July, 2004 Week 3
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July, 2004 Week 3
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Monday July 12 , 2004 One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected. The Wit and elusive Wisdom of George W. Bush New revelations about drug abuse by Cheney's Dr.... Hmmm Don't suppose this is a prelude to more 'concerns' about Ol' Dick's health do ya? I am willing to wager that Cheney will get dumped as a running mate because he is a liability but the pretense will be concerns (justified or not) about his health, We had a pretty good day till about 2200, "B" got mad at Monica after she flipped a video tape at him, he kicked her pretty hard... when we called him on it he got incredibly mad and went storming out of the house, broke off the flag and slammed the door. The last time he did that he let all the air out of Christy's tires... he's a piece of work. On the 19th I am taking him down to see his biological mother and a few of his siblings. His Social Worker is willing to send him back to his mother... he would be out of our hands and no longer our responsibility legally... Morally?...Ethically? well that's a whole other can of worms. "B" is just such an explosive guy, you never know what will set him off. I think he sets up scenarios in his mind with elaborate expectations and when things go 'wrong' he just flies apart at the seams. I have to take Autumn to the USC Health Sciences Clinic tomorrow, she will be reevaluated as part of a blind study of the effect of using tricycles and stationary bikes on the development of strength. Christy says it's a fast four hours... very interesting... she says. We'll see.
Tuesday July 13 , 2004 The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on. Joseph Heller, novelist (1923-1999)
Wednesday July 14 , 2004 If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues? John Churton Collins, literary critic (1848-1908) philodox (FIL-uh-doks) noun; Someone who loves his or her own opinion; a dogmatic person. [From Greek philodoxos, from philo- (love) + doxa (glory, opinion). Ultimately from Indo-European root dek- (to take or accept) that's also the root of words such as paradox, orthodox, doctor, disciple, discipline, doctrine, dogma, decorate, dignity, and disdain.] "Don't take this as a comment on events in Washington -- or on newspaper editorial pages -- but I thought I should tell you that a philodox is a person who loves fame or glory or, more specifically, an argumentative or dogmatic person who loves his own opinions." Michael Gartner; Calling all Philologues; Austin American Statesman (Texas); Jan 15, 2000. "In effect, a philodoxical thinker can become very good and highly skilled at doubting and critiquing maps other than her own." Dale Cannon; Newsletter on Teaching in Philosophy (Newark, Delaware); Spring 2001. I have several friends who I could easily deem to be Philodoxical... hell, I might be a philodox myself... probably not though, I am too consumed by self doubt, I have no illusions about my fallibility. I got Christy's car SMOGed and figured out why the fan motor in the van was blowing fuses... it needed a 30 AMP and had a 25... Helen will be here at noon to do an interview/evaluation on all the kids except Autumn. the kids will earn $20 apiece for their time... cool. Christy is trying to get ready to go to her "Camp Meeting" up in the morning... she didn't realize how much time it would take to work with Helen Thursday July 15 , 2004 If Ignorance Is Bliss, You must be Orgasmic. Bumper Sticker Christy took off at 0720, I will see her again in 11 days. She has a 6 hour drive in the old van... it run's pretty good so I'm not worried... too much. Calie rode up with Rhonda and Keith Mike is being a petulant weenie, He came in and demanded that I take him to Nick's right now, I will be leaving to take Bald to the Orthodontist in a half an hour,,, he said so take me you have enough time to get back up here for "B", I said No, he said, so take "B" now, I said; "And wait in the parking lot for 30 minutes? I will take you down to Nick's at 1430... he yelled at me and said "I WILL BE IN THE CAR AT 2:30!! I don't know what that was... threat... ultimatum? Apparently Mike's teacher ("B" calls her "The Bearded Lady") was fired... or she quit... it's a shame, I think Mike sort of liked her. In the car he said Parent's get to do whatever they want when ever they want... My agenda included, shopping for food, taking "B" to the Orthodontist, Stand in line at the DMV to register the car... without paperwork (Christy misplaced it), waiting in line at Kaiser for Monica's medicine... I tell you boy, that's a purely orgasmic afternoon un my book... The DMV was actually pretty painless... all she needed was my license plate number... she gave me my tag in less than three minutes... I am so conditioned by my youthful negative encounters with the 'old DMV that I am always pleasantly amazed by their efficiency. I noticed that the entire office was manned by African American women, I wonder why? I had always considered the DMV to be populated by a cross-section of the general population... apparently there was a convergence in Palmdale... well... they did good work, At Kaiser the wait was short but the medicine wasn't ready... no one had contacted the doctor... I know they told Christy they had notified Dr Dillard but the computer said no. I went shopping at Smart and Final... the trick will be to keep the kids from inhaling it