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2/15/10: The liberals back east Big government is the new boogieman. Or should I say the old one. Ronald Reagan famously said that government is the problem, and this simplistic statement has found resonance with generations of conservatives, from the greedy elites, who adore the fallacies of trickle-down economics, to the angry populists of the tea party movement. When it comes to the tea partiers, their new-found hysteria over deficits underscores how well they’ve been manipulated by the likes of Beck and Hannity, because during Bush’s 8 years, while deficit spending soared, not least because of unprecedented tax breaks for the super rich that yielded little for the middle class, the tea partiers, the pundits, and the Republican congressmen and senators who now loudly decry Obama’s deficit spending were all curiously silent. In fact, those elected officials were actually complicit, voting for drug bills, increased privatization, boondoggle arms procurements, no bid contracts, tax breaks, and, of course, ill-fated military adventures, all of which cost every tax payer dearly. Now they shed crocodile tears and have become born-again fiscal conservatives. And the average Joe on the street has likewise once again caught the fever of fiscal conservatism; Except when it comes to his tax breaks; Or our obscene and ultimately untenable military budget; Or the two wars that are costing more than all of the fiscal stimulus plans put together. What’s more, that same man on the street, who somehow feels that taxes are an unnecessary burden, expects the National Guard to save his house from floods, the forest service to protect his home from wildfires, the military to protect him from foreign aggression and domestic insurrection; Somehow. Even more of a disconnect becomes apparent when you study the demographics of these fiscal conservatives. They dominate the red states that voted for Bush Cheney, and also for McCain Palin. But most of the red states are fiscal leaches, net beneficiaries of federal funding to states. In fact, some 76% of the states that voted for Bush in 2000 are pigs at the federal trough, taking far more than their fair share. Some of the worst offenders include that fiercely independent state, North Dakota, which gets over 2 dollars back from evil big government for every dollar it puts in. Mississippi, which nets $1.84, and of course, when you include their unshared oil revenues, America’s biggest socialist experiment and welfare state, Alaska. And the biggest losers? Places like New York, Massachusetts, and California. Those miserable liberals who want to waste people’s hard-earned tax dollars are wasting them on… subsidizing born-again populists who keep whining about the bloated federal government while they feast on its largesse. It’s so ironic as to be laughable, but I’m not laughing. At a tea party meetup the other day, a speaker accused the federal government of ‘stealing our hard-earned tax dollars to send to those liberals back east’ – an almost complete inversion of the facts. But let’s not confuse these folks with the truth. The fact is that almost all of the Bush tax cut money went to the super-rich. A stunning 1.8 trillion dollars, a sum that exceeds even the health care bill. That, plus his reckless war in Iraq has cost the American taxpayer far, far more than any Democratic president in modern history, but that’s another inconvenient truth. Ironically, what damaged Bush’s reputation the most was not his profligate spending and mad cowboy disease warmongering. What really turned the American people against him was the failure of big government after Katrina. People were rightly incensed that the most powerful country in the world seemed completely helpless and useless. Some even blamed big government for this, pointing out that Wal Mart and other non-governmental organizations provided speedier, more efficient aid. But they missed the larger point: the capable James Lee Witt, director of FEMA during the Clinton administration, was sacked by Bush and replaced with the clueless, do nothing, fiddle-while-Rome-burns ,‘Brownie’, Michael Brown. Under Bush, FEMA’s budget was slashed, and it once again became a dumping ground for political appointees, hacks like Brown who were owed favors. It wasn’t big government by its nature that failed the residents of the Gulf coast, but rather the hollowing out of big government, which has been destroyed by privatization, budget cuts, and cronyism. If the tea partiers really want to put their money where their mouth is, they should start sending our government the money they’re stealing from the liberals back East. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 1/06/10: Am I a Commie or A capitalist? My car is festooned with bumper stickers. Some favorites include “Abstinence Makes the Church Grow Fondlers”, “Alternative Energy is Homeland Security” and “These Colors Don’t Run… the World”. This last one in particular seems to provoke the ire of right wingers. Recently I picked up a new deer rifle at a local sporting goods store. As I returned to my car, I found a note on the windshield that said “Expletive you and your Expletive Commie Bumper Stickers”. It also had a rather fetching smiley face drawn at the bottom as a lovely coda. Sure, ‘Commie’ is one of those all-purpose epithets that has essentially lost all meaning to most who wield it, but since I’d just seen Michael Moore’s film about Capitalism, I began to wonder, am I a Commie? With apologies to Michael Moore, I think I’m actually a bit of a Capitalist. Certainly, I do not believe in an equal share of wealth for everyone. For example, I do not believe that a lazy person deserves my standard of living. I also believe that this thing called the ‘profit motive’ which Moore seems to find distasteful, obviously works. One has only to look at China and Russia: when their collective farms were given the opportunity to sell some of their harvest on the open market and keep the profit, giving them a direct incentive to work harder, their production soared. This is human nature. In fact, when you take studies of such diverse animals as chimps and macaws into account, one might even make a case that it’s a near universal natural law of social economy, replete with ancillary laws such as ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’. I believe in a meritocracy. You work hard, you contribute; you live better. You’re lazy, shirk your duty, you live worse. And I believe in private property. I’m hardly a ‘Commie’. But that doesn’t mean I believe in the greedy, self-destructive form of Capitalism we have today. Our current system is like a snake eating its own tail. It is so obsessed with short-term profit that it is actively consuming itself. The environment is despoiled for short term gain. Dishonesty and poor workmanship are rewarded for those well-connected. And most alarming, human capital – the experience and skills of innumerable workers, is squandered and often thrown away like scrap iron. And, because the true cost some commodities, like coal and nuclear power, are not rolled into their market value, they remain artificially cheap when compared to more environmentally benign technologies like solar and wind. The system is rigged. It’s not a free-market at all. It’s not true capitalism. It is, indeed, a bit closer to the tenets of fascism, which might be paraphrased a bit like ‘what’s good for business is good for America’. That, assumes, of course, that this thing we call business, has America’s best interests at heart. It doesn’t. Corporations are soul-less creations with no morality and only one imperative: make a profit at all costs. If a human were so constructed, he’d be called a dangerous psychopath. Instead of free market Capitalism, we have the worst of both worlds: a largely unregulated economic system that rewards greed, human degradation and environmental destruction, and a nice safe back-door policy that has made sure, since at least the 1880’s, that the truly huge players are protected from their own recklessness. The irony is that if we lived in an actual laissez faire Capitalist system, while many things would be worse, there would also be no bailouts, no ‘too big to fail’. Halliburton would go broke because their shoddy construction that electrocutes troops and their vastly overpriced consulting fees would fail in a truly free market. No bid government contracts would cease to exist. Large banks and brokerage houses that took daredevil risks with their investments would go bust, probably triggering a vast meltdown as their underwriters, like Goldman Sacks, also failed. In a true ‘free market’, who you know, and who you contributed campaign dollars and other forms of bribery to, wouldn’t matter; which is, of course, why the idea of a true ‘free market economy’ is a total fiction. We are chattel, bought and paid for by transnational corporations just like coal or soybeans. There’s nothing ‘free’ about it. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 12/11/09: Obama Sells Out Shortly after Obama was inaugurated, I wrote a commentary that was quite critical of his economic team, which was composed of the very people who had created the financial crisis in the first place. I ended the commentary by suggesting that the age of Obama was starting to sound more like ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ than ‘a change is gonna come’. But disillusioned as I’d become about his domestic agenda, I still hoped that Obama would shine on foreign policy – that he might truly turn the ungainly ship of Empire around and return it to port. After all, it’s quite clear that America is following a long line of Imperial mistakes before it, vitiating itself with ever more military adventures, while provoking the ire of subjugated peoples, who are increasingly fighting back, weakening America like Lilliputians tying down Gulliver. But here, again, Obama has either caved to his corporate masters, or is showing his own true colors. He hasn’t extracted us from either of the costly wars we’re mired in; he’s escalated our involvement, apparently heeding the specious advice to ‘listen to the commanders on the ground’. Those commanders not surprisingly say what such men have always said, everywhere, throughout history: give us more men and arms and we’ll get the job done. Because their only tool is the hammer of military might, they perceive everything as a nail that must be struck repeatedly. Obama’s taken the Bush position that suspects can be held indefinitely without trial at our new Guantanamo, Bagram Air Force base. His administration has decided to continue the Bush policy of rendition, wherein suspects are picked up the world over and sent to ‘friendly regimes’ for questioning. The administration reassured the public that this policy would be closely monitored to prevent ‘prisoner abuse’. The entire purpose of rendition is to move a suspect to a country that has more brutal interrogation methods than our own! It’s extra-legal government-executed kidnapping that completely undermines American verbiage about ‘respecting the rule of law’. Then Obama refused to do anything more than lightly slap Israel’s wrist when that country once again threw gasoline on the fire by confiscating more land, tearing down more Palestinian housing, and going on a spree of new settlement building. The Palestinians have wisely refused to negotiate with Israel until this madness stops, but Obama is offering no carrot, and more importantly no stick, to compel the Israelis. Even George Bush senior was tougher on them, once suggesting that he would cease supporting loan guarantees for Israel if they didn’t stop building. President Obama is going to Copenhagen for climate talks, it’s true, and on the environment he is clearly a better president than either Bush was, but it’s still too little, too late. The massive public-works projects in renewable energy that this administration could have spent the stimulus money on have been largely swapped for bureaucratic expansion and conventional highway construction. His approach is more fiddling while Rome burns, than ‘change we can believe in’. White house visitor logs show that our president is eschewing meetings with progressive voices on health coverage, the economy, the environment, and economic justice, meeting instead with corporate interests and their lobbyists on these very subjects. Sound familiar? Mr. Obama topped it all. Our newly-minted Nobel Prize winner’s administration stated that the United States has decided to maintain the Bush administration's refusal to sign an international treaty banning land mines. But that makes sense: not only does America spend more on defense-related matters than all other countries on earth combined, but it’s also the biggest arms dealer, the biggest supplier of weapons of destruction, both mass and individual, on our planet as well. Frankly, I’m disgusted. Far from being instruments of seismic change, Obama’s policies support the status quo with an almost slavish fealty. I can’t for the life of me understand the hysterical comparisons of Obama to Stalin and Hitler on the right. These must be engendered by racism, pure and simple, because far from being on the radical fringe, Mr. Obama appears to be a middle of the road, bought-and-paid-for tool of corporate America, offering us a sort of ‘Bush Light’ foreign and domestic policy. At the end of the day, the man who wrote the brilliant, touching and humane ‘Dreams from my father’, and promised us sweeping change, has sold out himself, and all those who believed in him. But it’s our fault; for once again we wanted, needed to believe that this country could change, even though all of its institutions, from the legislative, executive and judicial branches to its ‘free’ press, are now basically appendages of multi-national corporations. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 9/16/09: In recent months, The psychotic sophistries of right wing pundits have gone gonzo. It's as if losing the election has blown their minds. First, there was Sean Hannity's 'tree of liberty'. I defy any sane adult to not fall down laughing after viewing it. Mr. Hannity shows us an old-timey illustration of the tree of liberty, complete with roots named Liberty, Freedom, etc, combining into a strong trunk. Above this trunk there are apples, named commerce, security etc. Then Mr. Hannity tells us that since Obama has become president, all of these apples have fallen into, I kid you not, the 'apple crate of socialism'. This entire cartoon seems to be for two year olds, but it's not, it's for the supposedly adult viewers of his program. Do his viewers never stop to think that by Hannity's definition, government-run institutions like fire, police, and military forces, and even public schools and hospitals, are equally 'socialist'. Later in the week, he tried to stir public ire over the fact that President Obama ordered a hamburger with Dijon mustard on it. Oh dear, how elitist! It's shocking that the president might want an exotic condiment like grey poupon mustard instead of Heinz ketchup. No, wait a minute, if he'd ordered Heinz, he'd be funding Theresa Heinz Kerry's evil radical agenda. I'm sure that was on tap as the diligent Hannity production team parsed Mr. Obama's menu choices. Rush Limbaugh accused the president of coddling the Somalis who'd taken an American sea captain hostage. He called them 'black Muslim teenagers', the implication being: hey, Obama's black, and maybe he's Muslim too. Yes, and maybe on weekends President Obama secretly goes swashbuckling in the gulf of Aden with distant dangerous relatives from the Dark Continent. Scary! Of course, once those pirates were dispassionately killed by Navy Seal snipers and the hostage freed, Limbaugh changed his tune - he then criticized the president's 'slow response'. Now Limbaugh has topped it all by suggesting that Governor Mark Sanford's affair was caused by his extreme distress at having to accept Obama's stimulus package money. OK, let's forget for a moment that Sanford's been having an affair for over a year, i.e. since before Obama was president. Are we really supposed to believe that a prominent Republican, who was until his recent self immolation thought to be a presidential contender, is so weak that he would break his marriage vows under the duress of… performing his executive duties? Is this the supposedly macho Republican Party we're talking about