2/2005 Week 1 Articles

by Jack Lassenberry

Last week I gave a talk on what I called “The Myth of the Liberal Media” to a pleasingly large and well-informed group called Pointes for Peace, in (surprise) Grosse Pointe Woods. I told them there are mainly two kinds of media in this nation today — the “mainstream media,” which are about as liberal as corporate America in general, and virulently ideological right-wing media.

What could honestly be called the “liberal media” consists, pretty much (apart from a few cranks like me), of a handful of columnists like Molly Ivins, Jim Hightower, Paul Krugman, and — did I mention Molly Ivins?

All of this was hardly news to anyone paying attention to what Eric Alterman and Ben Bagdikian have been saying for years. This country and its press have shifted dramatically to the right in the last quarter-century, and my craft will pay for this folly for years.

Being in the Grosse Pointes, I imagined I’d get challenged by people who think there’s really a vast conspiracy of New York intellectuals who want to force gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and fluoridated water on us all. There was none of that. But something did happen that astonished me to the point of speechlessness. An attractive, if a bit steely, dark-haired woman on the sidelines raised her hand and, after ranting on that Bush and Kerry were equally bad, proclaimed that the only hope for salvation, or mankind, or something, was Chairman Bob Avakian’s Revolutionary Communist Party.

Had I been prepared, I might have allowed myself a frisson of nostalgia, and spoken to her in her own artificial language. “Sorry, comrade, but an objective analysis of current conditions demonstrates that the time is not right for the mass uprising, and that what’s now needed is a popular front.”

Part of me wanted to sing the “Internationale” off-key in French, just to watch her swoon with desire, or nausea. But instead, I merely stood there like a geek staring at a two-headed calf until my colleague Dick Wright said, “I think we are all pretty bourgeois here,” and brought down the house.

Later, a sweetly grandmotherish lady, who said she was a revolutionary communist too, tried to sell me Avakian’s autobiography, From Ike to Mao. I was barely mature enough not to say, “Hold the mayo.”

We tend to think of commies as harmless anachronisms now, which they mostly are. But back in the day — the 1960s, say — we tended to regard fundamentalist religious movements the same way. Not now. Both the Marxist-Leninists and the dogmatic Christians are very much alike in that they promise you answers and a blueprint for living your life, if you promise not to think too much, and keep your mouth shut if you do.

That promise has proven devastatingly seductive for most men at most times. Ayn Rand offers another system with all the answers, and so does Osama bin Laden, and so do various others of what George Orwell used to call “all the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” What all these systems do is take parts of the truth and construct a brilliantly woven little system and substitute it for reality.

Ayn Rand has a lot to say that’s worthwhile about the heroic struggle of the individual. There’s much that even an intelligent atheist can recognize as true and compelling in most religious dogma. Marxism is a brilliant critique of the sins of capitalism, especially capitalism as it existed during the Industrial Revolution. And most of our multinational corporations today seem to be misbehaving as though following a script written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That may well be sparking a mini-revival of revolutionary communist movements.

But the Glorious Worldwide Great Proletarian Revolution isn’t coming, comrades. Unfortunately all these systems, when in power, eventually bump against annoying reality, which they try to overlook first, then suppress by killing anyone who points out the man behind the curtain, before they finally crash.

And none of them rewards the person who points out, however gently, that the system has flaws, or even worse, tries to think for himself. Those who question are seen as heretics, savagely turned on, and true believers are taught to hate them more than they do their ideology’s natural enemies. Orwell, my personal hero, was a writer of uncompromising honesty, a socialist who nevertheless was hated, in his day, by many on the left because he pointed out the flaws of his allies as well as his foes. He was attacked especially for noting that Soviet communism had evolved into just another form of murderous totalitarian dictatorship, something he lampooned brilliantly in his masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984.

Locally, I have a couple heroes who fit this mold, both of whom, ironically, are religious, rather than political figures. The first is Bishop Tom Gumbleton, best known perhaps for trying to raise our consciousness about the conditions in places such as Haiti and Iraq and El Salvador.

