August 31, 2010

The great American comedian and political punster, Will Rogers, once delivered a particularly pointed play on words, that turned out to be perhaps his most perceptive.

“Everything is funny,” he said, “as long as it’s happening to somebody else.”

If Will were around, today, there’s no doubt he’d have something to say about far too many political pranksters, who’re laughing up their sleeves, at discomfort they’re causing for others. Will Rogers would say: “It’s time to cut the comedy!”

The leading G.O.P. Pranksters may think it’s funny to watch their congressional opponents squirm, at the tired old bromides, like “Tax-and-spend-liberals!” they hurl at them. The bare fact is, that despite the pained grimaces such lies evince, this is one time they’re simply untrue. The sad joke is on the dumbed-down electorate that believes the canard.

In one of his more perceptive observations, Will Rogers noted that most politicians were at least a year behind public opinion. He’d be amazed at how many of today’s ordinary Americans have forgotten the servile Republican-led Congress that shouted “Amen!” when a pretentious, high-rolling, Bush-Cheney administration ran up a more than three-trillion-dollar deficit, in an eight-year spending spree. Now the same G.O.P. Judas-goat- grovellers cry crocodile tears, at Democrat proposals to help out-of-work Americans reclaim their pride and productivity, by extending unemployment assistance they wouldn’t have needed, if the ‘go-along’ Republican leadership had just said “NO!” to the two-term squander-lust of a Bush-Cheney juggernaut, run-amok.

What’s even more amazing, the arrogant, nay-saying Republican leadership, now turned into ‘weeping-Willies, ‘ over the Obama administration’s refusal to extend tax cuts to the Grand Old Party’s wealthiest patrons, wants working-class and small business people to believe, it’s their plight that’s being bemoaned. Well guess what? It appears, the tepid T-Baggers and the Sarah-Palin-led army-of-ignorants all seem to be buying it.

Will Rogers had something to say about that, too. “The income tax,” he chuckled, “has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.” Here, too, Will wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find the most profligate putters among the G.O.P. political-leadership. What would probably flabbergast him is the number of ordinary taxpayers who seem to have swallowed their hokum. But there, too, he was onto some common sense, because he also observed that comedians can only last, until they begin to take themselves seriously… or the audience takes them seriously.

One can only hope that the latter happens soon, or Will’s least funny perception may just come true: “I tell you folks,” he once ruefully complained, “all politics is applesauce!”

Back to the Top

August 24, 2010

Whomever it was that observed: “Change is certain, progress is not,” couldn’t have been more incisive. If there was ever a measure of the lack of progress made in religious tolerance, since the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, in 1692, the present uproar over construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center, in downtown New York City is pointed proof of what Somerset Maugham described in his Writer’s Notebook as “the cruel things men do for the love of God.”

One would think that when Thomas Jefferson outlined legislation for religious tolerance in the State of Virginia, with these words in 1782: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty Gods , or no God,” that we were on a progressive path toward tolerance of personal religious preference and or practice but if anything, we’ve retrogressed.

We are now at a place in time, where every American citizen must make a choice; not in his or her own personal preference for or against a specific religious belief but whether or not they will respect the right of others to maintain the same privilege, even though it may differ from theirs. Our retrogressions have made this almost an impossibility, since most views are based not on fact but pure, willfully insistent prejudice. To make matters even worse, religious provocateurs of almost every denomination have reconfigured the issue, shrouding it in political camouflage, with the introduction of insidious references to terrorist connections and associations; unproved but disquieting enough to generate emotional angst, which is their calculated intent. The aim, to mute the will of elected officials who might tend toward a different view.

It’s the so-called infallibility of Christian doctrine and the singular power of its affirmation, in the hands of ‘fallible’ humans, that has created the current impasse. Similarly, the tenacious attachment of certain Jewish sects to their own theocracy, excluding Jews with differing viewpoints, is as dogmatic and detrimental as the most inflexible Islamic code they claim to decry and oppose. Unwillingness to accept the Constitutional emphasis on a universal right to any or no personal religious belief and practice, plus the steadfast separation of any religious dogma or doctrine, from governmental intrusion, is the crucial component we all lack, to resolve the current religious dilemma that bedevils us. Frankly, erecting any meeting place in which those of differing beliefs might gather to learn about each other and perhaps, even initiate some form of peaceable mutual tolerance, would not only represent a miraculous achievement but one worth every effort, to make it a reality. Such an edifice would ennoble and enshrine this precinct of pain forever.

Back to the Top

August 17, 2010

In his analysis of the method of Leonardo DaVinci, the poet/mathematician, Paul Valery wrote, that the folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths is inborn in us. This commentator was sadly reminded of this by an article by Jacob Weisberg, in the most recent issue of Newsweek magazine. In the piece, titled “Palinism 101,” adapted from a book he edited: “Palinisms – The Accidental Wit and Wisdom of Sarah Palin,” Weisberg asks (and wryly attempts to answer) the question: “Is her babble scary or just funny?” He then proceeds to devalue his own proof, with the denigration, that: “Palinisms consist of a unitary stream of populist blather--- Fox News without the punctuation,” as he puts it.

Cheapened from the start, by its appearing to be a promo for his own volume, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Weisberg further devalues the piece; missing the most important point of the answer to his own question, in an effort to achieve a clever put-down. It’s not that his assessment of Palin’s “blather” or Fox News’s shoddy ethics is wrong. His all-out attempt to malign both impels him to overlook a larger and more frightening truth.

This commentator believes that although much of the negative assessment by pundits is valid, Sarah Palin actually serves an important and chillingly necessary purpose, for which thoughtful Americans should not only be grateful but strongly concerned about. She is an awesomely accurate barometer of America’s current dumbed-down national intellect. If, as many pundits and pollsters seem to have determined, Sarah Palin’s following is as broad and varied as they claim, our social fabric has decomposed to a dangerous level. In the plainest and most explicit context, our political fate is on the brink of being determined by elements of our society, motivated and willing to abandon bellwether standards and beliefs, on which this republic and its most revered concepts and institutions were established.

It’s not enough, though, just to identify and characterize Sarah Palin’s appeal as a sorry sign of the times. Someone has to assume responsibility for our having sunk to this level. First and most compelling has been the pure-profit motive, which produced and huckstered the technical gadgetry, with which corporate capital has captivated and addicted our populace; enslaved them to the many manipulative indebtednesses of the ‘company store;’ made us abandon the tradition of ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ by which we’ve achieved ever higher levels of comprehension and accomplishment, for all of our society. Alas, we’ve allowed and encouraged this for the convenient comfort of impermanent things, over the practical and lasting profit that honest collaboration provides.

Now, we teeter on the brink of a national intellectual abyss, in which the sounds of Me! My! And Mine! over ride the verbal promise our founders made, to extend the fruits of our mutual strivings to a deferential and deserving populace of partners.

The ultimate answer to Weisberg’s question won’t come from Sarah Palin, her Palinisms or the impertinent and impermanent Palinist coterie. As with all of this nation’s most important questions, the ultimate answer must come from us… All of us.

Back to the Top

August 10, 2010

In his Oxford History of the American People, Samuel Eliot Morrison points out that America was accidentally discovered by someone who was actually looking for something else. When discovered, it wasn’t wanted, in fact most of the next fifty years afterward were spent seeking a way around it. He also noted that America was named after someone who discovered no part of it. History is like that, he wrote, very chancy.

Those now raising a hue and cry for the rest of us to “Take our country back!,” tend to overlook this. They urge a return to a time (by their account) when the rights and privileges of citizenship were restricted to White, Christian, native-born Americans. To set the record straight, the only native Americans were members of aboriginal tribes who considered themselves custodians of lands which White, mostly Christian explorers either conquered or obtained by fraud or legal flim-flam; enabling them not only to divest the natives of custody but turn them into stateless wards and victims of an endless campaign of expatriation, domination and decimation, through institutionalized disinterest.

If those who would return to renowned tradition truly desire reliving a time in which we all can rejoice, they should rediscover and re-explore what it was our ancestral pioneers came here to find, in the first place. True, a few – but just a few – came for property and profit. Most, though, came to escape the same kind of tyranny that many of today’s ‘Tea-baggers’ seek to re-impose: the forced adoption of dogmatic and harsh religious credo and custom, with punitive penalties for disobedience or disbelief… a carbon copy of what the instigators of Islamic theocracy are now attempting to force, on countries in the Middle-east, where thousands of irreplaceable American men and women endanger their lives daily, to free unwilling victims and where many are losing their lives, in the effort.

What most of those who came here sought was the individual dignity that a fair return for honest labor allows one to feel and the opportunity to find a need for such labor. They also sought the comfort and conviviality of neighborly affiliation; involvement with others who were ready to socialize, celebrate or help, depending on the occasion… who could put aside differences in religion and politics, for a greater good of the moment and with a common effort, overcome problems and dangers with a strength born of unity.

Those who came also sought the right to disagree with neighbors or the policies and practices of those who govern them, without a response of snub or slap. They understood, no two humans can or will always think alike. The fabric of our Constitution shows how important this is but somehow, we’ve lost the ability to understand it. Can we rediscover it, before it’s too late? The poet Carl Sandburg may have given us the answer.

In his great poem, “The People, Yes,” he reminds us that “ the learning and blundering people will live on… they’ll be “tricked and sold and again sold but… go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.” Our hope, he says, is with them. “The people... yes.”

