains just that: a dream.

The Bird Street Community Center has actually been around for 27 years, serving Dorchester in a number of ways, but in the main providing a solid foundation for youth, a safe and affirming place in a sometimes hostile city in our age of sink-or-swim. Bird Street provides kids not only with the possibility to dream big, but with the practical skills and the confidence to turn those dreams into reality.

According to Ms. Kaiser, the Executive Director, Bird Street Community Center faces two big challenges today. First to its current programs: one of the most important services Bird Street provides is job training and placement for high-risk youth. Funding for the program is tight, of course, and a shortfall could mean it would have to be cut by as much as 50%. The other challenge is to the center’s future: while the organization has raised over $6 million to date for the construction of the much-needed new facility, it must come up with the remaining $4.8 million by December. A tall order.

There’s something of a ripple effect in society, so what happens in Dorchester doesn’t necessarily stay in Dorchester. When a kid can’t get skills training, can’t land a decent job, and eventually succumbs to despair, drugs, or a life of crime, it has ramifications for all of us. We have grown accustomed in these last decades to what the Bush Administration has dubbed the “ownership society,” a society whose mantra is “mine, mine, mine”. We need to get back to the bigger challenge of The Great Society, where the key word is “ours”. A world of “mine” is a war of all against all. Without “ours” there really is no civil society to speak of.

It has been a swift, precipitous drop from the idea of The Great Society of the Johnson era to that of the Hate Society we’re living in now, from the waging a war on poverty to our current war on the poor. From daring to believe in the American dream to sowing the seeds of the American nightmare in less than half a century. Sadly Americans have not flinched at shelling out nearly $200 billion and counting for a sham war a world away, while good people trying hard to build a better future here at home have to go jonesing for peanuts in the face of general indifference.

Still, Andrea Kaiser and her community aren’t giving up on their American dream. In fact, they’re in the audacious business of encouraging others to dream big, too. Nowadays that’s downright un-American.

2005-06-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that as for TV, the trashier the better. My dream day begins with “Elimidate,” and “Celebrity Justice” followed by “Springer,” and back-to-back “Judge Judy”s. My afternoon would have to include “Style Court,” “Craft Corner Death Match” and “The Dog Whisperer.” But evenings call for more serious fare. That’s where PBS comes in.

I get the feeling that for a lot of people, myself included, PBS is kind of like a cultural Arctic Wildlife Refuge—a pristine and magnificent place we may never actually visit—or rarely—but it’s good to know it’s there. PBS is one of the few organizations I contribute to, albeit a modest amount, but their seemingly endless pledge drives (they say it happens only once a year, but it seems to last ten months) keep me away a lot of the time, and the fact that commercials—yes, actual commercials—have crept into their programming rankles me on principle.

The lion’s share of adult programming on public television is downright anodyne. Like the superabundance of home improvement shows totally indistinguishable from anything on commercial television. You’ve got your cooking shows and your travel guides. And fluff like “Antiques Roadshow.” You have to go deep into the heart of this cultural refuge to get past the cultural refuse. But there are some rare, exotic creatures in there.

One such national treasure is Bill Moyers. I have always found his take on things thought-provoking. He is one of the last of a nearly extinct breed of journalists and public thinkers: an unflinchingly honest, reasoned and humanistic voice in what’s become an increasingly hysterical national shouting match. Moyers doesn’t strike me as an ideologue. He is something much more dangerous in the current cultural climate: a free thinker.

With the ascendancy of the GOP apparatchiks in every sector of society, you knew it couldn’t be long before a non-party member like Moyers came under sustained assault. The Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, has launched an old-fashioned Soviet-style intimidation campaign against any and all in the media who refuse to tow the party line. Moyers won’t back down, but he may soon be purged from the PBS playlist, replaced by such complete zeros as Tucker Carlson, whose new PBS show “Unfiltered” (the title an unclever wink to the party faithful), offers absolutely no insight into the news. A trained parrot could host his show.

Every war is ultimately a war for resources, and the present culture war is no different. We lend value to things in great part by withholding them from others. This is where cut-throat capitalism and democracy come to loggerheads. The right has come to the realization that while knowledge is power, withholding knowledge is, too. This is clear in their stance on everything from evolution and sex ed to the War in Iraq. PBS is next. And a PBS without Moyers is like an Arctice Wildlife Refuge riddled with oil wells: no refuge at all.

2005-05-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

I was in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago with my buddy D., who’d dragged me along to a birthday party in a cozy little gazillion dollar penthouse with a fabulous view of the backs of buildings with views of Central Park. A gazillion ain’t what it used to be. A view of the actual park will cost you at least a quadruple bijillion gazillion (roughly a googolplex). Even for the filthy rich, there are degrees of filth.

Penthouse reality (even the mere gazillion dollar variety) bears little resemblance to the life at street-level I’ve always known and rather loathed, truth be known, full of lopsided, self-consciously quirky, often unintentionally grotesque people who can't afford their own cigarettes, and who think of their lives as, at best would-be no-budget indie films, at worst some unwatchable pomo alt-funk version of Fear Factor. Here on the umpteenth floor amongst the glitterati it was more brutal, less amusing. But the drinks were on the house.

After kindly fetching me my third, D. smiled and said, “not so bad after all, eh?” Keep ‘em coming, I told him. After three drinks I didn’t hate everyone in the room anymore, but I still disliked the vast majority intensely. D. looked at me with a mixture of mild surprise and pity. “Mike,” he said, “you’re having rich rage.”

Suddenly I felt a flush of shame come over me. I had to admit I was on the verge. And it’s not the first time I’ve noticed this shameful creeping wealthism in me. Sometimes while I'm sitting on the Orange Line T on my way home from my slave-wage day job, my eye rests dreamily on one of those Mohegan Sun ads plastered all over the trains. You know the ones: the Duchess of Oysterland and her all-white entourage. I mean, where am I? South Africa circa 1979? Is this the express to Sun City? Miss Locked-and-loaded Buying Machine, Mr. A-Game, and the lady with the vibrating phone who only answers to “the noble touch of heated stones.” Do these people ride the T? Or is the point just to rub the rest of our noses in it?

I tried in vain to defend myself against charges of rich rage. After all, some of my best friends are rich, or at least upper middle class. D. wasn’t having it. “It’s not their fault,” he said. “They were born that way.” I tried political rhetoric, telling D.: “History calls those who fight for the poor heroes. Those who fight for the rich are mercenaries.” But it sounds so 1848. I mean, you can only stay angry at the rich for so long. Paris Hilton’s not really hurting anyone, is she?

Yes, the rich do suffer unduly from the burden of their status. And I’ve been guilty on occasion of prejudice against them. And though it pains me to admit it, while greed is often considered the worst of the seven sins, envy comes in a close second.