These are all countries in wretched shape, and in most of them our nation has managed to make things worse. He’s tried to help them when he could, and tried to be a tug on our conscience too. He’s no opportunistic, cynical politician with a clerical collar; he deeply believes in God.

But he also believes in speaking truth to power, whether that power wears a Haitian general’s uniform, works in the White House or sits in the Vatican. He was among the first to demand the Roman Catholic Church he loves come clean on the sex scandals of a few years ago.

As a young man studying in Rome, Gumbleton was inspired by the excitement of renewal and the heady intellectual ferment of the Vatican II conferences, which tried to redefine the church’s role in the modern world.

This set his path for life; he came away believing that his church ought to dedicate itself to transforming this world into as close an imitation of the kingdom of heaven as possible. He was made a bishop in 1968. The leadership of his church is far more reactionary today. Last week, he turned 75, and bishops are traditionally supposed to offer their resignations then.

Bishop Tom, who looks and acts two decades younger, has no desire to stop doing what he’s doing, and more than one member of his parish (St. Leo’s) has told me they’ll protest if the church tries to take him from them. The irony, of course, is that the pope is a decade older and in appalling shape. Yet nobody would dare whisper that he step aside.

My other hero is the Rev. Harry Cook, rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Clawson. In a lecture this week at the University of Colorado, he plans to tell the students that he fears “religion may be the death of us all.”

He means the kind of religion that actually caused a GOP politician to say that denuding the forests is all right because “when the last tree is felled, Jesus will come again.” Cook proclaims himself a “secular agnostic humanist,” for which he has taken some heat. I think he deserves more admiration than the pope. What’s so moral about being good if you know you’ll get paradise as a reward?

What’s far nobler, I think, is to try and follow Christian principles even if you have no idea what comes after this life, and grappling with the awesome challenge of trying to figure out each unique situation. These are two different, but very inspiring men, and Detroit is lucky to have them.

Confidential to “Raymond Jackson”: You make some interesting arguments about the city apart from your defensiveness and name-calling, but I’m afraid I can’t pay attention unless you provide me with a way of verifying your existence and contacting you. For all I know, you’re really the niece of the late Emperor Franz-Joseph of Austria, or Alberta Tinsley-Talabi’s mom, or both.

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.
 

Looking for a ray of light in Iraq

Molly Ivins  February 02, 2005

HERE’S hoping. The trouble with being a congenital optimist is that gloom-mongering feels so uncomfortable. The election in Iraq Sunday, like the one in Afghanistan last year, was moving, inspiring and hopeful. When there’s a ray of light breaking through in a dark sky, I’d much rather concentrate on the ray than the black clouds.

But mitigating my optimism is the fact that I’ve been around for a long time. Not that longevity is any guarantee of wisdom, but it does provide perspective. I can remember when they had elections in Vietnam that looked hopeful in 1967. I can remember the elections in El Salvador in 1984. And I remember last year’s election in Afghanistan, with the almost unbearably moving sight of Afghan women coming out to vote. Still, it didn’t kill off a single raping warlord, did it?

In Iraq alone, we’ve been through “mission accomplished,” then the violence would end once we captured Saddam Hussein, then the all-important handover of sovereignty that would make all the difference and next the destruction of Fallujah that was going to break the insurgency. (Well, it did destroy Fallujah.) Someday, we will actually capture al-Zarqawi, and I bet we find that doesn’t make much difference, either.

I really don’t like accentuating the negative, but I also don’t like spin, especially after what we’ve been through with this administration and the truth about Iraq. It isn’t helpful to write off 175 terrorist attacks on the day of the election as “relative calm.” It isn’t helpful to claim there was a 72 percent turnout rate and then have it fall overnight to 57 percent. It isn’t helpful to set low expectations, then boast about doing “better than expected.” And we also still don’t know what we’ve got here.

We’re potentially looking at an anti-American Shiite government that signs right up with the mullahs in Iran. What do we do then, re-invade?

I’m having a hard time believing this next one is true. Judith Miller of The New York Times, who was responsible for much of that paper’s lousy reporting before the war, said on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” that the American government is angling to get Ahmad Chalabi a top government post in the Iraqi Cabinet. If true, someone not only needs his head examined, but should also be indicted for malfeasance. Chalabi is, of course, the noted crook and Iranian spy who fed this administration so much bad information before the war he should be considered a pariah for that alone.