in one day.... Email from George... he sent me a link to a parody site... it's a long download with dialup...funny as hell...though: http://www,jibjab.com/thisland.html Friday July 16 , 2004 Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties. John Milton; Areopagitica - English poet (1608-1674) IEP for Mike and "B" today, I also have a dental appointment at 1120. Mike doesn't want to go to school because his teacher was fired/or quit. He says there will be nothing for him to do... I find it hard to believe, but he may be right, I will see. Mike went to school. the IEP went smoothly, The dentist was unpleasant but tolerable, I like my Hygienist, she's Finnish, names Sirkka, unbelievably, she is the second Finn named Sirkka, I used to work with a lady named Sirkka Manning... The part for my bike came in on schedule, I managed to reassemble the bike in about an hour... now all I have to concern myself with is getting the brakes fixed. Mike.... Arrrrggg.... Saturday July 17 , 2004 Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. -Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) Monica and I took "B" to see his Mom and sisters and brothers down in Sylmar... unfortunately there was a brushfire at the intersection of the 14, Antelope Valley Freeway and the 5, Golden State Freeway, they had the 14 closed so we had to go a half hour out of our way over the mountains,,, pain. His mom gave him a big hug and his sisters doted on him. "B" seemed pretty overwhelmed. I forgot my camera, damn. His oldest sister, Alicia is about 29 or to, she has a daughter 14 years old and another 7. The fire is pretty impressive, when we went through the mountains at 1400 the news said it had burned about 30 acres, when we headed back at 1630 it was up to 300 plus acres... Acton, is about 30 miles away from the fire but the wind is blowing the smoke right at us. It is so thick it's making my throat sore and eyes burn... The Lake Hughs Fire is still going strong... behind us... that's a lot of smoke in the air. Sunday July 18 , 2004 Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth or the only truth. Charles A. Dana The smell of the fire down in Newhall is still in the air... I guess it's a real mess. If you have ever looked at the picture of my family on the home page of this site you can make note of the fact that the place where it was taken is probably ablaze as I type..., I hope not, but they have evacuated the Nature Center about a mile from where it was taken and closed off Placerita Canyon... I have my fingers crossed. It is a beautiful park, and it's only 25 miles from downtown LA. The GOP has been wagging their collective finger at Democrats and the anyone else that they have deemed to be their mortal enemy such as Atheists, non-Christians, Environmentalists, Conservationists, Pro-choice, Anti-war, or anyone who says anything disparaging about their infallible leader. They attempt to discredit anyone who has the audacity to disagree with them. They isolate detractors in "Free Speech Zones" miles from the media. They talk about "Family Values", "Moral Values", "Christian Values" as though they are the sole arbiters and singularly qualified to define what that means... lately they have eliminated the qualifiers and just say VALUES. As in; "The upcoming election is about VALUES." or; "Republicans are all about VALUES." It had always bothered me that Republicans, as a rule, don't defend their leaders or their positions on any particular subject, they attack yours. Or they cloak themselves in righteous generalities and condemn you for doubting their genuineness. They label their detractors as Left-Wing Whacko's, Liberals, Tree Huggers, Communists, Hippies, anti-marriage, anti-God, murders of the unborn... the litany of epithets is endless. If you should happen to mention that you think that Bush's war on Iraq was ill advised then they label you as Un-American or Pro Terrorist, Aiding abetting the Enemy, there is no way to get your opinion across to them because they attack and condemn and dismiss you as soon as you have made your opinion known. There is an article below that talks about something that really bothers me. It strikes me as being an ominous precursor to something really frightening, To me, one of the scariest things that happened during the Fascist take over of Germany and Italy and in Stalinist Russia was that in order for anyone to be considered a true member of the party you must be constantly vigilant for detractors and subversives. It was considered mandatory, patriotic and loyal for the true patriot to turn in neighbors, co-workers and classmates even parents who dared to speak out... they even had to report those who failed to be sufficiently supportive of the leader, his actions or his policies. It's hard for me to believe that this article [Minn. GOP Asks Activists to Report on Neighbors' Politics] in the Washington Post isn't on the National News. It's about the Minnesota branch of the RNC setting up a database containing supportive, undecided and hopelessly incorrigible Democrats so that they can identify those of our neighbors who might be susceptible to hands on intervention; Pamphlets, phone calls, in-home visits etc. I, for one, have a hard time accepting the 'VALUES' of any organization that would condone, let alone encourage, this sort of program. This is like something out of 1984 or a 'How To' book by Josef Goebbels. Or Tupperware ... it's despicable. A letter from Jack; on the attack.