Back to the Top

August 3, 2010

Back around 1800, in a note to the British painter, Joshua Reynolds, poet William Blake wrote: “Degrade first the arts, if you’d mankind degrade.” It was an insight, still worthy of note. In fact, an interview with the young concert pianist, Kirill Gerstein brought it to mind for this commentator. Having mastered just about every musical style, from Jazz, to Classics and beyond, this driven artist still has hopes, that exposing young people, to what past masters in the arts have achieved, can save our society from degradation. The problem is, there seems to be too little interest in such exposure. Or perhaps, there’s too little opportunity and time. As the Nobel prize winning novelist, Saul Bellow once explained to an interviewer who asked why he’d never written poetry: Bellow said, “Poets have to dream and dreaming in America is no cinch.”

Let’s face it, ours is a nation embroiled in a multiplicity of multi-task micro-management. A visit to any local outlet of the retail emporia in our shopping malls provides graphic proof. A long checkout line of purchasers awaits the attention of a cashier, who’s paging a manager with a discount query. This, while in the act of conversing with a friend on a cell phone, as with a miraculously free hand, she releases security tags from a pile of just- purchased merchandise, at her side. Most of the waiting purchasers, by the way, are also engaged in conversations with unseen parties, via their own cell phones or I-pods. How would one, thus involved, begin to address an issue like the influence of J.S. Bach on Jazz improvisation? This also explains why there’s so little interest in the actions of today’s members in our nation’s Federal Legislature. This observer’d be willing to bet, most informed opinions (so-called) are gleaned from a flurry of unidentified and undocumented ‘blogs,’ available at the drop of a web address.

Not too long after Blake’s assertion, the bard, Shelley, claimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If that was true, then, it certainly isn’t now. A fair number of today’s most notable poets are busily engaged in travels to areas which support major retail outlets, at which their publicists have arranged for them to read from newly released books of their poetry, most of which is about personal travails or triumphs, which leaves little creative time for critiques on legislative issues. Those not so engaged are deeply involved in the lively pursuit of poetic enterprise: deciding on awards of honors and grants, to poetic pals and artistic acquaintances, who in similar capacities, honor them in return… all of which makes for a busy but somewhat restricted milieu, with little time or thought for interest in legislative ethics… or the lack of them.

John Stuart Mill wrote that the fatal tendency to cease thinking about a thing when it’s no longer doubtful is the cause of half of mankind’s errors. With most young Americans engaged in erasing all doubt, on any number of subjects, via instant multi-messaging, don’t expect to hear informed opinions on issues needing a Congressional legislative response, soon. As for homing in on thoughts that artistic masters might have, on any subject, try the nearest retail ‘big-box’ store. With any luck, you might just end up standing behind one of them, in a check-out line.

Back to the Top

July 27, 2010

AThis commentator has made the tragic discovery of a new quid-pro-quo, as legal tender of world-wide villainy. It’s a currency more powerful than the Dollar, the Euro or any other accepted token, exchanged for endeavors in the nefarious pursuit of power and total human control. The new unit of exchange for universal dominance is death; a form of payment that trumps any other in acceptable value, even to those who claim human life as invaluable and non-negotiable.

How’s this for simple proof? Republican congressional leaders who pride themselves as defenders of the most stringent principles of conservative Christian theocracy have stonewalled legislation and Presidential action on every issue, from stem-cell research, to medically necessary abortion and also for cases of incestuous rape. In all, they cite the irreplaceable right to life of a single fetus, regardless of circumstance. These are the same leaders who stubbornly refuse to ratify a world-wide climate change treaty, the lack of which will certainly doom millions of children, yet unborn, to suffering and death from deterioration of the earth’s environment, without mutual agreement to reverse the effect of deadly, world-wide industrial pollution. Their reasons? The effect would be too detrimental to American industry and too burdensome on our economy.

Then there’s the issue of all that off-shore drilling for oil that’s destroying our country’s marine environment beyond repair, threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands; not to also mention the rampant use of life-threatening chemicals by agribusiness. Scientists warn us of deadly consequences to untold generations of Americans but hypocritical pro-life supporters in the Theocratic-led ranks of Christian conservatism stand silent, as G.O.P. leaders dampen every move to abort corporate actions, to squeeze more profit from the irreversible human destruction that such pursuits can only ensure.

Finally, there’s the ultimate and deadliest duplicity, of super-patriotic pietism… the ‘Holy Willies’ who support warfare for irrational reasons… who condone sending America’s best and most selfless citizens to commit almost-certain-death sacrifice, on a false altar of national defense. In truth, their goal is to help dogmatic mullahs impose doctrinaire despotism that honest Americans would never tolerate, on hapless victims in the name of Democracy. No prayer, offered by any faith, can ever mitigate such sightless sophistry. But with each passing day, we replay the solemn rite of another casualty’s passing… the haunting sound of honor guard steps and ritual commands… the symmetrical slap of weapons to the ready position and the bugle’s sorrowful call, as the volleyed echoes fade. All performed with practiced poise, except that awful look of parental pain. As you who’ve enjoyed another day of what you call freedom, do what you’re used to doing, especially those still concerned with dogmatic debate, political pride and potential profit, consider the cost of these and in terms of the world’s new coinage, tell us… what’s today’s market price for a human life?

Back to the Top

July 20, 2010

According to the Nobel Prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. Hearing reports of President Obama’s new interest in high speed rail development and a forthcoming grant to reconfigure rail designs from Utica to Schenectady, one couldn’t help but think of Weinberg’s observation, especially when various rail interests and their hard-right Republican congressional lap-dogs began to grumble about costs and government subsidy of railroad property development; property they say rightfully belongs to private industry. They’re talking, of course about railroad right-of-way now owned by corporate interests and the old socialist bugaboo, of government support for unprofitable passenger travel and mass transit, that profit making freight movers grumble, they have to pay for.

It seems that short memories and Right-wing intellects somehow always compliment each other. Back in the days after the Civil War, when the then Federal Government was hell-bent to span the continent with a transcontinental railroad, corporate interests were thrown together for the precise purpose of picking up huge tracts of unclaimed land, much of which had only just been cleared of Indian tribal custody, then literally turned over to corporate railroad ownership, with adjacent property, often several miles deep on either side of the track. This was property the government wasn’t exactly sure of who had ownership rights to but claimed anyway and persuaded the railroads to accept, on a basis of profitable development, that was sure to follow.

You see, in the corporate mind, it’s perfectly okay for government to underwrite initiatives that prompt eventual development and profit, especially if it also provides the labor. Especially, too, if workers are either underwritten or acquired at wages pegged and paid-for, at cheaper-by-the dozen provisos. That’s exactly what happened, with all those foreign workers who helped build the transcontinental railroads, for which many were denied citizenship in return for hard labor, at slave-wage levels.

Today, corporate freight interests own endless miles of track right-of –way, they all but inherited and derive additional profit from connective linkages with other corporate entities, involved in profitable ownerships of other properties along the right-of-way. Nice work if you can get it and they did, for most of America’s post-Civil War history.

Now, they beef about the cost to them, for poor-relative passenger carriers, while their congressional G.O.P. puppets huff and puff protests about government subsidy for make-work, socialist-like projects. Of course they overlook the taxes that workers pay, much of which goes to keep them well heeled and well treated, in health care programs they still deny to people who truly pay the freight, that keeps them ensconced, in their posh Washington sinecures. Thoreau wrote, we do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us.

For far too many, outside today’s corporate American cabal, that remains a sorry truth.

Back to the Top

July 13, 2010

If someone were to ask this commentator to identify the greatest problem facing our nation, at the present time, his immediate and unequivocal answer would be: the decriminalization of bribery. The ‘fix’ or ‘payoff’ has become standard operating procedure for most legislative enactments, involving members of the United States Congress, especially those in the Senate but the epidemic hasn’t stopped there. Similar ethical infections have spread to others at state legislative levels, the most blatant and depraved, now rampant among legislators in New York State. Agents of special interests who have the impudence to identify themselves as “lobbyists,” have larded legislators with monetary payoffs to the point of addiction, so that their dependence on regular payments is literally viewed as an inclusion, in anticipated political budgets.

It now also appears that the only reliable immunity to this iniquitous largesse is evinced by elected officials who, by choice or misfortune, have opted out of reelection efforts and are thus able to exert ethical courage, unthreatened by special-interest vengeance. David Paterson, who became New York State’s most recent Governor by default and fell prey to a vicious and sinister campaign of political chicanery, carried to unbelievably offensive proportions, is a notable example.

Undeterred by considerations of a possible plethora of vicious political paybacks, with which disgruntled manipulators might seek to punish him, Governor Paterson has now mounted a stubborn, yet admirable defense of actions, based on an obvious sense of fiduciary honesty. One might intellectually or emotionally disagree with these actions but in truth, one must also recognize his honest courage, in standing up for something he believes a critical necessity, against forces that have successfully cowed an impressive list of elected officials, at every level of federal and state government.

Beyond this, though, one has to be saddened and disheartened by the realization, that the only options left to elected officials with a continuing desire to be honest functionaries, given our nation’s current climate of pecuniary political intimidation, are expulsion or disenfranchisement.

At which point this commentator recalls the dismal observation of one notorious athletic coach, that good guys finish last… which apparently will remain a prevalent truth, as long as there are those in politics who continue to believe, that winning isn’t just the important thing. It’s the only thing.

Back to the Top

July 6, 2010

Perhaps more than any Independence Day in this commentator’s memory, the holiday just past put one in mind of an observation of the famed social psychologist, Erich Fromm, who noted that although freedom has brought us both independence and rationality, freedom has also isolated us and thereby, made us anxious and powerless.