That said, it was still pretty thrilling, wasn’t it? God bless them. I hope they’re going to make it after all. Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan — which we dropped like a hot rock to go after a nation that not only had not done us any harm, but didn’t even present the threat of harm — all is not tickety-boo. Opium is once again the country’s most important product, and the Taliban is still around. Al-Qaida, the people who did attack us, are also still around. Warlordism still rules in most of the country. And perhaps saddest of all, so little attention is paid.

We came in like gangbusters and promised the earth — we were going to nation-build, put in infrastructure, all that good stuff — and it got siphoned away to Iraq, including $700 million that had been appropriated for Afghanistan, according to Bob Woodward.

The good news (can’t help myself) is that we did Afghanistan right, if you will recall — went in with pretty much global backing and the support of all our allies. And they’re still there helping out, 8,300 NATO troops, including the French, the Germans and the rest of “old Europe.” Some of the country is secure enough for the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to function there. The commitments are starting to dwindle down now, but it’s still more help than we had in Iraq.

Unlike Iraq, we’ve actually got some construction projects going (there was nothing to reconstruct in Afghanistan) and should be able to celebrate a highway opening before long.

I don’t know whether these fairly dismal twin tales should be considered the alpha and omega of Bush’s policy of exporting the shining light of liberty via military invasion, but at least we can learn from our mistakes — and if there ever is a next time, we could try doing it right.

Ivins is a syndicated columnist.

By MOLLY IVINS, Creators Syndicate
February 3, 2005

AUSTIN, Texas — I don't get it. The divide between the rhetoric and the reality in this administration is larger than I can span. The dissonance between the noble ideals expressed and the nasty actions is too raw for me.

For example, Bush announces: "Our founders dedicated this country to the cause of human dignity, the rights of every person and the possibilities of every life. This conviction leads us into the world to help the afflicted, and defend the peace, and confound the designs of evil men." (I got that nugget from the 2003 State of the Union via an article by Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully.) So how come we give less to the afflicted than any other advanced nation?

And how come we're torturing people? How come we're putting people into high office — attorney general, Department of Homeland Security — who unleashed the whole torture scandal? The International Red Cross says torture is still going on today at Guantanamo. Torture has blackened our name around the world and made the president's words about bringing freedom and democracy sound hollow and hypocritical.

Item: Bush finally agreed to go along with the creation of a Department of Homeland Security, asserting nothing was more important than the safety of Americans. But then came lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, and suddenly our safety wasn't so important. According to Christine Todd Whitman, then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, she and Tom Ridge of Homeland Security crafted regulations requiring the 15,000 highest-risk chemical plants to take steps to reduce their vulnerability to terrorism. Seems like a sensible idea.

But nope, the administration wouldn't support it, and the lobby fought it. "I sometimes wonder whether those companies spend more money trying to defeat new regulations than they would by simply complying with them," writes Whitman in her book "It's My Party Too." There are no federal regulations today requiring chemical companies to prepare for terrorist attacks.

Here's an administration dedicated to destroying government as much as possible until, as Grover Norquist says, "we can drown it in the bathtub." But they have no hesitation about spending our money on "public relations." The Bushies have spent $250 million on "public relations" during their first term, more than twice as much as in Clinton's last term. But it was not public-interest spending, like trying to get people to eat healthier diets or not drink while driving. This was propaganda for the administration's political agenda.

Then there is the ludicrously loony matter of the budget deficit. Recall these people inherited a whopping budget surplus. For over a year now, the administration has said, "We've got a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years." The deficit in 2004 was $412 billion, the largest ever. The White House now says this year's will be $427 billion — BUT that the plan to cut the deficit is "on track." Man, that's some track.