2005-05-16T07:25:00.000-07:00

It has been a year now since the Goodridge decision legalized gay marriage in Massachusetts, and the sky has yet to fall. The aftermath of the SJC ruling has not been particularly newsworthy, if you want to know the truth. What’s followed in its wake is the very boring business of gay couples going about their married lives much as straight couples do. In fact, legalization has benefited the zealots on the right who’ve used it to reenergize their unholy jihad much more than it has the relatively modest number of gays and lesbians who have taken advantage of the opportunity to marry.

Lest we forget, the latest round of hysterical cries of “judicial activism!” began with the SJC’s decision, growing steadily more shrill through the Terri Shialvo fiasco, and culminating in the scorched-earth move on the part of Republicans to ban filibusters, which comes to a vote this week. Make no mistake, these issues are all connected, part of an agenda infinitely more insidious and damaging to democracy than anything gays could dream up. After all, the so-called gay agenda amounts to a bid to claim modest rights, and an obvious desire to take on the middle class responsibilities that come with them. It is not remotely radical. It is, in fact, downright old-fashioned and conservative. The religious radicals may be right that we live in an increasingly decadent society, but they, and not gays, are living proof of it.

For the Republicans going along with the radical wing of their party, the “nuclear option” is power politics at its boldest. You may not be gay, but it would be a mistake to assume that your personal freedoms are guaranteed because you’re not. Sure, the right believes in individual freedom: its own. Furthermore, this freedom seems to be the kind that necessitates the repeal of everyone else’s. Rest assured, you’re next.

That Democrats can’t seem to find their focus fighting such a truly un-American foe is just plain pathetic, but our cultural moment is one of rabid radicals versus milquetoast moderates. Since their 2004 defeat, the Democrats have whined, cringed, and cowered, many arguing that pandering to the right is the only way to prevail in the next election. Do this, and the terrorists win. Another brilliant strategy: wait for the right to implode. It will, but how many lives will be ruined by then?

The Democrats could learn a thing or two from the gay agenda: stick to your guns, and have faith in the strength of an open society. Sure, you’ll win some and lose some, but if the future is a free and open one, history will vindicate you. This is the real dilemma of the left: the goal of greater freedom for all is actually very moderate, requiring patience, tolerance, and trust, not vitriol, suspicion and scapegoating. It’s radical to the right precisely because the right is radical.

2005-05-10T07:24:00.000-07:00

Kids these days! At 35, I find myself saying this more often than I would like. I don’t feel particularly old, but when I talk to your average twenty-something, and try to explain life before the internet and ipod, I suddenly feel very old indeed. Even my 5 year old nephew refuses to play X-Box with me, because he’s so far advanced and I just don’t have the skills. He’s nice about it, but firm. I challenge him to a game of Pong. We’ll see who’s got the skills then, little man! He scoffs at me without taking his eyes of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” “Leave me alone,” he says, “can’t you see I’m busy beating this crack whore over the head with a crowbar ?”

It sometimes seems to me that mine may be the last American generation to be ambivalent about new technologies. We at least have early memories of the late sixties and seventies, that quaint and innocent era before 24 hour cable news, personal computers, X-box, and the internet. When the world was wider. Before it shrank to the size of a village. Kids today were born and raised global villagers.

I have always been a bit of a Luddite, often hostile toward and always late to embrace new technologies. I remember the moment I realized we were entering a brave new world of frightening abstractions. I was a college sophomore when the card catalogues at my university were dismantled, removed, and replaced by computers. A room the size of a city block was emptied out entirely over a summer. It seemed significant, and sinister to me at the time. It seemed to forebode a day when libraries themselves would disappear, and the whole of human knowledge, like the famed Royal Library of Alexandria, would go up in smoke.

Kids today have no such fear. They’ve grown up in a pumped-up, maxed-out media-saturated environment, with the whole of human knowledge at their fingertips. According to a fascinating new study by The Henry Kaiser Family Foundation called “Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 year olds” they are master multi-taskers, spending an average of almost six and a half hours a day with media. That’s over forty hours a week, a full-time job. And given that much of the time youth are using media, they are multi-tasking, they’re actually cramming 8.5 hours of media into those daily 6.5 hours. A valuable skill, to be sure, but the ability to focus on a single, simple task is waning.

The study assures us that kids are still perfectly happy, which is frankly hard for those of us nostalgic for the days of Pong to believe. I’m probably not too old to change my ways, improve my skills, but I don’t know if I’m ready to give up the pure and simple geometric pleasures of Pong for the still elusive high of chasing down and beating up on virtual crack whores with a bloody crowbar.

2005-05-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

In an editorial in the New York Times last week Bob Dole asked rhetorically if what he called the Democratic abuse of the filibuster was “what the framers intended,” as if the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were handed down to us like the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai. But these are not mystical (or mythical) documents, and the founders were not a cabal of high priests laying down a set of dogmas and dietary codes to follow to get into the kingdom of heaven. The Constitution is not a set of religious dogmas; it’s a set of guidelines to guard against them.

Politicians and judges of a certain stripe, usually on the right, seem to think of the Constitution as a sacred fetish to be worshipped in fear and awe. But it has always been, and was always meant to be a supremely practical, living document. It has been amended 27 times, after all. The reason it’s been replicated all over the world is that it carries one mind-blowing and ever more liberally applied assumption: that we, the people—not some monarch, not a Pope—control our collective destiny.

“What the founders intended” has the ring of incantation, not surprising as it is mostly heard from representatives of the party of monarchists and theocrats. It makes sense coming from self-professed “originalist” Antonin Scalia, who may be the next American pope, or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, whichever slot opens up first. Originalists and Strict Constructionists are cut from the same cloth as Biblical fundamentalists, whose interpretation of their text is equally specious, and brimming with hubris. Neither seek the truth, but by pretending special insight into the minds of the makers, hope to gain or maintain power, pure and simple.

The founders’ world was one without electricity, TVs or automobiles, not to mention internet porn, gene therapy, or feeding tubes. In 1776 the population of the colonies was about 2.5 million. The colonists could not have anticipated much of what we take for granted today. The beauty of the Constitution is that they didn’t need to. The assumptions undergirding the law, the truths we hold to be self-evident, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, are there to point us in the direction of liberty. But it’s up to each generation to define liberty for itself. Should what the founders intended when they spoke of “all men” be strictly adhered to today? How would they have looked upon the suffragettes? Or the civil rights movement? They may very well have been appalled. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter. We are not living in their world, but they wrote a document that can live in ours.

We don’t owe fealty to the past, we owe allegiance to the future. Our forefathers clearly recognized this. But you wouldn’t expect the current batch of end-timers running the show in Washington to get that that’s really what the founders intended.

2005-04-25T07:18:00.000-07:00

Last week was a good week for gluttony and greed in America. First off, a study by the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that risk of death for overweight people was actually lower than for those whose weight was so-called “normal”. Ha ha! Super-size me, baby!