More than ever, we seem to be in the grip of forces meant to denude our independence, in the name of independence; forces that institutionalize regimentation, purely for economic reasons of control. The agent of this subjugation is technology, a means that has spawned a multiplicity of masters, to whom we’ve become addicted. Ours is now a less empathic, self-involved, multi-task society, irrevocably connected to gadgets like cell-phones, I-pods, Blackberrys and lap-tops, all of which tether us to pre-planned dependence on corporate contrivance.

Our annual Independence Day celebration, itself, has become a mockery of the kind of freedom our founders envisioned, jammed into a holiday weekend, re-designed to meet the leisure and commercialized ends of working families, labor unions, and a vast assemblage of vendors, who use this and many other, similar holidays, merely to move merchandise. Nothing more.

At this point, one would like to urge listeners, to “Think about it…” but contemplation takes time, the one commodity we lack and the critical element, that corporate connivers cannot and will not consider allowing. The whole point of their connivance is to keep our attention fixed on the magnetic diversions they’ve invented to systematize us. After all, thinking might just move us to rediscover the ethics our founders believed would make and keep us a truly workable democracy.

Our real problem is, that within what could be this wonderful country, we’ve allowed contrivers of corruption to amass more and more power. As Lord Acton so rightly once put it: “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Now, if we could only take the time to think about this, we might still be able to make our independence a credible reality.

Back to the Top

June 29, 2010

Through more than twenty years of on-air opinions, this commentator has never targeted a single recipient, by name, with critical remarks. It’s been a personal rule. But if ever a rule demanded exception, that time is now and never more deserved than by a fellow American citizen, of sorts, one Rupert Murdoch. In recent remarks, on U.S. energy policy, in which he urged piping oil and natural gas from Alaska, down into this country, despite opposition from those concerned about environmental issues, Mr. Murdoch had this disdaining retort: “We didn’t buy Alaska,” he snorted, “to save the moose.”

Mr. Murdoch, you owe every American citizen an apology. Not only the bona fide ones, by birth or immigration but also the émigrés, still struggling to achieve legitimate certification. Not because of your snide mockery but your care-less unconcern, for what American citizenship really means, plus your obvious ignorance of our nation’s history, that made it so easy for you to mock us.

First, I take issue with the arrogant use of the word “We,” by a Johnny-come-lately, who knows or cares little about our Alaskan purchase. When then Secretary of State Seward arranged to buy Alaska from the Czar of Russia, for a mere seven million-two hundred thousand dollars, it wasn’t for the furs and fish for which he was ridiculed in the Congress. It was – as he explained it – to erase the last vestige of Monarchy from the North American continent. Those who sincerely seek the kind of freedom our nation can still provide, understand the aversion to that constraint and its impetus. You, on the other hand, only sought U.S. citizenship, as a means of entitlement, to buy radio and TV properties here. Matter of fact, you cared more for that ownership than you did for your former Australian citizenship, of which you were stripped, by the purchase; which shows how callously you discarded that previous allegiance and how little you valued it.

Now, from the rarified bubble of your wealth and self-conceived importance, you cast imperious glances at thousands you automatically undervalue, as ‘lesser-Americans’ and scatter smug and mostly inhumane solutions to problems, countless numbers of our citizens and would-be citizens are striving to help us solve… with service that endangers many of their lives or encumbers others’ efforts to earn the merest necessities of life.

So, Rupert Murdoch, for all your wealth and the spurious citizenship it’s purchased, this true citizen, who willingly placed himself in harm’s-way for his country, still believes our future rests with those, who by birth or desire are also willing to dedicate the best of themselves, for a better America. About that apology… somehow, I can’t quite shake the feeling that something else, somewhere else, again will capture your fancy, and you and your fortune will be off in pursuit of yet another entitlement… to CAPTURE IT!

Back to the Top

June 22, 2010

In his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge noted: “Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory, emancipated from the order of time and space.” It seems, a fancy for money and the power it produces has created a national amnesia, from which Americans (alas) may never recover. Those of us lucky enough to be numbered among the nation’s aged are given numerous warnings on the dangers of memory loss, with no end of advice on how to keep our minds alert and functioning. What no one yet seems able to do is remedy the retention of one’s memory, when everyone else seems to have lost theirs.

This commentator remembers well, the battles waged to reform New York State’s government ethics laws, when he was executive director of New York State Common Cause, more than twenty years ago. The copies of bills signed into law and the pens then Governor Mario Cuomo used to sign them, in 1987, still adorn the wall over my desk, attesting to my efforts in that battle. Yet here we are some twenty-three years later, with our state government tied in knots by political shenanigans and candidates from both major parties, promising to achieve reform of the state’s ethics laws. And elders like myself wondering, whatever happened to the reforms enacted in 1987?

There are some politicians, much younger than I, with even more serious cases of memory loss. For instance, there’s the former G.O.P. minority leader of the New York State Assembly, who, as a candidate in the last Congressional election, opposed every effort of the newly elected President to effect reforms and supported Republican efforts to thwart them. Now, his is not only among the loudest voices demanding state reforms but he’s actually calling for sterner measures against British Petroleum Corporation, while his Republican Congressional colleagues literally oppose every Presidential effort to achieve them. He of course must be hoping that come next election time, voters in his district will have even shorter memories than he does and they well may.

One also wonders about the painfully short memory span of political and governmental leaders in both major parties of New York State, who enacted tax rewards worth millions, for years, to corporations that ostensibly created new jobs. Now, they’re suddenly aghast to learn that literally none were created but the rewards were awarded anyhow. Now, the money’s not there and the jobs never were and New York’s taxpayers are that much poorer. It’ll be interesting to find out who remembers what, when it comes to restoring the loss.

There was a time this commentator remembers, that we could actually depend on most of our elected officials to do what we elected them to do, despite differences of opinion and/or ideology. Believe it or not, there was such a time. Trouble is, no one seems to remember, when it was or how to reclaim it.

Back to the Top

June 15, 2010

For those of us, raised in a tradition of respect for American institutions, based on sheer merit, it’s become depressingly difficult to accept the distortions applied by wordsmith hirelings of those with agendas tied to personal/political ends. Such is the fate of our nation’s flag, which yesterday, was again a prime target for perversion. Typical is the ongoing attempt to turn our national emblem into a religious symbol. A true patriot, who understood the totality of a national insignia, the Methodist clergyman credited with the text to the Pledge of Allegiance, specifically made no mention of religious belief. It was just a matter of time, though, for God’s self-elected spokespersons to usurp Godlike power, by adding words to the text, to that effect. A travesty of theocratic tyranny, to which Congressional hypocrites rushed to affix their signatures.

For this commentator, the words of Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregational Minister, himself, still provide the best description of our national emblem’s importance:

“A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag,” wrote Beecher, “sees not only the flag but the nation itself, and whatever may be its symbols, he reads in its insignia, the government, the principles, the truths, the history that belongs to the nation that sets it forth.” Beecher also understood, that among the founders’ most profound fears was the suffering and tyranny produced by the unholy collusion of kings and clergy, that endowed the rich and robbed a powerless populace of the freedom of individual worship and the right to equal opportunity and equal justice. They were so stirred by this troublesome prospect, they enshrined their opposition to it in the Constitution, as a first priority. Their own number included both deists and non-believers and they gave equal latitude to both. Their intent was the individual right to believe in and practice religion or not but to do so, as a personal privilege, not an all-inclusive duty. All the more reason, that the national flag should be equally free of such an onus.

It’s asking a lot of an article of designed cloth to convey as much as we’ve asked, of our flag. That’s precisely why it must be free of undue influences or inferences that the founders themselves did not intend. It’s still a bedeviling mystery to this observer, how the same hypocrites who proclaimed it a religious symbol, could then have cavalierly allowed it to become a tawdry accompaniment, to the endless sales projections of corporate profiteers.

Beecher had it right. Looking at our flag, a thoughtful person sees the truth of the nation it represents. The key word, here, is – “thoughtful.” Given the current Congressional addiction to extra-monetary rewards, just for showing up to do, what they were elected to do in the first place, don’t expect to see any restraints on commercializing our National Emblem, any time soon. But for sure, you can expect to hear a loud Congressional “AMEN!!!” at the end of the next national prayer breakfast, regardless of who delivers the invocation.

Back to the Top

June 1, 2010

If there’s one fatal flaw in the stimulus that seems to be motivating current actions by Americans of every political ilk, it would have to be a demand for guarantees and their apparent failure to obtain them. It also should be clear to private sector champions and government involvement advocates, alike, that what they seek will never be reliably provided by technology. The reason for this is clear: human involvement, in which outcomes are only as accurate as their input and oversight allow.

Andrei Sakharov whose genius provided the former Soviet Union with the H-bomb and then resolutely launched a human rights campaign that brought Soviet dominance via weaponry to an end, made this perceptive observation about guarantees:

“Intellectual freedom,” he said, “is the only guarantee of a scientific-democratic approach to politics, economic development and culture.”

The intellectual freedom to which Sakharov referred is the ultimate freedom, that not only fosters and allows differences but discussion and opportunity to consider all possibilities and possible outcomes. Those of us who believe in and practice intellectual freedom know that though it may become an artifact of the past, in other venues of communication, it will continue to be a reality on this radio station, for as long as its listeners support it. True intellectual freedom, Sakharov said, allows for the expression, not only of correct ideas but dubious ones as well. This commentator is especially appreciative of those listeners who respectfully disagree with him and continue to support this public radio network and the diversity of perspectives and opinions it airs. Such support is essential to its continuance.

Back to the Top

May 25, 2010

If, as former President Calvin Coolidge said, “The chief business of the American people is business, “ then the ghouls of American business have taken things too far. This commentator always thought it was unlawful for anyone to profit from the death of American service personnel, killed in the defense of their country. Apparently, if this was ever true, it’s not anymore.