here, or a bunch of those famously weak wristed liberals? OK, I know that this president can do no right as far as these folks are concerned. Their job is to throw raw meat to mouth-breathing australopithecines (I wouldn't insult the intelligence of Neanderthals by calling them that), but surely even these intellectually challenged listeners must at some point find this nitpicking, absurdist bloviating to be too much. It defies logic that an adult, who knows the rudiments of personal hygiene, can tie their shoes, read and write, and drive a car, can take any of this seriously. And this is what I find so distressing about these supposed pundits, and many more from Michael Weiner AKA 'Michael Savage' to the joyously malevolent Ann Coulter. It's not that they exist, not even that some media executive might want to put them on the air because their extremist views are consonant with his own. No, it's that these people have massive, massive audiences. Who are these millions upon millions of people who follow the pundits, no matter how absurd their rationales, or egregious their hypocrisies. Rush Limbaugh railed against drug addicts for years, yet he was caught with an astounding 30,000 Oxycontin pills. Anyone other than a celebrity of his magnitude would have gone away for a long, long time for possession with intent to distribute. But Rush kept his job. The question is, how did he keep his listeners? How could these people still respect the world's greatest hypocrite? And how is America to prosper when so many Americans are this credulous, and this easily manipulated, whether into nonsensical 'tea party' protests or murderous attacks on doctors? Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 9/11/09: The Lockerbie bomber The DJ on my car radio was incensed. The Lockerbie bomber had been released. My first thoughts echoed his: it was indecent that this killer was not only released, but received a hero’s welcome back home in Libya. Yes, I admit it; I’m just not that forgiving a guy. I don’t think a terminally-ill convicted killer should be released on compassionate grounds so that he might spend his last days with friends and family. If he truly is guilty, he deserves to spend his last days, his last breath, rotting in jail. But other thoughts arose as well. One was that many of the Lockerbie victim’s families doubted his guilt. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed, said: "I went into that court in Holland thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter. I came out of it thinking he had been framed." A bereaved father’s statement of support for the alleged killer of his child carries a lot of weight with me, as do those of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which termed the conviction a possible miscarriage of justice. Where was the media coverage of these nuances? Surely they may even have played a part in his release, yet I heard nothing about them on CNN, ABC, NPR. My next thought was even more troubling, and it brought me back to the outrage of the DJ, and to my own reflexive anger. How, I thought, can we all feel such outrage when the United States has been harboring a serial terrorist bomber for years? Louis Posada Carilles is largely thought to be responsible for the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all aboard, including the mostly teenage members of the Cuban National Fencing Team. He has been convicted in abstentia in several countries for bombings and bombing plots, and was thought by our own FBI to have been involved in literally hundreds of bombings of Cuban targets in Cuba, Honduras, Panama and Venezuela. Washington even denied an extradition request from the Venezuelan Supreme Court, and Carilles continues to live in the United States though he has actually admitted to several bombings. He said of one bombing in Cuba, that killed an Italian-Canadian national: “It is sad someone is dead, but we cannot stop.” He also worked for Colonel Oliver North and General Richard Secord as they secretly and illegally armed Contra death squads in Nicaragua. Of course, North, a man who did everything he could to subvert our constitution by doing an end run around our laws and our congress, is now a well paid radio and TV personality and a darling ‘patriot’ of the right. It seems that no bad deed goes unrewarded for these murderous thugs, and the airwaves are strangely mute about their crimes and our government’s continuing complicity. George Bush senior once said these telling words: “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist” – and there, in one sentence, is all you need to know about the moral expediency of the United States. We will protect a bloodthirsty killer involved in literally scores of bombings of civilian targets because he is the enemy of our enemy. And while protecting him, we will respond with self-righteous outrage when another bomber, whose guilt is far less established, is set free. How sad that the frothing right, and even the average American citizen has forgotten the wisdom of Thomas Paine, one of the pivotal figures of the American revolution, who said “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression.”. The American policy of covert wars against countries we do not like, wars that often kill innocent civilians, is immoral and reprehensible. America has no solid moral footing, and seems unlikely to develop one when the Obama administration is enthusiastically continuing Bush polices of rendition and holding people without trial at a sort of Guantanimo lite – the Bagram air force base. Our government, our media, and most of our political commentators, appear to be rank hypocrites as they protest torture, terrorism and oppression in places like Libya and Iran while they refuse to acknowledge, or sometimes even actively cover up, their own country’s equivalent crimes. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 8/20/09: Country Gone Mad Suddenly, the tea parties are old news. The freak-out de jour is healthcare, and people are so profoundly ignorant about the issue that one woman begged the President not to let the government take over Medicare. 'Scuse me mam, but just who do you think administers Medicare, the tooth fairy? This is, of course, not the organically-grown 'grassroots' movement the conservative commentators are crowing as a fine example of democracy. It's funded by special interests, and carried to the people on multitudes of conservative talkshows. And these fine examples of democracy are in fact screaming, shouting people down, and threatening God's retribution. They resemble a feral mob of brown shirts from Hitler's Germany, not concerned citizens looking for dialogue and compromise. The Right isn't interested in dialogue; they're interested in winning at all costs, even if the cost is the end of the grand democratic experiment that is America. I think we're approaching the greatest threat to our democracy since at least the Great Depression. Day by day, my hopes for a post-racial America, and an America that really stands for liberty and justice are crumbling under an onslaught of disgusting, thinly-veiled racist vitriol and lynch mob mentality. We've had people with assault rifles coming to our president's speeches. One man, with a pistol strapped to his leg carried a sign saying 'It's time to water the tree of liberty'. When questioned by the media, he played dumb - oh no, I'm not advocating violence. There was no reference to blood on my sign. Of course, his sign implicitly references bloodshed, since the famous Jefferson quote it paraphrases is: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." This quote, a former favorite of mine, was sullied forever by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. His favorite tee shirt was emblazoned with it. Apparently Mr. McVeigh convinced himself that the women and children he blew up were either patriots or tyrants, rather than victims of a sick, twisted little man. A nascent threat to the president is evident at every speaking engagement, along with a veritable flood of racial caricature. We've had a seemingly endless parade of Republican party figures outed for emailing or mailing unbelievably racist caricatures of our president, from Obama in a witch doctor's