To this cascading disaster, Bush wants to add $2 trillion in transition costs over the next decade for his scheme to partially privatize Social Security. This is one I'm really having trouble figuring out. There is no crisis in the Social Security program. It is not in trouble. If nothing is done, come 2042 — or 2052 if you believe the Congressional Budget Office — SS will have to start paying less than its promised benefits, but will still be able to pay seniors more than it does today in constant dollars. You can easily fix even that minor problem by lifting the cap on FICA taxes now at $90,000.

Why should people who make more than $90,000 have their higher income exempted, when every nickel made by people below the poverty level is taxed?

As Paul Krugman of The New York Times points out, if you accept the Rosy Scenario the administration is using to paint privatization as an effective scheme, then Social Security is in no trouble at all and we don't need to do anything about it — economic growth will take care of it all. Contrariwise, if you accept the doom-and-gloom scenario the administration uses to prove that SS is in trouble, then there's no way the privatization scheme will be anything other than a disaster.

Dogged if I know what these people have against SS, a program that works just fine and has kept elderly people from having to eat cat food for many years now. Because the right wing has somehow become a cult of anti-government nuthatches, I have no idea where we're headed. The purposes of government, according to the U.S. Constitution, is "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

CROW EATEN HERE: Sorry, there were 260 terrorist attacks in Iraq on election day, not 175. And, oops, the British medical journal Lancet estimates 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, not 20,000.

MORE IVINS COLUMNS »

February 3, 2005

Years ago a Catholic school asked me to speak at an awards ceremony. I agreed, waiving my usual fee ($87,436) and after intense negotiations accepted nothing. A bit after that, the school asked me not to speak, saying higher-ups in the Washington diocese had learned -- possibly by reading my column -- that I was pro-choice. I accepted that also.

I cite this instructive episode in reference to Hamilton College, a venerable institution of higher learning in Upstate New York, which has canceled a speaking engagement for Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. For more than a week, Hamilton stuck to its guns, insisting that Churchill would speak no matter what -- no matter what being that he is an idiot. For some reason, Hamilton did not know this at first. It soon learned it in spades.

Churchill was supposed to speak about American Indian activism. He is the purported genuine article, an American Indian who, according to press reports, interrupted Denver's Columbus Day parade because Christopher Columbus was a racist enslaver of indigenous peoples. That happens to be true. It is also true that some of those indigenous peoples engaged in cannibalism and the dismemberment of living human beings. No one refers to this period as the Age of Enlightenment.

What finally got Churchill a measure of fame was not his Columbus Day exploits but an essay he wrote about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The victims, he wrote, were hardly innocent bystanders but rather the beneficiaries of an oppressive U.S. foreign policy and an exploitive American capitalism: "they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants."

Churchill was referring to the embargo then in place on Iraq and what it had done to that country's health system. For that reason, he called the victims of Sept. 11 "little Eichmanns," after the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust.

A more repellent, idiotic and badly written passage you're not likely to read. It probably does no good, but I'd like to point out to Churchill that if infants starved under Saddam Hussein, it was because Hussein chose to use relief money to buy arms and build palaces. As for the "little Eichmanns," a fair share of them were restaurant workers and deliverymen and clerical staff, and, of course, cops and firemen. They had packed their power lunches that morning.

There were reasons aplenty not to have invited Churchill and, once he was invited, to have rescinded the invitation. Hamilton would not do so. It flung around the First Amendment with abandon, as if Churchill was a faculty member whose job was at stake. Then Bill O'Reilly struck. The Fox TV commentator went to town on the controversy, finding the usual liberal idiocy at the usual liberal college perpetrated by the usual liberal morons. Having rounded up his usual suspects, O'Reilly ended a segment about Hamilton by providing the name of the college's president, Joan Hinde Stewart, her e-mail address and the school's phone number. Then, blood dripping from his evil heart, he asked his deranged viewers to "keep your comments respectable."

The school caved. Stewart reported getting 6,000 or so messages, and I know, because I get them all the time, that many of them were vile and obscene and even threatening. But this is the true cost of free speech. It is not some rarefied principle, not some slogan, not some trivial right for professors to abuse in comfortable distance from the targets of their ideas, but the most powerful and dangerous right of them all. And because O'Reilly had, in effect, organized an Internet lynch mob, a collection of cyber-goons -- one of whom threatened to bring a gun -- the school simply junked the program. It chickened out.