By Jack Dalton http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=801 To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, right or wrong, is not only un-patriotic, but it is morally treasonable to the American people. In the small Texas town of Canyon Lake, a sea of Bush ideologues, there is a strong voice of reason: Doug Kirk, the much attacked publisher of the Canyon Lake Weekly. Recently, a letter to the editor from Frances Shannon went too far. Way too far. "It is people like you who cry anti-war slogans, criticize our commander-in-chief for liberating Iraq and Afghanistan from barbarian rule that I was referring to as wimps," she wrote. Besides Doug, she also included in the "wimps with no backbone that do not deserve to be called Americans" category, "wives, mothers, and others that complain." This rated more than a simple letter to the editor response. For your information, Frances Shannon, when you were at home baking cookies, I and thousands of other "wimps with no backbone" were crawling around in Vietnam. While some at home were being "patriotic" and proudly waving the American flag with self-righteousness and vociferously supporting that un-mitigated disaster, as is being done today with Iraq, I and thousands of other Americans were getting shot to hell and back, as is happening in Iraq today. Thirty-five years later, after all the pontificating about "never again" has faded from memory, that same flag of false and misguided patriotism once again "proudly" waves over America. It seems that never again is here again (if it ever went away). The ease at which those of you who so blindly follow Bush can label fellow citizens as "wimps without backbone that do not deserve to be called Americans," including those of us who are combat veterans, concerns me in some ways more than my serious concerns for George Bush. Having been decorated for counter-insurgency operations in 1966, having been three times wounded and living a life fighting the effects of Agent Orange, I am not a wimp. By your statements, one can only conclude that you believe the only patriotic Americans are those that toot the horn for George Bush. I guess it makes no difference to you that the man you support has cut and is cutting funding for the Veterans Administration which to date has forced over 250,000 veterans out of the system due to a lack of funding. At the same time, this same man is creating more veterans and more disabled veterans. If continuing my open opposition to the Bush cabal makes me a "wimp without backbone," I guess I'll be a wimp without backbone for whatever life I have remaining. For I will go to my grave in opposition to any and all who preach perpetual war for profit. The thing that really stands out is that the vast majority of those who feel free to label their fellow citizens as un-patriotic, un-American, traitors, wimps, etc., especially those of us who actually wore the uniform and went to war, is that they themselves, for whatever reason, never wore this country's uniform and never went to war. The arrogance of people to call anyone, let alone combat veterans, wimps and un-American is astounding! My right to criticize was born in the thick of war. Your right to criticize was born in your front rooms from watching 30-second sound bites on Fox "news." My right is carried by sacrifice, yours by privilege. A Free Iraq? As for the statement Iraq is liberated and the Iraqi people are now free, it would be laughable if it were not so very sad. Sure the Iraqi people are now free, free to be a part of the 60% unemployed and free to watch Halliburton import thousands of foreign laborers to "rebuild" Iraq. Free to watch the wholesale privatization of their nation's resources, infrastructure, economy and everything in between by the same U.S. multinationals importing labor. But the Iraqi people have been liberated. They are now free to see their fellow citizens subject to arrest, detention, torture, and murder in the same prisons that Saddam used for the very same purposes. But they have been liberated and they are now free. They are now free to watch their country turned into what it never was until the politically driven and ideology based invasion: ground zero for fools and fanatics. But Iraq has been liberated and the Iraqi people are now free. They are free to wonder, with all the money Halliburton has been paid, when they will have potable water and electricity more than 8 hours a day; they are free to wonder about this and much more. They are free to wonder why Americans pay no attention to their own General Accounting Office reports that clearly state Iraq is worse off than before the invasion. (GAO report, 6/2004: "Iraq is Worse off Than Before the War Began") I could go on for a long time enumerating the theft of Iraq, but time and space prevent that. Be that as it may, one last thought on the "liberation" of Iraq: For those willing to use the brain's memory cells, you will recall that in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, not one time was "liberating Iraq" part of the discussion. From the beginning, it was weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds over Manhattan, and the link between Saddam, bin Laden, and al Qaeda, all of which has proven to be false and deliberately so! It was when those "reasons" began to unravel that Bush's adventure morphed in to a war of "liberation." This was deliberate deception, just like with Vietnam. I for one am really tired of Bush and company pissin' on my boots while trying to convince me it's raining. The crazy part is how many of you are reaching for umbrellas. Jack Dalton is a disabled Vietnam veteran suffering from the effects of Agent Orange. He lives in Portland, Oregon. You can e-mail Jack at jack_dalton@ommp.org ************************************************************* Copyright material is distributed without profit or payment for research and educational purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107. *************************************************************