Over the Memorial Day weekend just past, a number of ghoulish entrepreneurs blatantly advertised special deals on the sale of bedding, furniture and pre-owned cars, purchased at special Memorial Day discounts, benefiting both buyers and sellers from the deaths of unfortunates killed in action. The loss of someone to family and country, in war, is a heavy enough burden to bear, without the added insult of some entrepreneur profiting from it.

This is an issue on which every veterans organization can and should put their mouths where the money is. For them, the watchword should be: “NO GAIN FROM KIA PAIN! BAN MEMORIAL DAY SALES!”

The addition of a simple clause to existing law, making it a punishable crime to tie special sales promotions (offering discounts and other monetary rewards) as “Memorial Day” observances, would restore and ensure this day as one of respect for the Nation’s honored dead… who gave up their lives for their country and fellow citizens.

It’s time for every veterans organization and every family that’s suffered such a loss, to send the word to their Congressional representative:

“NO GAIN FROM KIA PAIN!” STOP PROFITEERING FROM “MEMORIAL DAY”!

Back to the Top

May 18, 2010

The wisdom’s as ancient as 550 BC, when Aesop first penned it: “United we stand, divided we fall…” The proof of this insight’s been shown in every age since; most recently, in the struggle of New York’s unionized state workers against being made scapegoats of one of the most miscreant political establishments, in this state’s history. Anti-union bias has been a preoccupation of profit mongering entrepreneurs, since the first companies chartered by European monarchs established acquisitive domains, in virgin territories of North, Central and South America.

Attempts to unify opposition to corporate efforts at gaining all-out control of workers’ labor, livelihood and lifestyle have been attacked with disparagement and ultimate brutality, wherever they’ve been attempted by work-force members, who showed any inclination to organize. The earliest gains by such pioneers as the Railroad Pullman Porters Union, the Garment Workers and United Mine Workers unions were literally won, at the cost of life and limb.

In recent times, bodily harm has been replaced by duplicity, one of the most notorious examples of which was displayed by a former head of the Screen Actors Guild, who parlayed his anti-labor antics into political profit. Ronald Reagan’s spewing of spurious charges of Communist conspiracy, against hundreds of innocent fellow union members, fuelled his political ambition, which then flowered from an alliance with the notoriously mob-dominated Teamsters Union. As President, Reagan’s decimation of the Air Traffic Controllers union left wounds and weaknesses in labor, that persist to the present day.

Organized labor has never really recovered the strength and stature it lost, to Reagan inspired campaigns that became stock-in-trade, for Republican subversion of any attempt by working class Americans, to obtain justice through unified representation. Now, power-hungry politicians of both parties, in both houses of New York State’s Legislature, have goaded a frankly frustrated and harried Governor to victimize and punish New York’s unionized state workers, for failures and chicanery that the legislators themselves created. To their credit, retaliating workers have shown respect for the highest principles of labor and the law. The victory they yet may win, will be the sort that organized labor has needed and vainly sought for years.

In an early speech on the rights of American workers, Samuel Gompers stressed that the mission of unions was: “…to protect the inalienable rights of workers to a better life, not only as equals before the law but in their health, their homes and their liberties as citizens; to overcome prejudice and antagonism; above all, to be full sharers in the abundance which their brains and brawn help to create.” Gompers understood, the only weapon that could make workers equal to the power of corporate tyranny was their own unified strength. The same kind of unity that made the United States a strong nation. That’s a strength not to be feared or disparaged; but respected and emulated. (MORE)

New York’s Governor can’t furlough a miscreant legislature. New York’s voters can and should. It’s time a mostly dedicated State work force received the respect and support that it’s consistently earned. And while we’re at it, we might try emulating their example, not as partisans but participants in a unified effort, for a better future we can all share… together.

Back to the Top

May 11, 2010

The United States Constitution was not written in stone. In fact, its authors were impelled by their knowledge of the savagery and enslavement, imposed on whole populations of Europe and the Middle East, by dogmatic alliances of monarchy and theocracy. Our founders were determined to deter the prospect of such perverted partnerships. What they didn’t envision nor could they predict was the ultimate, all-powerful effect of monetary tyranny, imposed by corporate coalitions. Fortunately, the same restraints are available, to curb the effect of these villainous deceptions. What appears to be lacking is the will of the Constitution’s current monitors to impose them.

Never, even in their most flagrant forms, were corporate entities construed as singular individuals, by those who chartered and supported their collective ventures. To have done so, would have left them open to civic responsibilities and singular guilt, for breaching them. In effect, their collective anonymity was a shield for shady actions, to increase corporate profit or investor enhancement, at the expense of the public good.

Now, an obviously biased Supreme Court majority has applied a new and implausibly incredible uniqueness to money, as being comparable to speech. This gives it the same freedom of expression that the Constitution applies to the speech of individuals; despite the proven power of corporate wealth, to mute the voice of any single person or group of individuals, especially given the corporate advantage of literal control over all current modes of mass communication. There’s still a factor which outweighs the right to free expression. It’s the people’s right to know the truth of all government actions and policies, which affect them. This automatically separates media, engaged in the professional reporting of such actions, from any other expressions of opinion; even from reports on subjects of passing or unimportant public interest.

The Constitution has invested both houses of Congress with the right to investigate and regulate activities, that embody aspects of inherent harm to the public. This right also applies to specific Executive branches which administer such activities, as drugs and pharmaceuticals, firearms and volatile chemical substances. Based on this premise, there’s no reason why activities which withhold vital public information or deliberately falsify information, the lack of which can create public harm, should not be open to similar investigation and regulation. It’s time for Congress to separate the professional reporting of necessary public information, from all other forms of public expression. This can be accomplished with legislation, establishing the same kinds of professional standards now required of Doctors, Psychologists, Sociologists and other specialists, as for those engaged in the professional reporting of news (outside the areas of commentary, opinion, entertainment and the many copy-cat versions of reading materials which fictionalize or lampoon news formats. Licensed news reporters and publishers would be required, simply, to meet standards of factual accuracy, in order to retain their licenses.

We’re talking , here, of a vital and necessary public service in which licensure could provide the means of preserving a trustworthy and dependable working press for Americans. It’s time that true speech was given the same level of Constitutional protection, now accorded any corporate expression, backed by the means to pay whatever the asking price might be.

Back to the Top

May 4, 2010

Recent talk on our nation’s news media: print, radio, TV and sundry electronics, has been riddled with words about a new and (for some) frightening force on our political process. They call themselves: “Tea- Baggers,” inspired by colonials who opposed King George’s Tea Tax and adopted the slogan: “No taxation without representation.” Contrary to the colonial original, present-day insurgents blame their ire on the efforts of the government, to rescue huge corporate institutions, whose decline is seen as a basis for a more widespread and calamitous failure of the national economy, itself. Republicans in Congress, paid lip-service to the Tea-Baggers and egged them on. Now, they’re in the quandarous position of aiding their own self-destruction, especially when their cat’s-paw mutineers realize, they’ve been playing both ends against the middle, swelling the “Lynch-the-bankers” chorus, while sub-rosa shaking bankers down for secret political pay-offs. Where logic’s concerned, the Tea-Bag insurgents and their Congressional connivers are out in left field. Here’s why: King George-The-Third made no bones about it. He was out to profit a corporation he’d chartered and funded, by taxing the colonists, forcing them to pay more for each cup of tea they drank and sharing the proceeds with beneficiaries, who owed him their existence.

The way this democratic republic was constituted – or supposed to be – corporations, whatever they offer: loans or cars, are answerable to the government. That’s us or U.S., however you spell it… or so it was thought, until a subversive Supreme Court majority, decided that corporate cabals are just like individuals and gave them the right to let their money – out-shout everyone else, while escaping civic responsibilities the rest of us are required to meet.

If you’ve followed the dots, this far, you now know why the so-called Tea-Baggers are distorted copies of the originals and also all-wet. Beyond this, the latest research shows they’re neither as populous nor popular as the Fox network’s baying hounds paint them; nor do they mirror all the rest of us. They’re a small percentage of mostly well-off, White, Protestant, Right-wing, often-Racist, believers in despotic dogma; yearning for a time when others like them determined the fate of Native Americans, plus other racial and ethnic immigrants, also women, whom they considered undeserving and of lesser status. Oh, and by the way, there are exceptions to government-run programs, they favor, like Social Security, Medicare, Military ( sent abroad to fight), Police and Fire services, etcetera. Now we learn that the founder of the bigoted John Birch Society’s decided to join them. He wants to help cleanse the country of impure elements, like those who came as African slaves or immigrant Jews and Hispanic Catholics. He’s begun in Arizona, naturally. They’ve got a “Let’s see your papers!” law that makes ethnic cleansing easier.

As to the recession? The very rich and the Tea-Baggers will recover. The working poor and those already mired in poverty, alas, will still echo the old Tennessee Ernie song: “…another day older and deeper in debt. Because, by then, like most of the country, they’ll owe their souls to the corporate store.

Back to the Top

April 27, 2010

Witnessing the news media’s inexplicable restoration of Eliot Spitzer to political prominence; and his vocally aggressive responses to the sudden turnaround in their disparagement, for no apparent justifiable reason, other than a boost in reader or viewer interest, one is reminded of an observation by the twenty-fourth century B.C. savant PTAHHOTPE, who called flaunting one’s knowledge, simply, “arrogance.” In his Oedipus Rex, Sophocles put it this way: “The tyrant,” he noted, “is a child of pride.”