Hamilton should not have invited Churchill in the first place. His ideas are trash, cliches to boot, and the school could have -- as that Catholic school did with me -- changed its mind once it found out more about him. But once he had accepted, and once Hamilton had insisted by all that is holy that it would stick to its guns, it could not then collapse because those ideas, as loathsome as they are, might have real consequences.

Hire some guards. Frisk the audience. But don't cave to the mob.

cohenr@washpost.com

E.J. Dionne, Jr. - Washington Post Writers Group

January 6, 2005

A Contempt for Civil Rights Supporting Torture is not Gonzales' Greatest Sin

By BRIAN J. FOLEY

Focusing on torture as the main objection to Alberto Gonzales' taking over as Attorney General distracts us from his greater sin: his attempt to give the president the power to imprison Americans incommunicado and indefinitely, without recourse to courts or lawyers. Such contempt for our civil rights shows that Gonzales cannot be trusted to protect them.

The White House, with Gonzales as legal adviser, argued for this unchecked and arbitrary power in two cases, all the way up to the US Supreme Court. Those cases concerned Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, Americans whom President Bush suspected were "enemy combatants" and threw into military prisons. Both men had no way to question the grave accusations against them.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court rejected the Administration's claim to such power last June and ordered that Hamdi be given a hearing (it avoided that issue in Padilla's case based on procedural grounds). When the government was required to prove its case against Hamdi, it released him instead, revealing that it had lacked any legitimate basis for locking him away for over two years. (Despite its lack of evidence, the government forced him to renounce his US citizenship and deported him to Saudi Arabia.)

What happened to Hamdi is outrageous. But the greater outrage is that the Administration ever argued for such power in the first place. The safeguards that the president tried to strip from us are part of the fundamental "due process" of law that our Constitution requires before the government can take our life, liberty or property. Due process is not a privilege to be given or removed at the government's behest, but a right that belongs to the citizenry, part of the bargain for delegating our powers to our government.

Due process is crucial for two reasons. First, access to the courts can correct mistakes. Even before 9/11, people were often arrested in error. Now that police are focusing on preventing terrorism, the risk of error has increased.
Normal behavior is more likely to seem suspicious. It's also easy to imagine how a person's enemies, or someone seeking a reward or a plea deal, might bear false witness. Courts can ferret out such problems.

Second, giving prisoners access to courts protects against government's abuse of power. A government that can, on its own say-so, arrest and imprison a person is dangerous. Such power chills the dissent and debate and free thought that democracies demand. It also wrecks lives.

This was the view of our Founding Fathers, as Gonzales must have learned even before law school. Arguments that the so-called War on Terror calls for rejecting this view are specious.

Gonzales' supporters argue that the president "needs" the power to arrest people he believes are plotting terrorist attacks, even if he lacks evidence that would satisfy a court. But how can anyone know that someone is a threat, without subjecting facts to rational proof? Without such rigor, people will be seized and jailed based on mere guesswork.

Moreover, our law already provides ample ways to thwart people planning to commit crimes. Evidence that a person has taken steps to commit murder can convict him for "attempted murder." Evidence that a person has agreed with another person to commit a crime can convict him for "conspiracy."

Gonzales' supporters also argue that holding a prisoner without access to an attorney can make him more susceptible to interrogation, which can yield information that might stop a terrorist attack. But what if someone is arrested by mistake and knows nothing? It's unlikely that the government -- so sure of its decision to arrest him -- would release him. Instead, the government might torture him, perhaps for years, until he "confesses." This nightmare is not farfetched, given Gonzales' support for torture.

At bottom, the Bush Administration, advised by Gonzales, has claimed the power to arrest and imprison innocent people. No one should have such power. To seek it is anti-democratic and anti-American. That alone is reason for the Senate to reject him.

BRIAN J. FOLEY is a professor at Florida Coastal School of Law. He can be reached at bfoley@fcsl.edu.
 