Values: Minnesota GOP Asks Activists to Report on Neighbors' Politics By Brian Faler All politics is local. But this year, it is getting downright neighborly. Take Minnesota. The state Republican Party has developed a Web site that allows its activists to tap into a database of voters whose political allegiances and concerns it would like to know. But it is not just any group of voters -- they are the activists' neighbors. The project, dubbed WebVoter, gives GOP activists the names and addresses of 25 people who live, in most cases, within a couple of blocks from them. The party has asked 60,000 supporters from across the state to figure out what issues animate their neighbors and where they stand in the political spectrum, and report that information back to the party -- with or, possibly, without their neighbors' permission. Those who seem persuadable will receive campaign literature from Republican candidates -- including President Bush -- with whom the party plans to share its data. Those deemed incorrigible Democrats will be struck from the list. "We don't want to waste our time or money on people who are not going to vote with us regardless of what we do," said Larry Colson, a Minnesota entrepreneur who helped develop the site. "We would like to be able to hone the message to people who are already with us and then people who are on the fence -- those are the people that we'd like to target." The Minnesota GOP, like many state parties, already collects voter information. It uses public information that Minnesotans provide when they register to vote, including their names, addresses and phone numbers. The party cross-references that data with information gleaned from other public and private sources. Colson, who is also the Bush campaign's "e-campaign chairman" for Minnesota, declined to say what other information the state party uses. But other state parties and campaigns typically tap demographic and consumer data taken from census reports or direct-marketing companies. The goal is to create detailed profiles of voters that will help the party decide whom it should woo -- and how. Minnesota and 22 other states do not require those registering to vote to identify their party affiliation. But through its efforts, Colson said, the party believes it has determined the political leanings of about 60 percent of the state's households. Some of the remainder -- he would not say how much -- has landed in the party's new database, a list that includes "tens of thousands" of names. The site and the party's reliance on neighborly connections, Colson said, are ways of filling those gaps. "You're more likely to tell your neighbor what your party preference is when they ask than you are to some stranger on the phone," he said. The project, which was first reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, could affect the November election in this battleground state. Democrat Al Gore won in 2000 by a little more than 2 percent of the vote -- about 60,000 ballots. The Bush campaign launched a similar effort on its Web site. Those who sign up to be campaign volunteers -- and who live in a state the campaign is targeting -- can access a list of their neighbors the campaign would like to reach. The site provides their names, addresses, phone numbers, maps of where each lives and a script with a number of questions -- including whether they are registered to vote, are opposed to abortion rights and support the president. The script also directs activists to identify themselves as Bush volunteers -- to prevent any questions as to where the respondents' information will end up, the campaign said. Colson said the Minnesota GOP has also asked its activists to identify themselves as such. But he said it is still possible that some will report on neighbors' views without their permission. "We don't really have a script, so to speak, other than 'get to know your neighbors -- talk to them.' So we've only given them rough guidelines," Colson said. "But it's not as if we're asking for Social Security number and make and model and serial number of car. We're asking for party preference," he said. "Party preference is not something that is such a personal piece of data." © 2004 The Washington Post Company Who's Got the Wrong Values Now? By E. J. Dionne Jr. Tuesday, July 13, 2004; (Page A15) It's notable that in a week when the major reasons the administration offered for the war in Iraq were undercut by a Senate intelligence committee report, our presidential candidates devoted themselves to talk about "values." The idea that our country fought a war on false premises is astonishing -- and it has a lot to do with the "values" of this administration. President Bush's government was unrelenting in trying to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to us, that he had scary weapons, that he was tied to al Qaeda and thus to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is wholly inadequate to shuck all this off on the CIA. The president was determined to scare the hell out of the country and make the case for war by whatever means necessary. "Chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained," Bush said in a speech to religious broadcasters in February 2003. "Secretly, without fingerprints, Saddam Hussein could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists or help them develop their own. Saddam Hussein is a threat. He's a threat to the United States of America." This was the president talking, not the CIA. Note that he's not telling us we should wage war against the evil Hussein for humanitarian reasons -- that was not the central rationale then, though it is now -- but because Hussein posed a threat to us that we have learned he did not. Yesterday, Bush defended his decision to go after the nation that "once had the worst government in the Middle East." And he implied that Libyan disarmament was a byproduct of his actions in Iraq. Even if that's true, Bush's current argument is a much-revised version of his original case for war. It wasn't the CIA but the president's closest advisers who resorted to the most purple and incendiary rhetoric to make sure we'd support the war. And the administration's talkers were especially eager to use their fiery rhetoric in the run-up to the 2002 midterm elections. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," declared national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Sept. 8, 2002. The same weekend, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000; it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children." And Vice President Cheney spoke with utter certainty about Hussein: "We know we have a part of the picture, and that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons." Again, was it the CIA at fault here or was the administration determined to do all it could to get us to buy into a war it was already determined to fight? What "values" freed it to exaggerate the flimsy evidence it had ("we know we have part of the picture") to get Americans thinking that Saddam Hussein could turn one of our cities into a Hiroshima or Nagasaki? Did the phony claims influence the course of the debate on the war? Of course they did. Listen to Sen. Pat Roberts, the loyal Republican from Kansas, in response to Tim Russert's question on "Meet the Press" as to whether what Roberts knows now would have led him to change his vote on the war. "I don't know if I would have or not," replied Roberts, the intelligence committee chairman. "I think the whole premise would have changed, I think the whole debate would have changed, and I think that the response would have changed in terms of any kind of military plans." As for his colleagues' votes for the war, Roberts said: "I doubt if the votes would have been there." Bush gave a powerful speech in York, Pa., last week describing his "values." He declared: "The culture of America is changing from one that has said 'If it feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame somebody else' to a culture in which each of us understands we are responsible for the decisions we make in life." That's a great idea. Applying it to the president means that he, not the CIA, is responsible for the case that was made for the war in Iraq. By the president's own logic, he can't blame a bunch of bureaucrats ("if you've got a problem, blame somebody else") for his administration's eagerness to offer the most lopsided picture possible of the threat Hussein posed. "If it feels good, do it." Bush is absolutely right that this is an inadequate approach to the decisions we face in life. The "values" that lead Bush to reject this concept should pertain especially to decisions to start wars and to the methods used to sell them. © 2004 The Washington Post Company By BOB HERBERT Published: July 16, 2004 Just as George W. Bush is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs, he is now the first president since Hoover to fail to meet with the N.A.A.C.P. during his entire term in office. Mr. Bush and the leadership of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization get along about as well as the Hatfields and the McCoys. The president was invited to the group's convention in Philadelphia this week, but he declined. That Mr. Bush thumbed his nose at N.A.A.C.P. officials is not the significant part of this story. The Julian Bonds and Kweisi Mfumes of the world can take care of themselves at least as well as Mr. Bush in the legalized gang fight called politics. What is troubling is Mr. Bush's relationship with black Americans in general. He's very good at using blacks as political props. And the props are too often part of an exceedingly cynical production. Four years ago, on the first night of the Republican convention, a parade of blacks was hauled before the television cameras (and the nearly all-white audience in the convention hall) to sing, to dance, to preach and to praise a party that has been relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century. I wrote at the time that "you couldn't tell whether you were at the Republican National Convention or the Motown Review." That exercise in modern-day minstrelsy was supposed to show that Mr. Bush was a new kind of Republican, a big-tent guy who would welcome a more diverse crowd into the G.O.P. That was fiction. It wasn't long before black voters would find themselves mugged in Florida, and soon after that Mr. Bush was steering the presidency into a hard-right turn. Among the most important props of that 2000 campaign were black children. Mr. Bush could be seen hugging them at endless photo-ops. He said a Bush administration would do great things for them. He promised to transform public education in America. He hijacked the trademarked slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, "Leave No Child Behind," and refashioned it for his own purposes. He pasted the new version, "No Child Left Behind," onto one of the signature initiatives of his presidency, a supposedly historic education reform act. The only problem is that, to date, the act has been underfunded by $26 billion. A lot of those kids the president hugged have been left behind. And why not? They can't do much for him. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" captured a telling presidential witticism. Mr. Bush, appearing before a well-heeled gathering in New York, says: "This is an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base." It wasn't really his base. But the comment spoke volumes. Mr. Bush said he was a different kind of Republican, but what black voters see are tax cuts for the very wealthy and underfunded public schools. What they see is an economy that sizzles for the haves and the have-mores, but a harrowing employment crisis for struggling blacks, especially black men. (When the Community Service Society looked at the proportion of the working-age population with jobs in New York City it found that nearly half of all black men between the ages of 16 and 64 were not working last year. That's a Depression-era statistic.) In Florida, where the president's brother is governor, and Texas, where the president once was the governor, state officials have been pulling the plug on health coverage for low-income children. The president could use his considerable clout to put a stop to that sort of thing, but he hasn't. And now we know that Florida was gearing up for a reprise of the election shenanigans of 2000. It took a court order to get the state to release a list of 48,000 suspected felons that was to be used to purge people from the voting rolls. It turned out that the list contained thousands of names of black people, who tend to vote Democratic, and hardly any names of Hispanics, who in Florida tend to vote Republican. Once their "mistake" was caught, the officials scrapped the list. Mr. Bush plans to address the Urban League convention in Detroit next week. That would be an excellent time for him to explain to an understandably skeptical audience why he campaigned one way — as a big-tent compassionate conservative — and governed another. Failure Is Not an Option, It's Mandatory Published: July 16, 2004
WASHINGTON For three days this week the nation was transfixed by the spectacle of the United States Senate, in all its august majesty, doing precisely the opposite of statesmanlike deliberation. Instead, it was debating the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would not only have discriminated against a large group of citizens, but also was doomed to defeat from the get-go. Everyone knew this harebrained notion would never draw the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment, and yet here were all these conservatives lining up to speak for it, wasting day after day with their meandering remarks about culture while more important business went unattended. What explains this folly? Not simple bigotry, as some pundits declared, or even simple politics. While it is true that the amendment was a classic election-year ploy, it owes its power as much to a peculiar narrative of class hostility as it does to homophobia or ideology. And in this narrative, success comes by losing. For more than three decades, the Republican Party has relied on the "culture war" to rescue their chances every four years, from Richard Nixon's campaign against the liberal news media to George H. W. Bush's campaign against the liberal flag-burners. In this culture war, the real divide is between "regular people" and an endlessly scheming "liberal elite." This strategy allows them to depict themselves as friends of the common people even as they gut workplace safety rules and lay plans to turn Social Security over to Wall Street. Most important, it has allowed Republicans to speak the language of populism. The amendment may have failed as law, but as pseudopopulist theater it was a masterpiece. Each important element of the culture-war narrative was there. Consider first its choice of targets: while the Senate's culture warriors denied feeling any hostility to gay people, they made no secret of their disgust with liberal judges, a tiny, arrogant group that believes it knows best in all things and harbors an unfathomable determination to run down American culture and thus made this measure necessary. Sam Brownback, senator from my home state, Kansas, may have put it best: "Most Americans believe homosexuals have a right to live as they choose. They do not believe a small group of activists or a tiny judicial elite have a right to redefine marriage and impose a radical social experiment on our entire society." What's more, according to the outraged senators, these liberal judges were acting according to a plan. Maybe no one used the term "conspiracy," but Mr. Brownback asserted that the Massachusetts judges who allowed gay marriages to proceed there were merely mouthing a "predetermined outcome"; Orrin Hatch of Utah asserted that "these were not a bunch of random, coincidental legal events"; and Jim Bunning of Kentucky warned how "the liberals, who have no respect for the law" had "plotted out a state-by-state strategy" that they were now carrying out, one domino at a time. Our age-old folkways, in other words, are today under siege from a cabal of know-it-all elites. The common people are being trampled by the intellectuals. This is precisely the same formula that was used, to great effect, in the nasty spat over evolution that Kansans endured in 1999, in which the elitists said to be forcing their views on the unassuming world were biology professors and those scheming paleontologists. And, as do the partisans of each of these other culture-causes, the proponents of the marriage amendment made soaring, grandiose claims for the significance of the issue they were debating. While editorialists across the nation tut-tutted and reminded the senators that they had important work they ought to be doing, the senators fired back that in fact they were debating that most important of all possible subjects. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who took particular offense at the charges of insignificance, argued that this was a debate about nothing less than "the glue that holds the basic foundational societal unit together." Wake up, America! Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion. Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object. The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured. Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it. Thomas Frank is the author, most recently, of "What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America." |