How else can one explain Mr.Spitzer’s abrupt rush to flout his denigration of just about every elected official still holding office. And the media’s willingness to trumpet his unflattering evaluations, that seem to be based on nothing but a spate of soured Spitzerian opinions. For all those, still struggling to make logical sense out of the former ‘Sheriff of Wall Street’ and transient-Governor’s meteoric self-destruction, there’s really no other way to explain this but the arrogance of super-intellect, added to a sanctimonious self-appointment, not only to evaluate but to judge, condemn and apply harsh punishment. This might be strategically approved behavior for a “Sheriff,” but an absolute ‘no-no!’ for a Governor, installed by a vote of near-landslide proportions. In fact, for this observer, the former Attorney General’s seeming inability to adopt the more political demeanor, his newer office demanded, was the first evidence of impending doom for the Spitzer-led administration; a sense intensified, by the new Governor’s hot pursuit of the wily, long-serving Republican Majority Leader of the State Senate, Joe Bruno, while still flaunting his Sheriff’s aura and twirling his verbal six-guns, for emphasis. It was an opening act, better left to those with the legal resources and authority to do the job right.

In his newly chosen role as self-appointed spoiler, the failed former Governor shows evidence of an essential trait he still lacks: the common touch of humanity, a critical characteristic of every great politician, in our history. His gross insult to the current Governor, who succeeded him: virtually admitting by his denigration, that his choice was simply a sop, to attract votes from the African-American community, is proof of his own inadequacy. If David Paterson was obviously as inept, as Mr. Spitzer now paints him, why did he still select him as a successor? Or was he so blinded by his own brilliance, it never occurred to him that one might be necessary? Whichever the case, it only makes his own lack more glaring.

Some have temporized, that the betrayal of his wife, by Mr. Spitzer, was an act of which countless public officials, plus even ordinary citizens , have been guilty. Here, too, his use of the legal dodge, that adultery with a paid prostitute was somehow, more tolerable, shows a kind of connivance that only puts his words of regret in question, not as expressions of credible contrition but only self-reproach for a foul up. Either way, he conveys a level of penitence, that merits him a political second chance at nothing - but anonymity.

Back to the Top

April 20, 2010

It’s high time someone exposed the ‘bilge’ that Republican political leaders stand and spew, on the nation’s front porch, in opposition to government control of anything, as ‘Socialism,’ but then sneak in the back door, to parlay pay-offs from corporate tycoons, for whom they’ve promoted this pejorative, to help fleece the very taxpayers they’re supposed to be helping. They know they’re dealing in duplicity but somehow, many Americans who are prime targets in this betrayal, seem to have swallowed the con.

Before the ‘Ghoulish Old Pols’ pull this swindle off and laugh all-the-way-to-the-bank, with their corporate confederates, someone must set their victims straight. And who better, than the one President, G.O.P. pitch-men like to cite, more than any other? Who else but honest Abe Lincoln, the icon of every so-called sterling Republican principle. Back around 1854, this is what Lincoln had to say about government: “The legitimate object of government,” he wrote, “is to do for the community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do or so well do, for themselves --- in their own capacities…. If some men kill, or beat or constrain others; or despoil them of property by force , fraud or noncompliance with contracts, it is a common object of peaceful and just men to prevent it.” In the McConnell/Boehner lexicon, that’s ‘government control… or even worse: “Socialism!”

As any thinking person and more than anything else, he was a studious and thoughtful man, Lincoln understood this linchpin of the “E PLURIBUS UNUM” principle: that a diverse society seeking to become a successful composite, depends not only on the combined talents and capabilities of its individuals but – in some specific cases, the oversight and restraint of members expressly designated for such purposes. The key, here, is that this was determined by people who cared and thought more about long-term prosperity, than brief, quick-buck bubbles.

At this point in our deterioration, those who want to “take back” control of a country, that was never meant to be exclusively theirs, are hoping to keep the minds of our robotically addicted millions fixed on their I-pad, Blackberry and other diversionary gadgets, long enough to dismantle the once-workable means of a fragile yet essential independence. As in similar but less imminent and damaging crises of the past, the only effective antidote is in the hands of those still capable of thinking for themselves, while caring about others.

The time has come to stand proudly and firmly for a view that Lincoln never abandoned: “Government,” he said, “is a combination of the people of a country to effect certain objects by joint effort.” Note the absence of private or political party emphasis. If you’re among those still willing to put our destiny in the hands of thinking Americans, let every elected official you know, know it. There’s not a moment to lose.

Back to the Top

April 6, 2010

For a nation born of revolution and steeped in the pursuit of revolutionary technological ideas and achievements, today’s America is a veritable contradiction in mismatched thinking and behavior. Our history is rife with reactionary denunciations and resistance to any idea or hypothesis, that might - in the least – threaten the all-powerful nexus of corporate-capitalist control over America’s socio-economic present and future. But a world-wide eruption of impatience and outrage, at blatant economic disparity, linked to a dogma of racial and religious supremacy, should impel us to consider a need to change.

The most visible and easily recognized symptom is the spread and intensity of the so-called ‘tea-bagger’ movement, an alarming outburst of effort to impose a minority view of racial, religious and economic superiority, nationwide. There are, though, other, much less alarming attitudes we could and should be addressing. One of these is a stubborn, lockstep view of how we fund and structure the education of our children and youth.

It’s time we re-examined not only the educational needs of our youth but the institutional means and functional process best suited to provide them. We’ve become too steeped in reliance on mechanical technology. An emphasis on computers is fine, if all we’re interested in is an army of robots. But if nothing else, the ‘Teabagger’ movement should prove a crying national need for adult individuals with honed and developed capacities for analytic introspection and humane thought, and confidence to apply it. For this, we’ve a need to re-examine an ages-old approach of those who once pioneered the most demanding of our arts and philosophies; the masters who not only taught methods but principles, to apprentices who learned from them and passed their teachings on to others. We have a human treasure of more than a few such masters of the arts and sciences, in America, who could pass a wealth of knowledge and capability on, to our children and youth… teach them how to think and transpose that thought into accomplishment. All that stands in the way of this is a stubborn bureaucratic insistence on status quo, a self-serving, inert lock on seniority and the voracious appetite of techno-venders for profit.

Sophocles said it simply but true: “since we’re all likely to go astray, the reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.” More than ever, now, we need Americans, still able to recognize such truth, who are courageous and caring enough to act on it?

Back to the Top

March 30, 2010

Veteran psychologists have long agreed, that the most invoked justification of assaults, by incorrigible sociopath batterers, is that they were motivated by a provocative statement or attitude of the victim. In their view, the injured person could have avoided injury, simply by avoiding the provocation. Thus, the perpetrator rationalizes transferance of actual guilt to the victim. This long-recognized and forensically unacceptable defense is the exact strategy now being mounted by some key Republican party leaders, to the spate of vicious responses by degenerate elements (some criminal, others borderline but all dangerous) and egged on by the inflammatory incitement of the G.O.P’s own political provocateurs.

And now, these fiery verbal arsonists are spurring some rowdy, undisciplined dupes to even more illicit and dangerous actions. They’re vocally castigating Democratic-party opponents, for daring to take offense, at the illegal atrocities committed by ungovernable forces the G.O.P. themselves, unloosed. Perhaps the most surprising, vocally vituperative Republican big-wig is the early-on, self-alluded successor to current President, Obama, whom he has all-but-dubbed a ‘one termer’. Emulating a despicably self-mitigating wife beater, the irrationally garrulous Newt Gingrich has counseled vociferous Democrat leaders, that calling attention to illicit acts that have been committed against their people and premises, will only anger and incite the perpetrators to commit even more injurious ones. It’s helpful to have advance evidence of the kind of national leader Newt might be. One, sort of in the mold of the late ‘Louisiana Kingfish’, Senator Huey Long, who warned victims of his thuggish onslaughts to shut up and take their lumps or they could end up with worse ones. He, too, had Presidential aspirations.

Violent and vindictive elements have disturbed America’s unanimity. ever since disparate outsiders first came here, to pursue individual goals that inevitably drew them together.

Ultimately, common purpose and common sense convinced our leaders and inspired us to oppose and prevail over every attempt, by fanatic malcontents, to make us victims of pernicious ’divide-and-conquer,’ dogmas. To have overcome so much, for so long, against so many odds, only to surrender its priceless benefit to its most offensive enemies, now, would be not only tragic but senseless.

Those who chose “E Pluribus Unum” as our national motto, mutually pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to keep this an eternal precept of our independence. A few selfish members of our national legislature, whose political fortunes now seem to outweigh all else, have forgotten that America’s continued independence rests on the equal value of all three of those pledged elements. If this amazing, singular experiment is to survive, it’s imperative for all of us, now, to remind and convince them to reverse their catastrophic course.

Back to the Top

March 23, 2010

At the start of every semester, my high school French teacher would look at each new incoming class, shake her head and repeat her favorite phrase, borrowed from the French critic, Alphonse Karr. “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!” she’d intone.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.” This commentator didn’t really understand the truth of that adage, until he undertook a long and frustrating study of the New York State Legislature. With the advent of its most recent tenure, though, the full brunt of those words is now clear.

In the wake of the ‘Watergate’ scandal, the redoubtable ethicist, Archibald Cox, created Common Cause, to make such shenanigans a ‘never-again’ event in our governmental history. Asked to take the helm of the New York State chapter, I soon learned the over-riding factor for Archie was “the people’s right to know.” Nothing, he said, outweighed its value to defend and perpetuate the freedom and fairness of self-government.