So fat is the new black. While the news comes as a relief to roughly half of the American public dying to ditch the Atkins diet, the study did not find that the quality of life was better, or the risk of disability, disease, or depression was lower for people currently considered overweight but not obese, just the risk of death. But that’s OK. As everyone knows, American life is defined wholly by quantity. It’s a numbers game. As those in favor of the indefinite continuation of a certain brain-dead woman’s so-called life recently argued, fifteen years in a persistent vegetative state is better than none. This apparently applies to couch potatoes, too.

Better red than dead, right? Yes, the media’s spinning the battle of the bulge as yet another broadside in The War of Red and Blue. Weighing in on the right, Tucker Carlson (who’s looking paunchy) welcomed the news as more evidence that rail-thin liberal elites are out of step with real, rotund Americans. Liberals’ skeletal figures are part and parcel of their Culture of Death. Bony babe Ann Coulter’s been put on notice: pack on the pounds or be banished from the Red Brigade, comrade

Even The New York Times’ David Brooks revealed he has felt passively persecuted by healthy Americans, whose offensive habits, including regular exercise and eating salads in public, he described as “condescending.” The only reason I, for one, go to the gym is to feel superior flexing my washboard abs at flabby arch-conservatives. I’m not doing it for my health. Every salad I eat is an accusation. Republican reaction to the CDC report is another instance of the right’s bizarre, raging persecution complex.

Greedwise, Congress has finally approved drilling in the Arctic reserve Yee-haw Never mind that the amount of recoverable oil could easily be offset by a return to fuel-efficient automobiles. Hybrids are not only feasible, they are actually on the roads. But we know where the Bush administration’s priorities are: tax incentives for chuckleheads who think a trip to the mall in their Sherman tank is cool.

I think it’s a good thing to ease up a little on the weight issue, broaden the scope of “normal”. But a striking trend toward obesity is real. We live in a binge culture. Psychologists speculate that binging is an attempt to compensate for a perceived lack, or a reaction to trauma. SUVS got bigger in the wake of 9/11, and we went to war for oil rather than seek energy alternatives, or curb consumption. The question is: do we really want to be a sad, fat nation in denial?

2005-04-18T07:16:00.000-07:00

I've never liked the term “homophobia.” The gay community has sometimes used it to cry wolf, it seems. But one instance in which it’s indisputably accurate is the U.S. Military’s failed “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, which has wrecked the careers of 10,000 honorable men and women, cost taxpayers upwards of $200 million, and made America decidedly less secure in this age of terror. Now that it’s being given a second look, a new round of fear-mongering by a minority of vocal proponents of a gay ban has begun.

A majority of Americans, including those in the military, believe it’s time to put “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to rest, and allow gay servicemen and women to serve without intimidation. Despite what the cowards on Capitol Hill say, this is not a liberal versus conservative issue. Like much of the current political debate, it’s between a few rabid hypocrites, panderers, and bigots and, well, the rest of us.

Those in favor of the ban have little factual data to back up their apocalyptic claims, only some hysterical notions about gay sexuality. A prime example: Lieutenant Colonel Robert McGinnis, an oft-quoted, virulent opponent of gays in the military, and a textbook homophobe, bizarrely obsessed with gay sexuality. If there is a scenario where hot man-on-man action could possibly take place, he has imagined it in great detail, and then labeled it a threat. Methinks the Colonel doth protest too much.

McGinnis is embarrassing proof that homophobia is really less about the sexuality of others than it is about the homophobe’s. Sigmund Freud coined the term to describe heterosexuals’ “vigorous counter-attitudes” toward homosexuality, usually based on their own homosexual feelings. Freud’s hypothesis has been tested scientifically, by Dr. Henry Adams of the University of Georgia for one, who found that, indeed, self-professed homophobes are much more likely to be aroused by male homosexual erotic stimuli than their more or less indifferent hetero counterparts.

Homophobes are always at the center of their sex scenarios, of course, being looked at, longed for and lusted after constantly by other men. It must be wonderful. The problem is it’s all in their heads. Their fantasies of being the object of male desire assume, erroneously as it turns out, that gay men are all appetite and no taste. Gay desire is no more or less indiscriminate than straight desire. Gays, like straights, can engage with others nonsexually, and behave professionally on the job.

It can be embarrassing, when self-professed heterosexuals become obsessed with their fantasy version of the glorious hypersexual world of gays. Oh, would that it were even a fraction as glamorous as they imagine it to be. Alas, it’s not all that different from the straight life. The question really is, does protecting a tiny minority of insecure homophobes with wild fantasies about what might happen if they drop the soap in the barracks shower merit the repression of respectable men and women who are minding their own business and doing their jobs?

2005-04-12T07:14:00.000-07:00

“If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name,” Woody Allen once said, “he’d never stop throwing up.” Whether it’s merely the pendulum swinging or the aftermath of premillennial tension, everybody these days seems to be doing something in the name of God.

The media has jumped on the bandwagon with religious pornography like the Terri Schiavo melodrama and the death of Pope John Paul II. Spectacles like these bring the media whores and hypocrites out in droves. Hypocrisy is one of those things, like sex and death, that is both infinitely banal and utterly fascinating. And one thing’s for sure: we live in an era fascinated more than any other by the banal.

As for porn, next week NBC will treat its culture-of-lies niche audience to an adaptation of Tim LeHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ best-selling “Left Behind” books with a miniseries called “Revelations,” fanning the flames of radicalism on the religious right, and further mainstreaming their noxious, crackpot views. Jesus is dry-heaving as we speak.

If you really want to understand what’s going on in the reddest parts of red America (and you’d be forgiven for not wanting to), the “Left Behind” books will show you in graphic, gory detail, and tediously purple prose. The series is the latest version of a centuries-old concept called “the Abominable Fancy”: the idea that the chief amusement of the saved will be the suffering of the damned. Those who subscribe believe in a Heaven hardly distinguishable from an episode of “Jerry Springer.” Or if you prefer, an endless night in Abu Ghraib prison. In other words, it’s a version of Heaven that looks to most sensible folks uncannily like Hell.

If you want to see the real-life poster boy for the Abominable Fancy of the radical religious right, his name is Eric Robert Rudolph, and last week he struck a plea bargain that will allow him to avoid the death penalty, something he was more than willing to inflict on others on several occasions in the 1990s. A self-ordained soldier in the “Army of God,”in addition to the ‘96 Olympic bombing, this homegrown terrorist’s resume includes family planning clinics and a gay club in Atlanta. His handiwork left two dead and hundreds maimed for life.