outfit, to the white house garden filled with watermelon. A Boston cop email blasted out a letter comparing professor Louis Gates to a "banana-eating jungle monkey'. His lawyer said the comments were "taken out of context" - how in God's name can you take something like that out of context? We've had two Fox News personalities inadvertently voicing their innermost thoughts this way: Brian Kilmeade said "we [Americans] keep marrying other species and other ethnicities . . . Swedes have pure genes . . . in America we marry everybody..." Glenn Beck said: "Obama is a racist who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." I'm not sure what white culture is. Is it personified by the transcontinental railroad, built largely with the toil and blood of Chinese immigrants? Or theAmerican cowboy, who was very often black? Or perhaps our constitution, large parts of which were lifted from the Iroquois? The fantasy that white people alone made this great country persists in the minds of these troglodytes, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Many whites still look back to the 1950's as a golden time. Funny, I see it as a time of shame, when large parts of America practiced apartheid and lynching, and people were blacklisted for their beliefs. It was a time of paranoia, censorship, and lockstep conformity - none of which are the hallmarks of a great democracy. So how do we defend our democracy? Surely joining the shouting match isn't the way. I don't want to be a bully, but I don't want to sit idly by while my country is highjacked by a bunch of crazy, ignorant racists either. Well, money talks, and Glenn Beck's show has lost a slew of advertisers who felt he went too far - but not until they received tons of mail from outraged Americans. Perhaps a boycott of every Fox advertiser is a start. If you've got a better idea, I'm all ears. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 7/7/09: Who is the Pharoah? An Israeli government official recently likened the Obama administration's call for a complete cessation of any new settlement activity in the occupied territories, to a pharaonic decree to cast newborn sons into the river. What an arrogant, twisted and spiteful piece of verbal mischief. The idea is that Israel must expand, and that limiting the so-called 'natural growth' of the settlements is in effect, inhibiting Jewish birthrates. I guess by this logic, the Palestinians, who have a much higher birth-rate than Israel's, should eventually be given her territory, as their numbers swell. Of course this bit of sophistry is laughable, but it plays on deeply-held religious convictions, and so it plays with fire. A little sunlight on the subject: The pharaohs taxed the Jews, and enslaved them. The United States government, under every administration since the 1940's, has subsidized the Jewish state. We are hardly some cold ruler lording it over our subjects. We're more like an angry parent, finally telling our kid that if he doesn't stop bullying the entire neighborhood, we're going to cut his allowance and ground him. Or rather, that's what I wish we were saying. The Jewish state can continue its insane and inflammatory policy of grabbing more and more of other people's land. It can continue to throw gasoline and thermite on the flames. I'm not advocating that we force Israel through military action to comply. But just as Israel is free to pursue a course of action that is not only suicidal, but holds great risks for America, the United States should feel free to politely decline any more military and economic aid to Israel. I for one am sick of the tail wagging the dog. It is our largesse, our good will that has kept the state of Israel alive. In return, she has spied on us on several occasions, and resolutely refuses to moderate her behavior. This is not a relationship of give and take. There is no reciprocal compromise. In fact, I'd say that it's Israel that resembles a haughty pharaoh, not the Obama administration. Israel's intransigence, it's theft of land and huge quantities of water from indigenous Palestinians, threatens world stability. It's arguable that neither 9-11, or the attacks on the USS Cole and our embassies in Africa would have occurred if we hadn't given Israel carte blanche all these years. If she wants to go her own way, unheeding of the consequences, I see no reason why we should feel required to pick up the tab. Israel needs boundaries. She needs be told, no, we will not stand by while you make things worse, subjugating a people, forcing them into little Bantustans, throwing their human rights in the toilet. We will not give you the money or the armaments to burn civilians with white phosphorus, scatter brightly-colored cluster bombs that look like plastic toys into densely populated neighborhoods, nor have your infantry make sport of shooting unarmed civilians. America does not fund Hamas. Consequently we don't have much sway with them. Much as I'd love to see Hamas and Hezzbolah destroyed, I feel less responsible for the evils they commit because my tax dollars aren't funding them, as they are funding Israel's. If you ever needed proof that lobbyists, rather than the will of the people control policy, one has only to look at the contrast between the stated policy goals of the pro-Israeli lobby groups, and the results of polls of American Jewry. American Jews are far more critical of Israel's policies, far more likely to want the US government to attach strings to our aid to Israel, and far more likely to support a free and contiguous Palestinian state right now. Politicians are listening to the lobbyists, not the people, on all issues, and it's time, on the issues of Israel, American foreign policy, American domestic policy, the environment, and our insane military budget, for the people to make some noise and take back their country. And it's time for the state of Israel to show some respect, flexibility and humility towards their best friend in the world, and stop whining like an eternal victim. Bullies don't make good victims. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 6/5/09: Two Kinds of People There appears to be a great divide between people who feel that you must believe what they believe, and people who couldn't care less. I fall into the latter category. You're straight or gay? I don't care. Religious? An atheist? As long as you don't abridge anyone's rights, threaten their loved ones, pollute their land, air and water, force them to listen to your sermons, or dress like you, think like you, it's none of my business. But then there are those other folks. Osama Bin Laden feels that everyone the world over must convert to Islam. Many fundamentalist Christians feel that everyone must come to Jesus. George Bush felt that Democracy must be foisted upon the rest of the world at gunpoint - a position not too fundamentally different from Bin Laden's call for a worldwide Caliphate. I think this grasping for control comes from a common psychological flaw, a fundamental fear of the basic, chaotic nature of life. For some people, the existential terror borne of the intuition that nature is inherently without rules and profoundly indifferent to human striving and suffering causes anxiety and a yearning for rules, easy answers, and above all, structure. It's like the lack an internal moral compass and belief system forces some to subsume their individuality into a container that keeps their terror at bay. This would be all well and good except that they inevitably want, need, everyone else to agree with them. Their worldview must be ratified by lock-step conformity to their beliefs. Anyone who disagrees with them is a profound threat to the fragile construct of their belief system. They turn to all manner of coercive institutions: extreme fundamentalist churches, street gangs, cults; anything to give them a ready-made set of beliefs and a community that doesn't question them. Governments are somewhat similar, though often less extreme, than these other more overtly disturbing institutions. Government is by its nature rigid, coercive. It promotes all manner of conformity and punishes those who stray too far. I distrust it fundamentally for this reason. But accepting the government's sway over me is a