Taking my state-level cue from his example, I zeroed in on the nefarious practice of New York’s Legislature, which secretly used its franking privilege for flagrant, partisan campaign promotions, at taxpayer expense, under the rubric of public information. It’s been the practice of these solicitors of the public purse, to periodically peruse the informational pamphlets of state agencies, clip pertinent items and print them in political fliers, falsely mislabeled as official proof of personal accomplishment; then add photo’s with gratefully smiling public figures, under self-serving headlines about their selfless devotion, to the voters in their districts. Digging deeper, we found that the cost of this flim-flam, never shown or recorded, ran to several million taxpayer dollars a year.

As dismayed New Yorkers are now hearing about a pitiably bare public cupboard and near-fatal funding cuts, in every category, including those most acutely needed, legislative leaders of both parties, in both houses, are crying crocodile tears and promising a no-holds-barred battle, to save desperately needed funds wherever possible. The one possibility they’re certain to overlook is the prospect of giving up those imitation-info mailers they’re still cranking out at our expense, to the harsh total of who-knows-how-many taxpayer purloined dollars. Over the years, a practice certain to add up to millions, that could have shrunk the acute budget shortage, they’re now arguing about.

As you think on this bland bilking of the public purse, remember it’s been deliberately kept out of the public record, despite our right to know about it. So, when the next Legislative ‘official-info-message’ shows up in your mail box… and you can bet your last buck, it will, take a minute to let your State legislator know what you think of the continued duplicity; committed for partisan-personal-gain at your expense, hiding its cost and how its paid-for… and all in the foul-official pretense of keeping you informed.

Back to the Top

March 16, 2010

Traversing the unimagined agony of static saturated silence, imposed on this radio station by the elements, over the past four days, has inspired much soul stirring thought for this commentator. One was strongly impelled toward such supports as Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay on Truth, in which he discovered: that the cruelest lies are often told in silence. For certain, the theft of communicative power couldn’t have come at a more crucial time, in Northeast Public Radio’s unstinting effort, to counter the rampant campaigns of formidable fiction and whole clothed half-truth, spewed by outlets that malicious money made captive, while this outlet’s only aim was to focus fact and forethought on the faculties of those, mired in the process of making up their minds.

Under less pressing circumstances, one might have been consoled by comments like those of Meister Eckhardt who, in his thirteenth century Directions for Contemplative Life, observed, that in silence one can most readily preserve their integrity. Alas Eckhardt hadn’t an inkling of the damage expedited by a current Supreme Court majority, hell-bent on handing invincible power to the paid trumpeters of corporate avarice.

The problem encountered, when an aroused nature overcomes the finite vulnerability of human engineering, is that mischief makers lack either scruple or integrity. In this case, the hit-or-miss occurrence that crippled honest-owned media, left its opposite untouched. So a Congressional theocratic enforcer, who flouted the statutory separation of church and state, to impose a pious edict on the U.S. Government, could calmly keep silent about abusive sexual assaults on children, concealed by the same hierarchy that imposed a ban on constitutionally lawful abortion. Added to this, a powerful lobbying arm of a protected American ally could work to silence any criticism of its Israeli client, for forcing Palestinian citizens out of legally owned homes, so favored Israelis could usurp them; and plan to build new homes for 16oo others, in an age-old Palestinian neighborhood, muting the sound of any American dissent, to hinder this glaring misuse of friendship. Such is the gross assault on silence, that happenstance condones.

Thankfully, in this instance, the dedicated and persistent efforts of a few heroic personnel restored WAMC’s vital voice, allowing the critical projection of truth-against-power to resume. If anyone’s ever doubted the difference between this and other media, that trumpet the substance of their tawdry sounds, the forty-eight hours of deprivation now past should settle the question, once and for all. This projector is thankful and happy to resume his commitment, to continue speaking truth.

Back to the Top

March 9, 2010

Suddenly, this society which humans have all pretty much had a hand in shaping, for as long as they’ve been part of it, is all shaken up over the sorry state of its ethics. This is especially apparent in their mindless responses to the actions of political and governmental leaders, that they have chosen. This commentator still wants to know what kind of lotus leaves they’ve been sucking on, for the past several decades? To begin with, it’s important to acknowledge Herbert Spencer’s argument, that no one can be perfectly free until everyone is free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral and no one can be perfectly happy, until everybody’s happy. Since such things are virtually impossible, one must settle for the nearest possibility. Those who organized our government understood the inevitability of human frailty and did their best to counter it. That’s precisely why they constructed ethics laws as they now appear. They not only stress the avoidance of wrongdoing by public officials but insist that they shun even a perception of it and that’s become the crux of the problems we now face. It’s that old devil, perception, maneuvering to befuddle us and for the most part, succeeding.

Pundits are quick to remind us, we live in different times, and things now have changed. If so, there’s not much proof, it’s for the better. At just about the time, that Britain’s American colonies opted for independence, the German scientist/philosopher, Georg Lichtenberg noted that nothing contributes more to peace of the soul, than having no opinion at all. Today’s Americans have gone Georg one better. They’ve let corporate captors not only control the informational sources they’ve relied on for opinions, they’ve ceded the right to form and act on them, to a corporate-congressional cabal.

Today’s typical Americans apparently not only expect but accept some form of dishonesty to be the norm, not only for those they deal with or purchase from but those invested with the responsibility to represent and protect them from such behavior. So how is it so many of them are paid-up members of the AARP, which also sells healthcare insurance and pharmaceuticals, while protecting them from others who also do?

Why is a New York Governor guilty of an ethics violation, for accepting free tickets to Yankee Stadium, where former Presidents, Governors and Mayors have presided from seats of honor? And how is it that fans are taxed for the wherewithal to build newer, more opulent stadiums, yet charged more to watch the games in them and do so?

Is anyone now able to give a valid opinion, about anything? On subjecting opinion to coercion, Thomas Jefferson once asked: “Whom will you make your inquisitors? And then answered: “Fallible men… men governed by bad passions… by private as well as public reasons.” Now, someone will remind me, that these are different times, thus we perceive things differently. Once, in another different time, James Reston of a different New York Times wrote: “All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.”

So, do you still think times… or people have changed? Not sure? Just ask Pogo.

Back to the Top

March 2, 2010

The month just past is best known to most Americans for the several of their most noted Presidents, born in it. It’s to our shame (or should be) that we’ve allowed a fault in our national character: the love of money over all other incentives, to disparage and degrade the way we now celebrate their birthdates: lumped into a weekend, favorably positioned for the greatest promotional and recreational sales hype. That noted, this commentator still finds a reason to lament yet another sad example of disrespect, the lack of attention given to Ben Franklin, perhaps the wisest of our founders who, despite his merit was never honored, with an elective position of leadership. Or perhaps, it was his ultimate wisdom, not to seek or accept one.

Looking back over the spate of prejudice, deliberate viciousness and perverse hypocrisy, with which a body of our elected officials and some mindless adherents have bombarded our newest President and his purported legislative supporters, one is impelled to recall a long-forgotten comment, once published by Ben Franklin, in “Poor Richard’s Almanac: “Blame all and praise all…” he noted, “ are two blockheads!”

Despite the self-serving and utter misrepresentation-by-design, with which political and religious demagogues have been cannonading the rest of us, via their paid-for radio and TV puppet ventriloquists, honest pollsters have discovered and reported, that a majority of American citizens want their President and a conscientious, bi-partisan Congress, to produce the least politicized, most practical and prudent solutions to the onerous problems, now bedeviling this nation, as quickly as it’s possible to do so. And to achieve this, with the least personal or corporate gain, for any functionary, lobbyist or commercial enterprise. That’s an explicit and provable fact. A failure by any of them, to attempt an honest response, ought to be reason enough, as Yogi Berra might have put it, to “Throw the bums out.”

Given this observer’s poetic predilection, he’s impelled to cite yet another, more metaphoric source, the honored American bard: Robert Frost, from his poem – “Take Something Like A Star,” composed in 1949.

“……It asks a little of us here,
It asks a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may take something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.”

Back to the Top

February 23, 2010

Sensing a profound change, weighing on the world’s once-widely-perceived ‘last best hope for democracy,’ this commentator has suddenly realized, a critical element, gone from the clamorous chorus of voices echoing across our nation. What’s missing is ‘conscience’. In 1949, the great journalist/ curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken, wrote: “Conscience is the inner voice that warns us, somebody may be looking.” A national conscience is what we now lack. This critical ‘inner voice’ has been silenced by a massive dose of disregard. The truth is, too few Americans seem to care, that someone may be looking… or not.

Many examples can prove this but the one that finally convinced this observer is the abject, waver of responsibility, a craven United States Attorney General and his cowardly corps of milksop underlings handed, to Gestapo-cloned mimics, in the Bush/Cheney administration’s Department of ‘Nazi-ite Injustice.’ For more than half a century, this commentator was proud to be counted among what countless fellow citizens identified, as America’s “greatest generation.” That pride came at a horrendous cost. For many, their very lives but for all of us, years of suspension, hardship and both physical and emotional pain. What helped us endure was the knowledge, our sacrifice was not only necessary but carried out under the weight of the most arduous strictures conscience could apply. Our mission was not only fitting but our humanity and self-restraint, against the most grievous inhumanity, gave the world proof of the difference. A panel of the most respected judiciary levied extreme penalties against the perpetrators of a genocide, that no legal explanation could mitigate. The present U.S. Attorney General and his lieutenants degraded this mass infliction of conscience, on the souls of an entire generation, with a single, mindless ameliorating phrase: that Bush/Cheney’s Nazi-like legal clones simply showed “poor judgement.”

How does our system of justice now answer similar perpetrators of the most bestial acts: like kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of innocent adults and children? Will it now be possible to mitigate such crimes down to examples of poor judgment? After all, isn’t ours a system of legal precedent? What next? Does our new President, like a once oblivious Reagan, lay a mitigating wreath on graves of Nazi heroes? Perhaps this time, Goering or Heidrich?