Rudolph is just the kind of guy LeHaye and Jenkins’ bogus right-wing Jesus would love to have as a soldier in his Apocalyptic Army: a cold-blooded murderer using religion to justify his own evil impulses, and a coward who hates life with a passion but fears death even more. And no wonder. What kind of paradise are these self-righteous phonies preparing for? One without mercy, hope, or love. One in which the petty and vindictive, the nutjobs and pschopaths get the pleasure of seeing their every little revenge fantasy acted out on a giant IMAX in the sky.

Mmm, sounds like fun. Don’t forget the popcorn. But please, leave me behind.

2005-04-04T07:12:00.000-07:00

Govern-not Mitt Romney wants red states to know he has a conscience. And he’s voting it. Eager to pander to his imaginary out-of-state political base, he has taken a brave symbolic stand against paraplegics, sufferers of Parkinsons, and medical science in his home state, by promising to veto a bill that flew through the legislature allowing stem cell research in Massachusetts. Romney's veto will have no practical effect, but it’s another way for him to make national headlines, his chief purpose in office.

Romney is a legend in his own mind. Politically speaking he is not particularly well-liked by anyone, even his supposed constituency. This is not terribly unusual for a politician, but there is a tipping point. In politics, shameless self-promotion, in order to be effective, should be offset by at least the appearance of public service. When it is not, the results can be, well, embarrassing, as they were in the last election, where Romney’s campaigning was a real liability to his party.

It’s pretty clear that Romney is about as fond of his in-state public as it is of him. And he wants out-of-staters to know it. He has been campaigning abroad by dissing his home state, apparently in the hopes of winning his party’s nomination for president in 2008. He’s gotten this far on those ‘70s soap star looks, but if he wants to play in the big leagues he’ll need a makeover, at the very least. Unfortunately, he’s alienated all the queer eyes in Massachusetts, wooing them locally and bashing them in the national press. His flip-flopping on women’s issues and gay rights makes John Kerry look like a preschool tumbler. His record on the economy is less than stellar.

Wherever Romney goes from here, he will have to run on his failures, pleading powerlessness against economic, political, and social forces beyond his control. He believes he can parlay defeat into victory on the national stage, where, if recent history is any indication, incompetence is not a problem. Like Bush, Kerry, and Kennedy, Romney is himself the privileged son of a politician, and an ivy league grad. He is following the natural course of the patrician class of this new gilded age. He has shown little interest in the welfare of Massachusetts, but a keen interest in self-promotion, playing bait and switch with hot-button issues, and exploiting them for what he sees as his birthright: a shot at the White House. His motto could be: “Ask not what your governor can do for his state, but what your state can do for her governor.”

We get the politicians we deserve, and there may be a lesson in this for all of us. If we want real leaders we should stop rewarding over-groping aristocrats with delusions of grandeur, and look to more vibrant segments of an ethnically and economically diverse population for men and women who truly want to govern, not simply pursue their personal ambitions at the cost of the governed.

2005-03-30T07:09:00.000-08:00

With the media swarm around Terri Schiavo, we’ve been hearing a lot about one of President Bush’s much-vaunted “core values”: his “Culture of Life.” There is a certain irony, to put it mildly, in a self-proclaimed born-again Christian who, in the years since he was saved, has presided over more executions than any governor in recent history, one of which was that of a severely retarded man. And who, as President, has launched a war based on dubious intelligence that has claimed over 1,500 American lives, and no fewer than 17,000 Iraqis’. And who has actively sought ways to undermine the Geneva Conventions. Whose administration condones and currently outsources the torture of detainees.

But it has a nice ring to it, this political catchphrase “The Culture of Life,” and that’s what matters, isn’t it? Bush and his people don’t inhabit our humdrum “reality-based” world. They live in that rarified faith-based realm, where neocons create reality for the rest of us by fiat. If Bush says it’s a Culture of Life, well then, it must be, right? And while we’re at it, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength, according to this new doubleplus goodthink.

Yes, there are some inconvenient facts to be dealt with, but faith can move mountains, so what’s a fact or two? Still for you reality-based readers, here’s a random few: there’s the racial disparity in health care coverage that, according to a recent study headed by former Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher, accounts for over 80,000 African American deaths per year.

Or take access to condoms in vulnerable populations. AIDS is on the rise again, but forget about the government funding education or prevention measures. Bush’s policy, in a nutshell: poor people should stop having sex, period. Problem solved. If the poor insist on pursuing their own culture of life, they’ll have to go head-to-head with Bush’s. The odds aren’t good. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that in 2002 infant mortality increased in the U.S. for the first time since 1958, and now stands as 42nd highest in the world, behind Cuba and China.

And what about the natural environment necessary to sustain life? The U.S. ranked 45th—behind Russia and Botswana—in the World Economic Forum’s 2005 environmental sustainability index.

What would a real “Culture of Life” look like? For starters, it would recognize that education, affordable healthcare, and a living wage go a long way toward creating an environment where people can make informed choices about medical care and family planning rather than merely react to crises. And it would not abandon children once they were born. A political culture that shells out taxpayer dollars for half-baked propaganda, one that professes love of life while pursuing costly policies at home and abroad that result in death, that exploits the real misfortune of a family for its own gain is not a “Culture of Life”. It is a culture of lies.

2005-03-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

It wouldn’t be Spring without the annual Gardener’s Gathering, which took place last Saturday at Northeastern University. Hundreds of hardy urban gardeners were there to usher it in, along with Mayor Menino, and a host of organizations dedicated to the greening of Boston and surrounding towns. One of the many things about Boston that is unique among American cities is the extensive network of community gardens, and the beauty, sustenance, and healthy, active lifestyle they promote.

The Mayor, a garden enthusiast himself, is doing his part with a new grant program called Small Changes (www.cityofboston.gov/parks/), that seeks to distribute $1 million over the next four years for urban beautification projects.

The Gathering, organized by Boston Natural Areas Network(www.bostonnatural.org), is in its thirtieth year, and is a testament to the spirit and tenacity of Boston’s urban gardeners. BNAN is an indispensable resource, and its practical and fun Master Urban Gardener (MUG) program touches on everything from organizing a community garden to dealing with pests, pH, and soil erosion.

The diversity of the urban gardening community was on display at the Gathering. All races, ages and classes were represented, often working side-by-side, sharing knowledge and experience. Too often city dwellers live in isolation from one another. Gardens, parks, and paths provide the infrastructure of a true community, and boost the quality of life immeasurably.

Gardeners are never content to stand around talking. They want to get their hands dirty. And what impresses me no end about these folks is that they really do walk the walk. They are committed to increasing the quality of life and health for everyone in our cities and suburbs, and they’re taking the initiative to make it happen.