compromise I make because I distrust anarchy even more. I may hate the fact that I must file plans and pay fees to put a deck on my house, something the framers would no doubt find oppressively intrusive, but do I want an EPA to protect me against polluters? Do I want an armed forces to belay aggression? You bet. Recently the French government banned headscarves in the public schools, which seems an obvious breach of human rights. But that's small potatoes. In Saudi Arabia or Iran, you can wear a full Burka, a total body covering, with a mesh scrim hiding even your eyes, but if you wear makeup or a sundress, you may be arrested, beaten by so-called 'virtue police', or even scarred and blinded by acid. This need of some to control others seems patently absurd and dangerous to those of us who have no such desire. Framed another way - perhaps if all people were forced to wear purple on Wednesdays - it would probably appear absurd to everyone. But instead, it's couched in those damnable abstracts: the Bible, the Koran, Democracy, and, most laughably in this context: 'Freedom'. If I truly lived in a free country, even public nudity would be legal. Think of it, an artificial man-made institution is asserting the right to force you to cover your own body. In essence, it has codified how much cloth must cover which body parts. How absurd! How laughable! Who I sleep with, what I wear, ingest, listen to, believe in, pray or don't pray to, is fundamentally no one else's business, unless my actions abridge other peoples rights and freedoms. This seems like a no-brainer to me, and yet you and I tacitly give our government freedom to regulate all of these liberties, even, in extreme cases, those involving prayer and religious rites. The difference between what we tolerate, and what zealots of all stripes obdurately seek to is foist upon us is only a matter of degree, not substance. What a lovely world this would be if we could welcome everyone's differences with open arms, secure in the validity of our own beliefs, for our own selves alone. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 5/22/09: Things liberals take for granted Many liberals mock right-wingers for a tendency to, shall we say, be inconsistent in their views. When he's ahead on election night, Norm Coleman suggests that if Al Franken demands a recount, he's wasting taxpayer money. Months later, now that Norm's behind… well, that's a different story. Most right wingers whine that state's rights should trump the federal government, unless those rights support a woman's right to abortion, or abridge the rights of gun owners to own personal howitzers. But what of liberals? Are they so consistent? My stepmother bitterly attacked the Quakers for supporting a ban on abortion, though she'd often demonstrated with them against capital punishment.. I'm not equating abortion with execution, but I can see the Quaker position as ethical, consistent, and truly 'pro-life'. Many liberals support the complete unrestrained right to abortion virtually up to the end of the third trimester. No compromise is acceptable to them, because if one equates the killing of, say, an eight month old fetus with that of a newborn, it's a slippery slope. I for one feel that third trimester abortions are wrong. An eight month old fetus is way, way closer to a newborn than to a blastula, even if certain ardent feminists wish to pretend it isn't. How about gay marriage and polygamy? Most liberals I know support gay marriage, but view polygamy as evil patriarchal slavery. Now, I know that polygamy can involve young girls forced into marriage under extreme duress. No sane person supports that. But there are polygamous families wherein the wives are doctors, lawyers, high-powered executives, and they are often quite articulate about their appreciation of their familial structure. Is a liberal any more justified in abridging the freedom of these consenting adults than is a conservative wishing to do the same to a gay couple? I think that any consenting group of adults can form any kind of family unit they wish, as long as they don't abridge anyone else's rights. Until a few hundred years ago, the vast majority of humans were polygamous or polyandrous. Monogamy is a relatively recent phenomenon; yet many liberals view any divergence from it as innately wrong. Why? Liberals by and large decry capital punishment as morally unjustified. Yet how many of them would hesitate to kill someone who'd raped and murdered their toddler? I am steadfastly against capital punishment because innocent people, particularly non-white and poor people, are mostly the ones that end up getting executed. But I support the concept that an irredeemable killer should be escorted off the planet posthaste, like a rabid animal, and I find that concept morally justifiable. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way of enforcing it justly. Circumcision is another favorite. Female genital circumcision is rightly condemned as a heinous form of mutilation. But what of male circumcision? Female circumcision is obviously far more barbaric, causing lifelong pain and debility, but both are forms of ritual mutilation that are implicitly accepted within certain societies. Sure circumcised males have fewer incidences of certain diseases than uncircumcised ones, but is that really good enough? Would such an argument be taken seriously if applied to female circumcision? I decided to not circumcise my son, even though I'm a Jew, after witnessing several Brissin. A bris is the ritual circumcision of a newborn male child. Let me tell you, those babies feel pain! They cry pitifully, with obvious looks of shock and agony on their little faces. I decided not to welcome my child into this world with searing pain, and for that, I was called a child abuser by some - interestingly, all of them liberal feminists. Yet scientists have found that the foreskin can give both partners more pleasure. And there is anecdotal evidence that circumcised males have higher incidences of both premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction. The foreskin is the densest aggregation of nerves in the male human body outside of the brain and spine; yet we cut it off all the time, without a backward glance, because this form of mutilation, and make no mistake, that is what it is, is accepted as normal by our society. Provincial cultural chauvinism affects those on the left as well as the right. Let he who is without double standards cast the first stone. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 5/20/09: Swine Flu and Racism During the first few weeks of the Swine flu outbreak, many conservatives insulted Mexico and Mexicans by implying that it was a pestilential third world cesspool, and that only such a country could be the source of a dangerous epidemic. With sad predictability, they then proceeded to link the outbreak to their lust for deporting all illegal aliens and sealing the borders. This didn't surprise me at all. These people, short on logic, but over-endowed with vitriol and hyperbole, are masters of conflation. Their facile minds can bind even the most patently disparate subjects together for ideological gain. One perfect example of this is Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who recently pointed out the 'odd coincidence' that the two times swine flu has broken out, democratic presidents were in office. Apart from the fact that she's wrong - Gerald Ford was president during the last outbreak - the real point is that she recklessly fashioned two utterly unrelated semi-facts into nonsense that implies some sort of evil conspiracy. So it is with winguts of all political stripes. But what really caught me up short was when some co-workers and friends darkly commented 'well, you know where the flu came from' - damning Mexico, sotto voce, with the same broad brush as right-wing hate radio hosts . I didn't expect this from co-workers, let alone friends. Of course the problem with these folks, besides an obvious unconscious proclivity for discrimination, is that their conclusions are utterly specious. First world agribusiness is responsible for many of the nasty biological scourges we're struggling with today, from Mad Cow to MRSA, and there is even