This awful miscarriage raises other questions, too, of the lost voice of conscience in our midst. Where are the heart-tugging sounds of those who once cried “NEVER AGAIN!” The nettlers of memory who yearly dispense thousands of candles for windows, on Yom Hashoa (The Day of Remembrance)? What of the criers of conscience, like The Anti-defamation League, who somehow let this horrendous pronouncement go by, without a single shout of condemnation? What prompted their memory slip? Is anyone listening? Does anyone still care? What’s become of our nation’s once insistent, still, small voice?

This caring commentator can still hear the echo of Pastor Niemoller’s grim reminder.

Back to the Top

February 16, 2010

Politically speaking, much grievance has been aired, of late, about the misstatement, overstatement and pure falsification by media, that Americans have long held to unimpeachable standards of reliability. It’s not possible for most of us to pin-point exactly when this bent for fallibility-by-design became a norm but for certain, there’s little doubt among a majority of us, that it now exists. What makes it all the more hurtful and well-nigh impossible to reverse, is the realization that it’s actually much more pervasive, throughout our societal fabric than just in the political arena.

For this observer, the scourge of fictionalizing truth, by most news media outlets, has become standard operating procedure, ever since corporate owners decided, not only to marry operating policy to investor profit but to ensure eternal success with an ongoing campaign of anti-intellectual erosion. Its symptoms are easy to spot. They include shrinking the space and time allotted for any information focused on improving reader, viewer or listener intelligence and replacing it with appeals to thoughtless appetites for food, drink, gadget-faddery, fast vehicles and faster-acting informational apparatus. Except, that all of the latter by-pass process, to provide ultimate answers ASAP. How they’re come-by is too time consuming, thus decidedly unnecessary. Note,

also, the blatant change in advertising content, which features adults who appear to have lost all virtues of judgment or resistance and most, exhibit demeanors that project them as moronically agreeable, to whatever’s being pitched. In the course of this process, media moguls have emasculated language and made the airing of intelligence a thing of shame.

Upbraided with the charge that their pages, screens and speakers are more-than-ever devoid of serious examples of rhetoric, drama, music, literature or art, the media’s corporate overlords bemoan the erosion of these and the exorbitant cost of imposing them, on a miniscule and unappreciative audience; overlooking the truth of their own manipulative roles, to create this outcome. The sorry truth is that many foreign nations we consider inferior, boast better educated populations, not only in technologies and the various art-forms we’ve proclaimed as dead or dying but also, in our language.

If intellectualism and the arts are dying in America, it’s because those who persist in vociferously telling us so, are doing their utmost to kill them. They’re also the ones who most persistently and loudly urge us to trust them, while at the same time, doing their utmost to breach and despoil our trust. In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare, as usual, was right-on… dooming a character to prance through most of the play, portraying an ass. Trouble is, in this winter of our discontent, there aren’t nearly enough appropriate costumes to go around.

Back to the Top

February 9, 2010

Toward the conclusion of his great treatise, “Walden,” Thoreau remarked on the shortsightedness of human self-indulgence, that led his neighbors to act: “…as if there were safety in stupidity alone.” For himself, Thoreau said, he treasured truth more than love, money or fame. To this commentator, it seems that the stupidity of today’s Americans gives greater credence to Thoreau’s words, more than ever before. Then, again, it just may be that as a people, we’ve always exhibited this level of mass stupidity. De Toqueville recognized it, barely fifty years after we’d achieved independence. “I know of no country,” he wrote, “where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men and where a more profound contempt is expressed for the permanent equality of property.”

Why, except for mass stupidity, would so many Americans literally turn their backs on a truth that brought them to the current state of a chaotic economy, unemployment totals and bank failures verging on those of the great depression of the nineteen thirties, plus an explosive ‘anti-American’ hostility among Islamic nations, that number more than half of the world’s population? Intensifying all this is a myopic propensity for disunity at a typical moment, when solidarity has been a critical element of our deliverance in the past.

Ignoring the fact of their own subservience to the facilitators of this national calamity, it’s as though Republicans are now determined to make its worst consequence a disastrous fact, via deliberate and persistent resistance to any and all corrective efforts. Even more astonishing are the antics of Democrats, many of whom seem bent on being accessories to the swift return of oppressive G.O.P. chicanery. The proof is in their dogged disposition to counter every curative attempt by their newly installed President, with a welter of splintering disaffections. Not to mention a spate of political disparities.

The once proud and purposeful alliance that championed the rights of millions of America’s common-folk, has now morphed into spin-off hybrids; like the scared rabbit Blue-Dogs, who pose as Democrats but literally retreat from being classified as such. Stirring the political stew-pot are the flakes, who rebel just for the hell-of-it, even abetting their own adversity, like kids who threaten to eat worms. Other political provocateurs plot mayhem from inside the party, ensuring the awful upshot of debacle.

From colonial times onward, more than one discerning observer has called our nation a melting pot, meaning it in the best sense of the word. Now, rushing hell-bent away from the kind of unity that won us this appellation is certain to earn us a ‘melt-down’ none of us wants or needs.

Back to the Top

February 2, 2010

Josiah Stanford and Aldo Leopold never knew each other. Josiah worked the land on the family farm he established around 1816, in Niskayuna, New York. Aldo became the so-called father of American land conservation, about a century later. If there were such beings as ghosts, the shades of these two would be writhing in agony, today, at the wanton waste of a once-proud mansion and its verdent, surrounding wooded grounds, now reduced to a crumbling hulk and rubbled acreage, just to feed the greed of a few bankers and voracious developers, who should be exposed as public enemies of any effort, to reverse the almost certain ruin of upstate New York’s once robust environment.

If one were seeking to support the thesis that the malling of America would be more aptly spelled ‘mauling,’ no better example could be found than in the general vicinity of the once lushly green, rolling countryside of Niskayuna, now rapidly becoming the newest graveyard of speculative failures, in the history of commercial development, north and west of New York’s capital.

Politicians, from our nation’s President on down, have found a rallying cry, for opening a new route to prosperity, in the twenty-first century. They call it the greening of America, with talk about the wonders our genius can produce, to clean up the mess of our progress, to date and turn its trash into assets. It may sound great but it’ll never happen. Not until someone asserts the honest courage, to tell those behind the big-box and strip-mall carnage, that the days of greening their wallets at the expense of hard-working American taxpayers and their children are over.

Aldo Leopold wrote that we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity, that belongs to us. When we truly see land as part of the community to which we belong, he noted, then we may begin to use it with love and respect. Trouble is, love and respect are words, long erased from the vocabulary of commercial development. Like the verdant woods that once surrounded Josiah Stanford’s farm, they’re neglected remnants of another time. It’s not likely, we or our children will see much of them, here, ever again.

Back to the Top

January 26, 2010

In a 1942 essay, on the contribution of an independent judiciary to civilization, the great Federal Appeals Court jurist, Learned Hand, wrote: “no court can save a society so riven, that the spirit of moderation is gone.” Sixty eight years later, in a rash and callous show of activist intemperance, the now openly politicized majority of this nation’s highest court has proved the falsity of its own stated opposition to judicial activism. In giving corporations and unions a no-limit sanction for political spending, the court’s reactionary paladins have made the constitutional right of public self-expression a virtual impossibility for millions of ordinary citizens. To accomplish this, it has used the artificial mechanisms of distortion and technicality. First and most blatant is the court’s irrational rationale, that there’s no difference between a corporation and an individual; a reversal that annuls the basis for many previous strictures applied to corporations.

But beyond this is the technicality, that not only now exempts purchased speech from limitation but its intensity. By defining money as equivalent to expression, the court has also erased all limits to the volume of human expression, in effect, erasing any ordinance that controls the magnitude of mechanically generated sound. If corporations can now air all manner of electronically reproduced opinion, what then becomes of laws that communities have established against offensive sonic disturbance, like various forms of too-loud music or other amplifications that some owners of boom boxes and outdoor sound systems have seen defined as public nuisances?

Then, there’s the simple question of equal justice. If those with the monetary capability to control all available transmission outlets are able to out-shout opinions of all others, what lawful mechanisms are left to ordinary citizens, to make public officials and fellow citizens aware of their feelings and impressions, on issues that affect them?

In the same Learned Hand essay, cited to begin this commentary, the great jurist made a final and eminently wise observation: a society which evades its responsibility by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of the spirit of moderation, he wrote, in the end will perish. There’s one sound even this bought-and-paid-for High-Court may have overlooked and this commentator prays they’ll yet hear it: the sound of aroused voters, flexing their electoral muscles in millions of voting booths, throughout this country. Now, if Americans will just wise up and sound off, they can still save this democracy.

Back to the Top

January 19, 2010

Back when we were just becoming a nation, in a direct reference to theocratic despotism, like medieval Who, among our nation’s many political pundits and prognosticators would have guessed, in the month after Barach Obama’s inauguration, that he and his party would now face not one but a series of critical tests, any of which might jeopardize the tenure of this administration and its Democratic congressional majority, beyond the present term? Foreseen or not, that’s exactly what they’re facing. A persistently tenacious economic plunge, that resists attempts to upgrade its label to a recession and goads many victims into venting their rage, not at Republican instigators but Democrat successors, struggling to reverse it. The new President’s key campaign issue, of enacting healthcare reform to serve Americans, in every economic stratum, teeters on the brink of dissolution, in a welter of political disagreements and inexplicably negative reactions, from those who seemed to need and desire it most. Added to these is the ultimately unnerving straw of blunders and defections, by some of the Democrat Party’s longest serving and most strategically placed stalwarts, fuelling the opposition’s electoral hopes and possibilities which ‘til now, appeared illusory, at best.