Jennifer Hill, executive director of Groundwork Somerville(www.GroundworkSomerville.org), is a prime example. We had a nice, long chat about the Somerville Active Living by Design Partnership, which is working to (among other things) extend the network of bike trails around the city in the hopes that one day you’ll be able to get just about anywhere, including to work and back, safely and surely, by bike. There’s a lot of talk these days about obesity. Here’s a real and practical solution. Active living by design means making it easy for ordinary people to live actively by providing real alternatives to driving. Hill believes that living in the city really can be a walk in the park.

We Americans like to think we’re a hardy, independent lot, the heirs of Thoreau and Emerson. But the truth is we are growing ever more dependent—in terms of foreign debt and energy sources, obviously, but also in pretty much every part of our day-to-day lives. We’ve gone from a nation of small farmers to one of consumers in need of a constant fix. Hey, where’s my grande iced half caff organic triple espresso mocha soy latte? Agriculture, even on the gardening scale, teaches practical self-reliance. It’s spring. Go out and get your hands dirty.

2005-03-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

Are boys the new girls? Now that First Lady Laura Bush has declared her interest in them on national television, and her husband has appointed her Gang Czarina, expect a torrent of TV specials and newspaper articles on the topic of boys, as if they’ve just arrived en mass from Mars. Harvard’s Dr. William Pollock has written a book, “Real Boys,” that is to the study of boys what Audubon’s “Birds of America” was to ornithology. The recent MSNBC documentary based on Pollock’s research is sure to be just the first of many in the boy blitzkrieg.

I applaud Mrs. Bush on her new hobby, even if there are shades of “Desperate Housewives” in it. I only hope the first lady’s involvement in the cause won’t turn a very real issue into just another political football. Politicizing it furthers the notion that championing boys is a reactionary stance, a sneaky attempt by social conservatives to undo the progress of the women’s movement. Truth is, both sides are guilty of bad faith when it comes to boys.

We’re not exactly on a sinking ship; we don’t have to choose either boys or girls to toss overboard. But it seems we can’t argue for girls without vilifying boys, and vice-versa. Last year Todd Harris Goldman’s popular book “Boys Are Stupid, Throw Rocks at Them” and merchandise bearing various boy-bashing slogans caused more eye-rolling than outrage (but just enough outrage to sell lots of tee-shirts and pjs). Grrrl Power advocates argued that society has said these things to women for generations, and it was never a problem until boys became the target. Others argued that Goldman’s slogans were just words, as if calling someone stupid was not as shattering in some ways as throwing rocks at them. No matter how you slice it, perpetuating the notion that your own self-worth should come at the expense of someone else’s, whatever their gender, is indefensible. Not to mention antisocial. Regardless of the sins of the father or mother, it’s wrong to visit them on our sons and daughters.

While there will always be those who see gender relations as a never-ending grudge match, the rest of us should focus our attention on creating positive learning and social environments based on mutual respect regardless of gender.

And if Mrs. Bush really wants to help, she should have a little chat with the husband, and bring him on board. He hasn’t been shy about throwing cash at pet causes. 150 billion dollars so far for his war. That amount would pay for over 2.6 million school teachers. It could insure over 93 million kids. We can’t even come up with the paltry funds to keep art, music, and after-school athletics available to all pupils in our public schools. These programs, in conjunction with active adult involvement in young people’s lives, are precisely what we need to channel all that wild energy and rampant teenage libido into positive, life-affirming, esteem-building activities for girls and boys alike.

2005-03-08T07:03:00.000-08:00

We all had favorite teachers who inspired us not only to study harder but to dream big. I had many, but a couple that stand out are Miss Fuller, my sophomore-year English teacher and Mr. Dougan, my high school wrestling coach. To these two I owe a passion for writing and fighting fair. For teenagers, a great teacher is that strangest of animals: an adult worthy of admiration, and emulation. If, as an adult, you’ve spent any time with teens, you know how impossibly exacting their standards are, and how few of us could pass muster. But when a connection is made, it’s deep and enduring. Because however they might pretend otherwise, kids want role-models. They want to believe.

My vote so far for the teacher of the year would have to go to Obain Auttouoman, hands down. Few teachers have inspired so many of their students as he has his, and my guess is that by year’s end the movie version of this whole deportation fiasco will be going into production with Jamie Foxx in the starring role. Mr. Auttouoman himself has star-power to spare. Everything about the man exudes love and intelligence. He has a generosity of spirit that is as undeniable as it is absolutely infectious.

And talk about a positive role model. He has been an inspiration since coming to America in 1992 from the Ivory Coast, where he had been twice jailed for his political views. He came to America, like so many before him, seeking the freedom and justice denied him in his native land. And in his adopted home he has been a model citizen, a dedicated public servant, and an inspiration to countless young people. If there is an ideal American, Mr. Auttouoman is it.

So it should really be no surprise that his threatened deportation due to an administrative cock-up has moved so many people to speak out, ultimately winning him a still-temporary reprieve. Now he’s got until 2007. Sen. John Kerry has submitted a bill intended to grant Mr. Auttouoman citizenship.

It’s that rarest of things in tough times: a happy ending. Well, almost. There is still something you can do not only to lend your voice to an unimpeachable cause, but to show Mr. Auttouoman and, perhaps more vitally, his students, that we as a society still value fighting the good fight. Go to fenway.boston.k12.ma.us, sign their petition, and get information on who to write or call to ensure that Mr. Attouoman will be able to remain in America, where he is doing so much good. Because there are a lot of things at stake here, not least the livelihood of an admirable public servant, and a great would-be and hopefully soon-to-be American citizen. There’s the lesson that when we believe, and dream big, we can make a difference, together.

2005-03-02T07:00:00.000-08:00

Last Tuesday, the 22nd of February, my cousin J.’s body was found in a friend’s apartment in Brazil, Indiana. J. Had died from an apparent drug overdose. He was 26.

J. and I had lost touch in recent years. I come from a big family, and the way it usually goes is, you see each other at weddings and funerals. I was overseas for much of the nineties, and J. was struggling through school. He’d always had a tough time of it. He was the runt of the pack, a sensitive kid. In his teens he was a Holden Caulfield type. In families you take a lot for granted, and I always just assumed he would make it through all right. I know now I misjudged the depth of J.’s despair. We all did.

Despair is something everybody lives with, inseparable from our consciousness of mortality. It is part of what makes us human. In it are the seeds of both tragedy and hope. And yet, we seem to have lost the language to speak about it meaningfully. Now when we talk about what the philosopher Kierkagaard called “the sickness unto death”we speak in clinical terms. We isolate symptoms, search for causes, offer up a cure. In our mania for quantification we’ve come up with ways to measure despair, like the Porsolt Forced Swim Test (FST), which involves recording stress levels in drowning rats, or the multiple-choice Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) for drowning humans. Even the human condition falls under the rubric of inconveniences for which the pharmaceutical companies are constantly developing happy pills. But despite their best efforts suicide rates continue to rise, increasing 60% over the past 45 years, according to the Suicide Prevention Action Network (SPAN USA).