compelling new evidence that this particular flu actually got its start in California. American agribusinesses pioneered the concept of the factory farm, which is as different from the family farm as the space shuttle is from a Ford pickup. The classical family farm raised crops and livestock together, rotating pastureland and crop land, with the livestock serving as perfect 'mobile fertilizer units' through their manure. Animals lived in low-density pastureland and airy barns. Because of fresh air, exercise, and a generally low-stress lifestyle, disease rates were low. Then factory farms started raising single breeds of single species of animals, stacked together in incredibly dense living conditions. Often, their pens were so small, they couldn't even turn around. They got no exercise, no fresh air, and lived in a state of continual stress and agitation. The combination of density, stress, and lack of air, sunlight and exercise produced a perfect storm for germs to incubate. Disease rates soared. To counteract this problem, did agribusiness see the error of its ways and lower the density? Did they give the animals more access to sunlight, fresh air, and exercise? No, instead they started dosing them throughout their entire lives with antibiotics. This turned the perfect storm into a hurricane. Now the germs were encouraged to mutate as well. This constant immune suppression of the animals, coupled with the low-level antibiotics and the terrible living conditions was a tailor-made recipe for drug-resistant germs. And the traces of antibiotics in the meat itself also encouraged the formation of such germs within people. But things got worse. Some bright number cruncher somewhere decided that cattle could be fed a mixture of grain, chicken manure (yes, I said manure) and rendered fat and meat byproducts from so-called 'downed animals' - animals too sick to be slaughtered for food. For the first time in history, herbivore ruminants like cows were being fed animal by-products, usually from very sick animals. The result was the introduction of Mad Cow disease into our meat supply. To this day, the Department of Agriculture refuses to let independent cattlemen test their meat for Mad Cow - because they are afraid of what will be discovered. Along with agribusiness, the Department of Agriculture is obviously more concerned with profit than with public health and safety. Because of this bottomless zeal for profit at any cost, American corporations are far more responsible for many health epidemics, from salmonella to swine flu, than the poor people of the third world are. The sooner we face this, the sooner we will turn from jingoistic demagoguery to rational discourse. Hopefully, that will lead to more humane and sustainable farming for everyone the world over. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 4/30/09: I was recently in Rome for a couple of weeks. Shortly before I came home, I went to St. Peter's Cathedral in Vatican City. After exploring the cathedral, I went down into the crypts below the main altar. As I wandered the maze of subterranean halls, I saw the sarcophagi of many ancient popes lining the walls, and then I saw Pope John-Paul's. Unlike the older ones, his was festooned with mounds of fresh flowers. I remembered the recent news stories that John-Paul's beatification, the first step toward sainthood, had been 'fast tracked' by Pope Benedict. I recalled a friend from home who wears a bracelet that supports John-Paul's beatification. And then I recalled that when the Catholic priest sex scandals erupted, Pope John-Paul steadfastly refused to admit any church wrongdoing, to apologize, or even to meet with the families of the victims. Actually, he went much farther: in act of stunning callousness, the Pope actually rewarded one the prime enablers of these predators. Archbishop Bernard Law of the archdiocese of Boston participated personally in the repeated cover-up of pedophile priests who were preying on innocent children. For example, he moved priests from parish to parish within the diocese despite repeated allegations of molestation of children under their care. Some of these priests had a 30 year history of complaints from parents, children, even nuns and other priests, and had abused scores of children, yet Law and his subordinates not only continued to reassign these predators from one parish to another whenever complaints arose, they actively bullied and threatened any clergy or laity who had the temerity to complain. It was the victims and the whistleblowers, not the perpetrators, who were blamed and pilloried by the archdiocese. When the scandal that Law and the Catholic hierarchy tried to suppress finally broke open, their abuse of the victims continued. Families were pressured to settle for almost nothing and to maintain silence. Their loyalty to the church, to God, was called into question when they resisted. And through it all, Archbishop Law remained. Eventually, the Boston archdiocese was forced to close 65 parishes due to near bankruptcy from cash settlements estimated at 100 million dollars. And an insurrection unprecedented in the Catholic Church's history, a grass-roots campaign of outraged parishioners and priests finally forced Bernard Law to resign as Archbishop. Later, organizations like bishopaccountability.org revealed how horrific the scandal was, and how depraved and cynical the response had been. But was Archbishop Law excommunicated for his sins? Was he punished in any way? Far from it. Pope John-Paul gave his loyal soldier a very cushy job as the archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome’s main church, and the Archbishop remained so thoroughly ensconced in the Vatican hierarchy that he even participated in the 2005 Papal Enclave that chose John Paul's successor. The national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests decried church leaders in Rome for insensitivity to abuse victims: 'Why can't the Vatican officials see that any position of honor afforded to Law will inevitably and needlessly cause more pain to hundreds who have been abused and have already suffered enough? It just rubs salt into already deep wounds for parishioners, victims and their families', he said. The bureaucrats in Boston, Rome and elsewhere who knowingly sent these priests to one parish after another are more evil than the priests themselves. The priests are sick, deranged. But these bureaucrats from low-level clerks right on up archbishops and possibly beyond cynically covered up this cancer instead of extirpating it, and in so doing actually helped it flourish for decades. They should be excommunicated, and prosecuted. But an ever-credulous, ever-faithful public continues to heap flowers on the grave of the man who presided over this disaster, and rewarded a prime enabler of this most heinous crime against children. In the face of the overwhelming grief caused by his church’s inaction and duplicity, Pope John-Paul showed no compassion at all. Instead he refused to apologize, comfort, console, or even face the families from Boston. In so doing, he demeaned his church, and denigrated its victims. Should this man really be beatified? Should he be on the path to sainthood? His actions and inactions speak for themselves. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 4/3/09: The New Gold Rush There’s a gold rush on in New York State. New technologies allow the extraction of previously unobtainable natural gas from an underground coal formation known as the Marcellus Shale. Locals are sitting pretty on top of billions of dollars worth of gas. But there’s an uglier side to the story. This technology, developed by the Halliburton Corporation, a company famous for its disregard for health, safety and environmental standards, is called Horizontal Hydraulic Fracturing, or ‘Fracing’. It involves injecting a toxic brew of water and noxious chemicals like Benzene, Formaldehyde, Hydrochloric Acid and others under very high pressure into the coal bed. Fracing was originally developed to extract gas from oil wells, which tend to be very deep. It was considered safe because at those depths, the only water present tends to be undrinkable. The problem with fracing a coal bed is that the wells are not deep. In fact, the coal beds are in close proximity to and often interspersed with significant underground aquifers, whose contamination would be catastrophic for many generations. And contamination is already happening: Recently, residents who turned on their faucets in Hudson Colorado were treated to the spectacle of ‘flammable water’. A nearby fracing operation had caused methane gas to pollute their wells. You can actually set this water alight with a match. I wonder how you put out a house fire in Hudson. Many communities near fracing operations also report cloudy, smelly water coming out of their taps. They are assured by our government, as were those working at ground zero, and those taking part in nuclear weapons tests, that there is no cause for concern. There are other problems too: like noisy high-pressure injector pumps and increased truck traffic. And since 60% of the chemicals are pumped back out and left in lined pits to evaporate, the neighboring area becomes awash in aerosolized volatile organic compounds, which have been proven to be carcinogenic and to cause neurological and other developmental problems in children. Everyone nearby essentially becomes an involuntary low-level paint huffer and glue sniffer. And some of those pits will inevitably overflow or leak into nearby streams, which will eventually feed into the Hudson, and into reservoirs. Our aquifers and our reservoirs could eventually become irremediable superfund sites. Add to that the bio-accumulation of these toxins in wildlife, and you have a further environmental nightmare on your hands. And if that weren’t enough, each well also requires 600,000 to one million gallons of water. No one has any idea where that much water will come from – not even the gas companies. But the EPA, under the Bush/Cheney policy of never letting science get in the way of profit, rubberstamped shallow-well fracing as safe. Among other absurdities in their report, they concluded that since the primary purpose of the wells was to extract gas, and not to inject chemicals underground, they were not subject to regulatory provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Incredibly, the fact this technology absolutely necessitates the injection of highly toxic chemicals was deemed irrelevant. One brave whistle blower, Weston Wilson, a senior environmental scientist with the EPA for over 30 years, wrote a dissenting report on his own time that completely debunks the pseudo-science of the official one, and points out that five of the report’s seven peer review committee members are enmeshed in the oil and gas industry, including one currently working for Halliburton, which stands to gain billions from these wells. Once again, the foxes are being asked to guard the henhouse. Many locals throughout the Marcellus Shale basin are itching to sell their gas rights and get wells on their land. It’s hard to argue with someone making little more than minimum wage that they should be deprived of many thousands of dollars a year in gas royalties. But what of their children? Their children’s children? What of the land, the wildlife, the tourist industry? How many fly fishermen will troll toxic streams? How many tourists will flock to view the foliage under the barrage of thousands of pumps, each emitting the noise of a subway train? Do not believe the EPA. Do not believe the gas companies. Get educated and get involved. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 3/27/09: Meet the New Boss... I see that the left's honeymoon with Obama is still in full swing, despite mounting evidence that he's not going to be a very liberal president at all. I know it's early. I know we can't blame him for Republican partisan slash and burn tactics in Congress. But we can blame him for the company he keeps, and the policies he crafts, and for legacy policies that he upholds rather than repudiates. Some examples: The Justice Department announced that it would adhere to the Bush administration's position that detainees imprisoned at a U.S. air base in Afghanistan have no right to challenge their confinement in U.S. courts. Habeus Corpus loses again. Treasury Secretary Geitner was former Secretary Paulson's right-hand man during the crafting of the initial, woeful T.A.R.P. plan - the one that had no real oversight at all for how the money was spent - hence, no easing of the credit crunch, and big bonuses for execs of the bailed out companies. Geitner and Paulson are both veterans of Wall Street. Couldn't Obama have picked someone more Progressive, like Paul Krugman, or former Labor Secretary Robert Reich? Similarly, Robert Rubin, another top architect of the Obama economic plan, helped destroy Citibank while receiving a salary of over 100 million dollars annually. And Lawrence Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, loves tax cuts and hates infrastructure. Sounds like… Bush! These people are embedded representatives of the culture of unrestrained greed and short-term gain that got us into this mess - do we really want the foxes guarding the hen house again Obama abrogated his own promise not to hire lobbyists into his administration, citing the financial meltdown as a mitigating factor. Yes, I'm absolutely sure that there are no people outside of the power/money elite that have the skills and background to do the job. Despite the most catastrophic economic meltdown since the 1930's, no one from the President on down through his administration has talked about our bloated, unsustainable military budget. Instead, all signs point to a heroin-like injection of even more capital into military projects, which will provide some short-term relief, and major withdrawal symptoms later on. This country has been on a permanent war-economy footing since 1939, and we simply can't sustain it. Yet Obama refuses to even speak to the issue. This financial crisis is actually an incredible opportunity to change this country's direction and to challenge some of the basic tenets of our government and economy that have been taken for granted for years. It's an opportunity that hasn't been seen since the early days of FDR. Unlike FDR, Obama is dealing with a much more intransigent Republican faction in congress which is more intent on bloodying him and the Democratic Party than in saving working people's lives, livelihoods, and dreams. But he's not even speaking to the real problems. He's not even trying to inject new thinking into the old order. Instead, he's surrounded himself with the usual Beltway/Wall Street suspects. And look at the Stimulus Bill, and compare it to what FDR did; very little money for boots on the ground projects, lots for bloated government apparatchiks and… I can't believe it… LOTS MORE TAX CUTS!). Sure, he needed some Republican votes. But the input from the Obama side itself had woeful little in terms of infrastructure construction and repair. The bill should have created something akin to FDR's massive work programs, targeting infrastructure. Instead, we get incremental, timid, mostly status-quo mediocrity. No, Obama isn't Bush - don't mistake what I'm saying for that. But there is a whiff of 'meet the new boss, same as the old boss' - or at least, it's feeling a bit more like that than 'change we can believe in'. Same old crew, same old policies, polished up a bit. And the same lobbyists swimming in a stream of money, sucking on the body politic like Remoras. Far from being the most Liberal president in my lifetime Obama seems firmly embedded in the power elite, and towing the line for the Military-Industrial Complex. It's time for the left to make some noise. It's time to stop wishing, and fantasizing, and imbuing Obama with all of our hopes and dreams, and start demanding some action on the ground. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 3/13/09: Sacred Cow When budgets and deficits are discussed in the media, and on the floors of congress, Social Security and Medicaid are often called the 'sacred cows' of American politics, both by laissez-faire Conservatives, who think them a 'Socialist' abomination, and by Progressives, who see them as part of the safety net a humane society erects to protect its more vulnerable members.. But the real sacred cow is so sacred, it's rarely mentioned seriously as a candidate for pruning at all. It's the US military budget, of course. Currently, the US military budget proper is 515 billion for fiscal 2009. Add discretionary spending, veteran's benefits, and military programs that are under the auspices of other departments, and you're up to over one trillion dollars per year on defense and war. One trillion is a very hard number to get your mind around. It is bandied about almost casually these days in discussions of bailouts and wars to the point that it loses any real meaning. An American trillion is a one followed by 12 zeroes. One trillion dollars is over 3,000 dollars for every single man, woman and child in America. But that's still too abstract. How about this: one trillion seconds ago was 31,688 years ago! 31,000 years ago we were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in caves. Agriculture was still 20,000 years in the future. Textiles, domesticated animals, pottery and metallurgy, medicine, writing, the wheel, the arch, houses - none of these existed. Throughout history, empires from the Romans to the Spanish, Dutch, and British have all made the same mistakes. They've expanded rapaciously, controlling more and more territory and natural resources, often under force of arms, and then rotted from within as their treasuries went deeper and deeper into debt supporting the vast weight of their conquests. America is certainly following the imperial paradigm to the letter. As in Rome, our infrastructure is crumbling; our educational and health care systems are no longer nearly the world's best, based on any standard metrics from mathematical literacy to infant mortality. Our standard of living is manifestly eroding. We have military bases all over the world, from remote islands in the Pacific to Antarctica. Our military alone uses more fuel than the eighth largest country in the world, Nigeria, which has a population of over 140 million. And our military budget is greater than all other military budgets on earth… combined. Do we really think that this country can keep spending over 3,000 dollars per year for every one of our citizens and survive? That's over 10 percent of the average adult American's annual income! There is a book entitled 'addicted to war' which details what our bloated military costs us. It also points out why this state of affairs persists decade after decade: our senators and congressmen are bought and paid for primarily by the Military-Industrial Complex, a term coined not by some left-wing radical, but by Dwight Eisenhower in his parting speech as president. In a draft, he originally called it the 'Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex', and his speech should be required reading in every school, as should Addicted to War, because we will not survive if we continue down the path of every empire that has preceded us. Now, I'm not saying we don't need a military; Far from it. There are real threats out there that must be met. Nor am I saying that our veterans don't deserve the best possible care; they do. But I am suggesting that maybe the United States no longer needs bases in Germany, Poland and Great Britain. Maybe the European Union can figure out how to protect itself. I'm suggesting that a plane like the B2 bomber which was designed for a mission that no longer exists and costs over 2 billion per airplane is not the wisest way to spend our money. Our expensive weapons aren't winning our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will always need defense, and deterrence against aggression, but if we stop trying to bend the world to our will, and trade coercion for cooperation, we will see a precipitous drop in the number of enemies we face. And we must tell our elected representatives and the media that the military budget must be cut, if we are to prosper as a nation. Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. 3/5/09: Proud of America When Michelle Obama stated that she was proud of her country for the first time, the right wing fell all over itself in faux outrage. Sean Hannity and company thundered, and Cindy McCain started every campaign appearance by pointedly insisting that she was quote always proud of my country end quote. But even though I am a white, middle-aged American male, whose life experience is far removed for Michelle Obama's, her words had resonance for me. Because to have always been proud of America is to have willingly had one's eyes closed. And the implication among the right wing that you're unpatriotic if you do not show unalloyed, uncritical admiration for America is both simplistic and insulting, but most importantly this attitude directly contradicts what makes America special. This nation was formed through lively dissent, not knee-jerk fealty to any political ideology, and that tradition of feisty self-criticism has thrived throughout America's existence. Critics from Tom Paine to Studs Terkel to Mark Twain - who bravely and tirelessly objected in print to American barbarity in the Philippines - sacrificed popularity, influence and livelihood while trying to steer this country from wrong to right. Yes, I have been ashamed of my country. And I am proud of that, because it means that I hold her to a higher standard, because I love her deeply and hate to see her sully her hard-won principles for profit and short-term gain. I am ashamed that we helped overthrow democratically-elected governments from Chile to Iran. I am ashamed of the napalm and Agent Orange America smothered Indochina in. And of course I am ashamed that Americans enslaved millions of Africans with unspeakable cruelty, often justifying this practice with quotes from the Bible. Did you know that there was a time, not too long ago, when Americans by the thousands flocked to public lynchings with their children and actually held picnics while black men were tortured to death? To quote historian Phillip Dray: Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball games and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic. End quote. Often severed roasted body parts of the victim comprised those souvenirs, as patently repulsive and barbaric a practice as anything Al Queda has ever done. And these heinous crimes were often not committed by robed thugs under cover of darkness, but by public figures like police chiefs and local politicians, before an audience of thousands in a festive atmosphere in broad daylight. These are historical facts, and how Cindy McCain could be proud of them is beyond me. And how could Sean Hannity and his odious brethren possibly be proud of the fact that taxpayer dollars were used for decades to fund the U.S. Military's School for the Americas, where generations of Latin American death squads were taught how to torture and practice terrorism? America's gluttony for cheap foreign labor and raw materials engendered the institutional export of a type of death-squad strong-man terrorism to South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, often with devastating long-term repercussions. This shameless policy of training and supporting human rights violators occurred under both Democratic and Republican administrations. But on this past election day, before a house full of similarly disaffected liberals, people who like me have more often than not been ashamed of our country, I led a heartfelt and tearful toast, without any irony whatsoever, to the United States of America, for its refusal to relinquish hope in the face of ever more strident lies and fear-mongering and for its repudiation of race politics. America charted a brave new course into the unknown, and did something almost unthinkable to me. I never thought a black man could possibly be elected in my lifetime, and I still find it thrilling to be so wrong. We are at the vanguard of Western Democracies once more, in proving the impossible to be possible. So I am extremely proud of my country today, a blushing, hopeful kind of pride. It's kind of a new feeling, but I could get used to it! Samuel Claiborne is a poet, essayist, composer, musician and photographer. A native of New York city, he now makes his home in Rosendale, New York. He also maintains a blog at samuelclaiborne.blogspot.com. |
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