By Colbert I. King

Saturday, February 5, 2005; Page A19

The state of the Union may be "confident and strong," as President Bush said the other night, but it is also full of people as prickly as porcupines. At least that's my impression based on responses to my Jan. 29 column, "Bridging the Great Divide."

First, the good side. E-mailers and letter writers seemed to agree that the country has pronounced political and ideological schisms. They were concerned about incivility and agreed that the tussle over policy would benefit from debate based on mutual respect, careful listening and honest dialogue. And all but a few saw the need to bridge political differences and bring more inclusiveness to government, given the serious domestic and international problems the country faces. But when the discussion turned to the causes of polarization, folks on both the left and right fled the common ground, abandoning any pretense of interest in the other side's point of view.

Mind you, they all acknowledged the existence of a great divide. But consider the reasons they offered:

The Media.

"The people who control conservative radio and talk shows . . . continually bash everything wrong in America with the word 'liberal.'. . . In the past election, one can see that the liberal-bashing is effective and can help win elections." -- S.S. and S.G., Ohio

"I just hope the liberal press takes this to heart and realizes that they are the major source of this problem. Their constant battering of Bush, calling him a liar, dumb, stupid, has been a large part of this problem." -- J.S., Florida

The Politicians.

"Your efforts should be directed at the likes of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd, Carl Levin, Patrick Leahy and all the other extreme left-wing fanatics of the Democratic Party. . . . THEY are the ones refusing bipartisanship, Mr. King, face it." -- B.F., Indiana

"I think the originating problem of all this division is Bush. . . .[He] is like a big waving red flag in front of a bull. He has really got half of us boiling mad." -- S.W., Oklahoma

The Parties.

"I fear that any overt call to civility and unity will be manipulated by the GOP into what it was post 9/11: you must support the agenda of Bush or be labeled a spoiler or worse." -- E.L., Massachusetts

"The [Democratic Party] needs to inflame its base with tales of lying, torturing, doing away with civil liberties, disenfranchisement, starving children, being intolerant, racist, sexist, anti-gay, anti-senior citizens, warmongers, Christian terrorists. . . . How do you begin a civil dialog with this mind-set? Liberals do not want civility; they want power. And will do and say anything to achieve that goal." -- E.M., California

"A return to civility in our American politics depends on both parties. Too often what happens is that Democrats give in to the media's calls for civility and Republicans do not. Democrats cannot, and should not, satisfy the media's cry for civility if Republicans are not willing to also be civil and listen." -- J.K., address unknown

And This?

"Civility and politeness was always part of my culture and continued to be when I moved to Washington. My theory on the erosion of civility: telemarketing. All of my training to be thoughtful and polite went out the window when I became bombarded with solicitation calls. . . . I found myself interrupting callers, hanging up on persistent talkers and abandoning my civility." -- C.F., Washington, D.C.

Most striking of all, perhaps, were the people who admitted being incapable of showing civility toward the political opposition. One writer, M.R., said that it's too late to bring political civility to the country, that finding common ground with what he called the "Radical Right administration" is tantamount to compromising with the devil.

R.J. of Virginia saw it much the same way. She said she had no intention of "playing nice" with an administration that takes advantage of liberals and Democrats whenever they show the slightest weakness or compromise. "Power is the only thing these creatures understand," she wrote.

Another writer, D.C. of Massachusetts, was completely dismissive of liberal Democrats, calling them "racists. They approve of blacks attaining the highest offices as long as they adhere to the leftie line." How's that for trying to reach a higher ground?

Am I suggesting that Democrats and Republicans should all hold hands and dance and sing and forget about their differences on critical issues? Am I trying to suggest that partisan activists or people with liberal and conservative mind-sets should surrender their convictions and begin speaking softly and tenderly with each other? Of course not.

But the enmity, as emotionally satisfying as it may be to the holder, stands in the way of the civility required to bridge political differences.

One thing shines through in the dozens of responses: Ideological and partisan rivals do have something in common -- an exaggerated sense of their own righteousness, aggravated by an inability to recognize that the other side may not be evil incarnate with nothing to offer.

Even when there is an acknowledgment of something of value on the other side, it's done with sentiment best reserved for al Qaeda.