Certainly there are cases in which medication makes all the difference, but there is no pharmacological remedy for the sickness unto death, “the awful rowing toward God,” as Anne Sexton so poignantly put it. The human condition is terminal. How to go on living in the face of it? We all have our ways, but occasionally when one of us is lost, we find ourselves wondering how we might have planted that impossible seed of hope that lodges in the hardest of soil and grows in the blackest of nights.

The poet’s prescription? Matthew Arnold, in his poem Dover Beach offers this: “Ah, love, let us be true/To one another for the world which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams,/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...”

If there is solace at all in any of it, it’s that we’re all in it together. “Let us be true to one another.” The only remedy for this kind of pain, it seems, is the comfort of companionship along the road. Wherever it leads.

2005-02-23T06:58:00.000-08:00

Ah, life in Medieval–er, I mean, Middle America. Though raised in a red state, I was shocked recently when my brother, who still lives in one, complained that “they” were trying to keep creationism out of the public schools his children attended. I would have used the word, “we,” and was unpleasantly surprised he hadn’t. A math nerd, he’s been studying computer science at night school. I figured he saw evolution at work every day.

Adaptation and selection are very obviously integral to who we are, and human history is unintelligible without them. The basic principles of evolution are at play in every aspect of our daily lives, not only in agriculture and animal husbandry, but in the progressive development of medical technology, and devises like cell-phones, ipods, and personal computers. Our penchant for selection clearly mimics Nature’s.

But I’m not as concerned about my brother as I am about his four kids, who range in age from 5 to 14. They are already having difficulties in school, and their parents’ growing involvement in a charismatic megachurch seems to be making matters worse. The church all but forbids inquiry, because questions open the door to doubt, and doubt leads to debate and dissent. And dissent is chief among sins. These churches constitute an aggressive “shadow theocracy” seeking to undermine modern democracy. No joke.

My brother’s kids are being taught to stifle their innate curiosity about the world, the physical laws governing it, and the other people inhabiting it. Since they are not to believe the evidence of their senses, or to ask nettlesome questions about the way things really work, they’re learning not to dialogue with others, but to disengage. Anyone with different ideas is automatically the enemy. The curiosity of others is a threat. Because they have no recourse to reason even benign questions are felt to be hostile.

Creationism in our schools encourages this mentality, discouraging the open inquiry necessary for participation in a global market. The hostility to debate that accompanies it is antithetical to democracy. Creationism is neither credible as an explanation of the origins of the species, nor are the teachings that often accompany it in any way beneficial to democratic socialization. Reason enough to keep it out of classrooms. Sensitivity to diversity should not blind us to the damaging effects of equating science with fiction.

Creationism is not a religious necessity, but for some it serves a psychological need, addressing feelings of disorientation in a rapidly changing world. Evolution represents dynamism, creation stasis. Feelings of helplessness in a world always in transition are real and valid, but creationism does nothing to allay them. Ignorance may be bliss, but knowledge is power.

In 1633 the astronomer Galileo was forced by the church to renounce “the heresy of the motion of the earth,” not because it was not demonstrably true, but because it challenged the self-serving “truths” of the church, threatening to undermine her hold on power. Today as ever, truth is heresy.

2005-02-16T06:56:00.000-08:00

It’s a good thing the middle class in this country has a self-deprecating sense of humor, because these days it’s the butt of every joke in D.C. Despite the claims that Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 portrayed President Bush in an unflattering light, he actually showed the president as a very competent comic, admirably able to make his audience of wealthy patrons laugh. All the way to the bank. I especially liked the one about the haves and the have-mores. Har har har. A real knee-slapper.

My personal fave’s gotta be the one about deficit spending, better known as the “Lucky me, I hit the trifecta” joke, which Mr. Bush told over and over to appreciative laughter at Republican fund-raisers after September 11th. A “trifecta” is the big payoff you get at the races for picking three winners. What were Bush’s big three? Recession, war, and 9-11. Our Comedian-in-chief. Anything for a laugh.

But President Bush’s side-splitting budget is by far his biggest, most elaborately set-up joke to date. And it’s on us, in more ways than one. He started work on this one when he signed the slyly ironic Jobs and Growth Act back in 2003, ensuring the have-mores would have even more, while the rest of us foot the bill. These are heady days for our burgeoning class of kleptocrats: Congress has installed a vomitorium for those who can’t stop binging. And why should they?

This budget is even more boffo than the last. The Paris Hilton of American presidents has slashed already meager funding for local cops, taking half a billion from them and throwing it into his wacky manned mission to Mars. He’s working on some totally awesome sketches for a way cool escape pod, that he’s axing food stamps to pay for. He’s also axed 48 Department of Education projects, hacking away at preschool literacy programs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s wastewater treatment programs for poor communities has been gutted. And the National Park System budget seems to have dried up, too. But who needs parks when you’ve got that big ol’ ranch in Crawford? With all the brush you could ever want to clear.

On the bright side, there’s another $81 billion for the war, and untold billions next year, and for who knows how many more years thereafter. But a funny thing happened on the way to Iraq. Somehow, according to an official US audit last month, over $9 billion bucks went missing there under Paul Bremer. $9 billion. Poof, just like that. Bremer, an obvious jokester himself, shrugged off the audit, saying it’s unfair to expect proper accounting practices at a time of unrest in Iraq. I mean, it’s like asking the libertine to remember the names of everyone at the orgy.

As for his own $2.57 trillion orgy, with its huge hidden costs, Mr. Bush, typically tongue-in-cheek, has called it “lean” and “disciplined”. Clowns in Congress have called it “principled, fair and restrained”. Some of the funniest lines since “let them eat cake.”

2005-02-10T06:51:00.000-08:00

“Holy hotpants, Batman!”

The world of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered muppets, cartoon characters and animated superheroes was rocked recently by charges, leveled by real-life cartoon-character-outer James Dobson of Focus on the Family, that one of its own, Sponge Bob SquarePants, is gay.

“I’m just stunned. This was totally out of the blue,” Batman, who was contacted by bat-phone last weekend, said. “Robin and I were out clubbing with Superman and the Hulk when we heard, and we were absolutely gobsmacked.”

At the Halls of Justice reaction among Superfriends was mixed.“I know every gay dive from here to Atlantis,” Aquaman said. “And I’ve never seen Sponge Bob in any of them.”

Green Lantern was indignant. “I don’t know how he’ll ever get a date. You have to have killer abs, and sponges don’t even have abs to begin with.”

Tinky-Winky issued a statement from Teletubbyland, which read in part: “I only hope that Mr. Squarepants is not subjected to the same personal hell I had to endure due to careless whispers by the Rev. Jerry Falwell back in 1999.”

At a press-conference on the matter Bi-Curious George voiced support for his fellow fictional friend but questioned the veracity of Dr. Dobson’s claims, which have been neither confirmed nor denied by Mr. SquarePants, whose spokespeople insist is asexual.

Others have refuted the assertion outright, pointing out not only Mr. Squarepants’ lack of genitalia, usually a prerequisite for sex and sexuality, but his utter lack of queer cred.

“Take it from a trained queer eye: Squarepants are so, like, 2004,” scoffed Fred, reached on the road in The Mystery Machine. Velma and Daphne, who recently took their vows in a low-key ceremony and are apparently honeymooning, could not be reached for comment.

Elmo had his doubts, too. “Elmo’s gaydar never go off with Sponge Bob,” he said from the set of Sesame Street last week. While Big Bird agreed, some of their costars seemed to shrug off the revelation.

“Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” Bert said with his trademark scowl. “Ernie and I were at that cruisy bathhouse at the other end of Sesame Street the other day, and saw Shrek in the shower sponging himself down with Bob, and Bob was laughing like crazy.”

“But Shrek is married,” Big Bird protested.

“And?” Bert sneered. “So were Fred and Barney.”

He-Man and She-Ra welcomed the news. In a joint statement they said, “It’s time the cartoon GLBT community brought asexual critters into the club, too The more the merrier.”

Bullwinkle and Rocky, ex-co-chairs of the Cartoon GLBT Alliance, the oldest such organization with an illustrious membership including the likes of Popeye and Brutus, Bugs Bunny and Snagglepuss, were vexed by the controversy. “Gee whiz, we bust our butts to make people laugh. All we do is give. If there are some people who can see only sex when two genderless cartoon friends are holding hands and having fun it’s really their own prurient imaginations at work. It’s their problem, not ours.”

2005-02-02T06:48:00.000-08:00

When I visited Auschwitz on a trip to Poland several years ago, it was a quiet summer day, the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the neat and orderly buildings bore no trace of what had gone on inside. Here in this nondescript setting was what philosopher Hannah Arendt described as ‘the banality of evil.’

Arendt coined the phrase during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, an SS Lieutenant-Colonel and Chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo charged with implementing the “Final Solution.” What struck her about Eichmann was his very ordinariness. He was not a comic-book villain, but your average middle-class Everyman. Much like the millions his branch of the SS rounded up and shipped to their deaths.

When you tour Auschwitz, you can walk through the gas chambers. There is an enormous room piled high with victims’ shoes, and another filled to the rafters with human hair. I remember a seemingly endless corridor with ID photos of prisoners, literally millions of them: young, old, some looking frightened, some weary, some defiant. They looked just like you and me.

But conspicuous by their absence at Auschwitz are the Eichmanns: the everymen on the other side. It is difficult to know how to represent them without seeming to show unwarranted, inappropriate, and frankly appalling sympathy for them—in simply representing them we humanize them. But in leaving them out we miss what may be the starkest lesson of the Holocaust—not only were the victims like us, but so were the perpetrators. It’s easy to walk away thinking of the millions who were murdered: “that could be me, or someone I love.” It is infinitely harder, more painful, but arguably as important to look at the perpetrators or those who stood idly by, and ask, “could that be me or someone I love?” Only then can we take measures to ensure it won’t happen on our watch.

Not surprisingly Vice President Dick Cheney chose the occasion of the liberation of Auschwitz to plug the administration’s own neocon liberation theology, which seeks to rid the world of evildoers. The trouble is, Liberators have a nasty habit of perpetrating unspeakable evils themselves. Remember, it was the Red Army under Stalin that liberated Auschwitz. In fact, the rhetoric of liberation has provided license for some of the most terrible atrocities in history.

It would be easy to relegate human atrocities to demonic supervillains and their drones, and were it not for the banality of evil we could. But we have our Eichmanns, too. At Abu Ghraib, for example, vastly different from Auschwitz in magnitude, certainly, but not so different in kind. If there is a lesson in the Nazi Holocaust it’s not that there are some comic-book villains out there waiting to perpetrate unspeakable evils—there may be—but the lesson of Auschwitz and Eichmann is how easy it is for all of us to be complicit in everyday evils that, when compounded, amount to unutterable atrocities.

2005-01-25T06:45:00.000-08:00

The poet William Carlos Williams once wrote: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.” Last week we heard some glorious poetry from our eloquent commander-and-frontier-poet-in-chief on the occasion of his second inaugural that turned Williams’ assertion on its head.

Maya Angel-who? Poet Laureate? This President don’t need no stinking laureate! Words like “liberty” and “freedom” trip from his tongue and take flight like so many F/A-18C Hornets. His inaugural oration was pure poetry. Informally titled “An Odd Time For Doubt,” after a stirring phrase found in it, the speech was notable for its condemnation of pretentious tyrants. And who could disagree? Everyone hates an uppity, ostentatious tyrant. A little humility goes a long way where tyrants are concerned. “We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny,” Mr. Bush added. Eight years is the maximum.

Addressing his cohorts abroad, “the leaders of governments with long habits of control,” Mr. Bush offered sage advice: “To serve your people, you must learn to trust them.” Having them sign loyalty oaths is the most efficient way to facilitate this process. He offered other helpful hints to friends and allies in the march to freedom: “Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies,” he reminded them. Everybody knows freedom and democracy are a lot easier without all that nit-picking debate and dissent.

The most moving part of the speech for me was the Bush version of Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you”: “Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character.” But don’t worry, you don’t have to choose between the two. In fact they go hand-in-hand. It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw recently on an expensive sports car: “Don’t let the car fool you,” it read, “my real reward is in Heaven.” “Have thy cake, and eateth it, too.” That’s the new “Golden Rule,” with an emphasis on the gold.

Not only are his words pure poetry, Mr. Bush himself is a work of art. While he played the Christ of “Ecce Homo” to perfection in his first term and throughout his re-election campaign (with Senator Kerry as the supremely decadent Pontius Pilate), what we behold in his second term is nothing short of Nietzsche’s Superman. This administration’s Will to Power is awesome to behold. Their rhetoric is equally awesome. It is no longer so difficult to get the news from poems. And men (and women and children) are dying everyday for precisely what is found there.

If the poet Yeats were alive today I would have had him at the inaugural. He could have read his poem “Second Coming”. It fit the occasion to a tee: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/…The best lack all convictions, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

2005-01-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

Are there biological differences between men and women?

Seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? I mean, to the layman, it’s obvious enough. But the suggestion that biological differences may exist, made at an academic conference last week by Harvard President Lawrence Summers, has once again caused a firestorm of controversy in the hallowed halls of academia.