Hear the likely next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, expressing his admiration this week for the display of discipline in the other party's organization. He prefaced that statement with the observation, "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for." "Hate"? Sadly, some Republicans feel likewise about Democrats.

America is "confident and strong"? What about our nightmare politics?

kingc@washpost.com

WASHINGTON

A friend of mine e-mailed me Friday to see if I wanted to go to the Folger Theater production of "Romeo and Juliet."

I e-mailed him back, fretting: Doesn't that play promote suicide?

What's the 411 on those Elizabethan teenagers? Were they friends with benefits who recklessly scarfed down unsafe substances and romanticized death?

Surely, the Apothecary is guilty of assisted suicide, selling the distraught Romeo a dram of poison and instructing him: "Put this in any liquid thing you will/And drink if off, and if you had the strength/Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight."

My friend suggested we skip the play and go out to dinner, where we could promote assisted gluttony. In this hypermoralistic atmosphere, you can't be too careful, even when a Friar is on hand to warn violent delights have violent ends." I don't want to get on the wrong side of the Savonarolas.

I saw "Million Dollar Baby" and was dazzled. But then Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved and other conservatives howled that Dirty Harry playing Dr. Kevorkian sends a positive message about euthanasia.

The culture cops are unmoved that Clint Eastwood's crepuscular boxing manager, Frankie, is a Catholic who goes to Mass every day and agonizes about the morality of his actions.

Mr. Medved wrote that the Oscar nominations for "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Sea Inside," which feature plots about assisted suicide, combined with snubs for "The Passion of the Christ," "illustrate Hollywood's profound, almost pathological discomfort with the traditional religiosity embraced by most of its mass audience."

I guess Shakespeare is pretty much out from now on. Ophelia drowns herself; Cleopatra kills herself with an assist from two asps; Lear's wretched daughter Goneril does herself in, as does Lady Macbeth. Brutus kills himself by running onto a sword held by his servant Strato (another assisted suicide), and his wife, Portia, dies by swallowing a burning coal; Othello stabs himself. And don't even start with the lurid family values in Greek drama and myth, rife with patricide, matricide, fratricide and incest.

It's funny that the moviemaker stirring up the fuss is an icon of the right, a man the president's father aped when he said, "Read my lips: No new taxes." When I interviewed Mr. Eastwood in 1995, he said he thought his party was onto something with its nostalgia for the old values. But he also said he was more libertarian than conservative: "The less you mess around with people, the better off people are." That attitude is passé in the Republican Party. The Christian right thinks that the more you mess around with people, the better off people are. It is eager to dictate social, cultural and marital behavior, with an assist from the man whom it boasts it put back in the White House.

The Virginia House of Delegates last week endorsed license plates reading "Traditional Marriage," featuring a red heart with interlocking gold wedding bands. (A married pal of mine joked that for verisimilitude, the plates should also feature a man and a woman looking miserable.)

But the Bard was more interested in untraditional marriage - like that lurid family dinner in "Titus Andronicus," when Titus serves Tamora meat pies made from the bodies of her two sons, who have raped and mutilated Titus's daughter in revenge for Titus slaying Tamora's oldest son before her eyes. (Capped by him murdering Tamora and mercy-killing his daughter.)

Just because it's not "Ozzie and Harriet," does it have to be bowdlerized, or Medvedized - "Unmixed with anything that could raise a blush on the cheek of modesty," as Dr. Bowdler bragged about his eviscerated Shakespeare?

Michael Moore and Mel Gibson aside, the purpose of art is not always to send messages. More often, it's just to tell a story, move people and provoke ideas. Mr. Eastwood's critics don't even understand what art is. Politics - not art - is about finding consensus with the majority of the audience. Art is not about avoiding controversy or ensuring that everyone leaves feeling morally uplifted.

What I love about movies and plays is seeing fictional characters behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways I never would. What I hate about politics is seeing real officials behaving in ends-justify-the-means ways on the W.M.D. "crisis" in Iraq, the Social Security "crisis," and the spread of federal disinformation from paid "journalists." Now that's worth howling about.

E-mail: liberties@nytimes.com

February 6, 2005