As I understand it, Summers was basically asking why, now that women have all the academic advantages once enjoyed more or less exclusively by men, women don’t seem to be using them to the fullest? Now, a cynical observer might see a taunt in this: OK, ladies, we called your bluff. Over nearly half a century we’ve made a concerted effort to empower girls in grades K-12 (often at the expense of their threateningly rambunctious male classmates, who could not properly respond to this empowering new dynamic). The men’s clubs have been eliminated. Universities now extend the same opportunities to female scholars as to their male counterparts. Enrollment of women has nearly doubled in the past quarter century. The number of women in college now exceeds the number of men. This has not been an easy transition, but here we are at last on a level playing field. So, all things being equal, why aren’t there more women in math and engineering? That’s what Summers was asking. And he proposed a number of possible answers, one of which was: maybe it’s biological.

We are understandably wary of the idea that gender differences might extend beyond the genital, to include intellectual abilities, or even inclinations. But to argue a vast conspiracy barring girls from following an acquired interest in Euclidian geometry doesn’t sound right, either. Has evolution had a hand in this? I think it’s an interesting question.

But if Summers’ critics have their way, we’ll never know. His comments have sparked a classic academic feud, in classic academic style, not so much about neurobiology and gender difference, but about the indelicacy of the comments themselves, and his impropriety in uttering them. One angry academic warned that because of them, women would avoid applying to Harvard, which is nonsense with knobs on. Another offered a more ominous threat, worthy of Medea: Summers should watch himself, as half of the student body is female.

Summers’ comments may have been indelicate—he admits he meant to provoke—but since when did we become so effete and easily offended? The tradition of free, informed and open debate that has made this country a magnet for iconoclasts and innovators is threatened daily by ideologues on the right and left offended by a good, old-fashioned, no-holds-barred mano-a-mano on the issues of the day. New science and technology are revealing all sorts of wonderfully unsavory things about us all the time. It’s not always the way we’d have it, but it’s the way it is.

Ideology, in full armor, hides behind its shield of propriety, while the Truth stands naked, like a big, ugly ape. Laughing.

2005-01-17T06:37:00.000-08:00

In the aftermath of the tsunami, along with the inevitable telethons and benefit concerts featuring the usual roster of attention-starved pop divas and over-earnest rock stars, comes Job’s old theological lament: “how could a merciful God let this happen?” This “why?” is the oldest rhetorical question there is. Prompted by catastrophe, it serves to express our anger at the death of innocents and our sadness at our inability to stop it.

But some attempt to answer, usually with poor results. If, for instance, you take the ever-popular televangelist stance of Jerry Falwell, et al.: that catastrophes are God’s punishment for (fill in the blank with your favorite fornicating scapegoats), then all of the sudden God doesn’t seem so merciful, does he? In fact, he seems petty, vindictive, and in need of anger management classes. In other words, a great big bossy version of Reverend Falwell himself. God help us.

For those of us who would like to believe that God is not a total psycho, philosophers and real religious leaders the world-round have, unfortunately, little to offer in the way of encouragement. The consensus seems to be: if God is not dead, He’s got ADHD, narcolepsy, or bi-polar disorder.

This is the downside of our modern-day monotheism. In classical mythology warring gods caused natural disasters, an explanation that alleviated the need to justify the suffering of mortals who were merely their playthings. Struck by lightning? Zeus must have been having a bad-hair day. Hindus are delegators. They’ve got Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva dividing the tasks of creation, survival and destruction among them. Asking why Vishnu is always losing his head is like asking why a fish swims. Japan’s native Shinto religion has eight million gods. More than enough to make a little mischief.

In these alternate moral universes, there are claims and counterclaims, jealousies and intrigues, rages and sulks, as in life. But when there is only one player on the board it becomes a different game altogether. The God of Abraham has no one to blame but Himself, and believers have no one to blame but Him. Complicating matters considerably is the fact that the Abrahamic God did not simply wake up in the world one day, like Ptah of Egypt. He was not hatched from a giant egg like P'an Ku of China. His universe did not simply spring into being. According to His own meticulous records it was an act of will. Possibly premeditated. If it all sprang from one divine head, we are dealing with one divine head-case.

Some say God lets catastrophes happen because they bring out the best in the rest of us. Without killer tsunamis, we wouldn’t know just how selfless and giving we really are. We might get to thinking we’re actually the cold-hearted misers who turned a blind eye on, say, the five million children worldwide who starved to death last year, without every asking why.

After all, it’s the oldest rhetorical question in the book.

2005-01-12T06:28:00.000-08:00

I recently received an odd-shaped envelope in the mail with a fancy-looking invitation inside, a big, royal blue RSVP scrawled across the bottom of it in great, loopy letters. I had a Welsh lady friend once who got a similar-looking card from the Lord Chamberlain inviting her to a reception at Buckingham Palace. But mine promised nothing so glamorous as tea with the Queen. Mine was from the good people at the usually slightly less than glamorous ACLU, cordially inviting me to join them in their fight for justice. For a nominal fee, of course. Very classy.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of left-wing junk mail (infinitely better than right-wing junk mail, but junk mail nonetheless), due, my guess is, to the fact that a friend got me a gift subscription to the New Yorker last Christmas. It’s not widely advertised, but a subscription to the magazine entitles you to full membership in The Liberal Elite. Suddenly you find yourself invited to dinner parties in Manhattan, hobnobbing with other Limousine Liberals, chatting over mini-muffalettas and bottles of Dom. Romanée Conti about the crisis in healthcare coverage and how, tragically (but business is business), it’s paying for your next get-away to Mauritius. Unfortunately, I have nothing to wear to these little soirées. And if you’re not in Fioravanti, the doorman won’t let you up.

Honestly, I always thought all the talk on the right about some Illuminati, Star Chamber-style Liberal Elite was hokum. Like the lurking Gay Agenda, it was fodder for paranoids and conspiracy freaks. But this fancy invitation from the ACLU’s got me wondering.

It’s not that I object to the mission of the ACLU, which for nearly a century has served a vital function responding to near-constant assaults on our Bill of Rights. What disturbs me is the way the ACLU and the left in general have set about wooing me, not with tough talk about the hard slog, but with champagne and canapés.

I mean, we’re talking social justice here, not some Cinderella Ball. And who needs an engraved invitation to jump on that bandwagon? All the sudden a bandwagon’s not good enough? The ACLU seems to think we need a chauffeured Bentley. Aren’t the obvious benefits of social justice inducement enough to contribute to the cause of freedom?

Well, apparently not. These days it’s all about the bling-bling. Politics is just another accessory: shall I wear the sapphire brooch or the ruby tierra tonight? The notion of national politics as fancy dress ball is great for our new class of American Aristocrats, on both left and right. But for those of us busy paying the tab and mopping up after them?

I crashed one of those chichi parties during the DNC. As security led me out I heard two well-dressed guests sniggering behind me.

One remarked to the other with a feigned yawn: “Did you hear? The class war is on again.”

The other laughed, adding: “And the enemy is us."