Self-styled experts and veteran analysts float various reasons for these reversals, some of which even sound relevant. There’s one, though, that all interested Democratic participants and observers need to consider and address, to garner even a slight hope of change for the better. It has to do with self-image, courage and confidence. All bear on a fate that seems to counter Democrats’ reasons for being Democrats. So, now, they have to ask themselves, why they decided to be Democrats? If those who formed this party, did so around a set of principles to reflect their belief in a government of, for and by the people, then the inclusive nature of democracy should negate any other belief, that asserts special privilege to any group, for whatever reason but proved and dire necessity.

Somehow, those who believe in the power of material wealth, to determine national policy and practice, have been able to redefine the term ‘principle’, from an ethical to a pecuniary standard. They’ve repeated the ‘big lies’ about Democrats, as tax and spenders, soft on crime and national defense for so long, their targets are themselves now unsure about them. At the same time, the purveyors of Nixon/Reagan/Bush perversion have used this distraction to push their own mastery of evils, for which they’ve blamed others. In the process, ethical principle has become an endangered species, all but replaced by a term spelled the same but of a hugely different meaning.

As he campaigned for our votes, Barach Obama promised change we could believe in and a sizeable majority of us responded. If that change hasn’t happened, perhaps it’s because we didn’t strive for it strongly enough. The time is late but courage and confidence can still prevail. As Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson noted, courage isn’t the absence of fear but a mastery of it, and long, long before that, in 19 B.C., Virgil revealed this unshakable truth. They can do all, he wrote, because they think they can. So, how about it, Democrats? Your President, party and country await the answer.

Back to the Top

January 12, 2010

Back when we were just becoming a nation, in a direct reference to theocratic despotism, like medieval Spain’s dreaded ‘Inquisition,’ Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we’ve not advanced one inch toward uniformity.”

In that perceptive and courageous statement, Jefferson took the first of a continuing series of resolute stands, with others, for the outright separation of church and state, in the policies and actions of the United States Government. With the overwhelming concurrence of the founders, this separation became one of the first stipulations of the U.S. Constitution, still unchanged. At the same time, the founders wisely included inviolate protection of religious beliefs and practices by individuals, as long as they didn’t infringe on the rights of other believers or non-believers. Despite these assurances, tyranny and suffering inflicted by the Holy Roman Church, imposed vestiges of anti-Catholic prejudice, long after our Constitution was adopted. It was only the intelligent and courageous examples of leaders like Al Smith, John F. Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Joeseph Biden, and upstate New York’s own Bishop Howard Hubbard, that enabled us to overcome this extreme residual intolerance.

Now, one blindly barbarous diehard congressman, who views himself, more important and powerful than all the wise and courageous American leaders who preceded him, seeks to re-impose the dreaded inquisition modus on our entire nation, “as an assertion of my Roman Catholic faith,” as he puts it.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the frighteningly savage and depraved effect of such a purely evil construct, as the bill proposed by Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, to prevent women who receive federal healthcare insurance subsidies, from obtaining abortion coverage is the almost certain probability, that it is unconstitutional. Not just because of the lawful protection now afforded a woman’s right to choose, but of Stupak’s own stupidly pointed justification of this bill, as an assertion of his Roman Catholic faith. A pronouncement that literally negates the language of the First Amendment, which prevents Congress from creating any law, based on a religious ideological purpose.

Even more disturbing, is the now common knowledge of the Congressman’s own personal history, whose admitted attitudes and actions stamp him, a former state trooper who more-or-less saw himself, not just as a policeman but an avenging judge and jury. Added to this, his horrific, pro-NRA pronouncements and actions, after his own son’s gun-shot suicide, paint a frightening picture of a berserk zealot, bent on dispensing self-determined discipline, judgment and punishment, to those he regards as offenders.

There’s another illegal act that Congressman Stupak’s assertion reveals. It makes him an unregistered and unlawful representative of a foreign power: The Vatican.

Bart Stupak’s perverted zeal has obviously blinded him to the long established and accepted fact of religious freedom, in these United States where everyone, including Catholics, has the right to believe and practice or not… as they wish and choose. What they do not and hopefully never will have is the right to tell or force any other person what to believe in or practice. For all our sakes and our country’s, the United States Congress must regain the courage and will to remind him of this.

Back to the Top

January 5, 2010

A top priority for all Americans to address, in this new year of two thousand and ten, is a tenet of our identity as a democratic republic, that’s almost become a cliché, as a result of our abuse of it. The phrase …”freedom of speech, and of the press,” is contained in the very first Amendment to our Constitution’s all-important Bill of Rights. In assuring this right, the framers took pains to separate freedom of speech from freedom of the press. It’s an important detachment to bear in mind, because those who would control and subvert the latter have made it synonymous with rampant unrestraint of the former.

In 1960, Albert Camus wrote, that freedom of the press is the freedom that has probably suffered most, from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty. No less a power than our nation’s Supreme Court has granted both prevaricators and corrupt nonprofessionals a license to run amuck, with deception and distortion of the truth, under the false identification of printed or broadcast news, as speech. The result; marauders armed with overpowering wealth have bombarded millions of otherwise optionless readers, listeners and viewers, with every form of verbal perversion, from insinuation to deliberately manufactured falsehood. All under the guise of protected speech, powered by the Court’s spurious description of money, as a form of human expression.

The key, here, is the Constitutional separation of speech and press, as separate entities and it seems, not even those most affected by this obvious split have emphasized it enough. Clearly, the framers saw the people’s right to unvarnished information, provided by professionally ethical and documented sources, as clearly different from the personal expression of opinion, by individuals or groups. This also asserts, that providers of such information be held to a measurable standard of professionalism, and adherence to factual reporting of statements and events, that can be documented or corroborated. There was a time, not that long ago, when print and electronic reporters of the news were held to such standards by regulations, under which their professions were practiced. It was also a time when deaths, births and marriages were reported as events of the day, by publishers who now label them commercial announcements, charged for at so-much a line. Electronic newscasts, too, were allowed sponsor promotion but never at the expense of news delivery, which wasn’t shredded with commercials. Editorial comment, too, was aired and labeled apart from news.

Now, fast and loose perversion of news, by government, corporate and money-vested manipulators, deprives vast numbers of citizens of their constitutionally promised and vital right to know. It’s time both government regulators and the courts, returned that prerogative to its rightful inheritors.

Back to the Top

December 29, 2009

It seems, the more vexing and challenging a time, the more inclined we are to look ahead and hope for something better. Increasingly, for this commentator, wisdom born of experience is still a persuasive teacher. As we near the onset of a new year and a new decade, the words of the ancient Roman truth-sayer, Seneca, still offer us hope’s most essential elements: our own ideas and involvement. For this observer, the great lack that defies our technology and defiles its promise is ‘quality.’ Our achievements promise much. Their peddlers tout more-than-enough of everything, for prices and terms, always scripted to appear within reach. What we get in return makes a mockery of truth.

Old Seneca had it exactly right. It’s quality rather than quantity that matters, he wrote. The one element we’ve not only lost but continue to ignore is quality. Ours has become a culture steeped in schlock. Our media not only glorify it but our populace seems to revel in it. The cheap and tawdry, wrapped in a valueless veneer, appear to have the strongest attraction for us and those who vend them for profit, promote them, ad infinitum.

Why does the lesser, yet louder, attract more of our populace? What is it that draws them to sounds certain to destroy their hearing, yet shun intelligent sweetness, that stimulates the brain and inspires the heart? Why do thousands crowd eateries, ignoring those they sit with but talk nonsense to others, somewhere else on tiny, hand-held devices, while the eateries compete, to offer more obesity per serving, at an attractive price, than any intelligent diner should ever ingest?

Why have we allowed those who’ve leased the people’s communicative resources, to abuse them, offering moronic parodies of prejudice as news, increasingly laced with promotional clap-trap, to the point where the promotion outweighs programs, in the time and space allotted both, while TV and computer screens are cluttered with debris of persuasions to buy, that literally overlay subject matter we’ve a right to peruse, in peace?

In “King Lear,” Shakespeare added this observation to Seneca’s: To the vile, wisdom and goodness seem vile; he wrote, filths savor but themselves. In the days and months of the coming year, this commentator wishes a rebirth in the pursuit of quality, by and for us all. The only certain way to make our future a truly profitable and happy one.

Back to the Top

December 22, 2009

Throughout the current ongoing Armageddon, on national healthcare reform, ‘change’ has become the byword, for those on every side of the issue. Liberal Democrats incessantly remind the President and their more conservative partisans of the impassioned promise, that carried the Obama campaign to victory. Old-line ‘moderate’ Democrats remind their more impatient members that incremental change, in close proximity to middle-of-the-road consistency, mirrors what the majority most often favors. Loyal and disciplined Republicans warn of an unending chain of catastrophe, that radical change will let loose, ignoring the reality of suffering and chaos already created, by the previous President and his henchmen, whom they supported, in virtual lockstep commitment. Meanwhile, a ‘hard-right’ alliance of radical religious zealots and cement-minded conservatives forms anti-change battle lines, behind a barrage of used tea-bags.

At this point, we should all focus on one unchangeable reality. As the insightful sociologist-educator, Helen Merrell Lynd so aptly noted, it’s characteristic of humans to change accustomed ways, as little as possible. For proof, she recalled that the very first Packard automobile, came equipped with a whipstock, attached to the dashboard. But despite our stubborn penchant for immovability, change is inevitable. The great French physiologist and founder of experimental medicine, Claude Bernard, who also served in the French Senate, observed that ideas are only instruments we use to break into phenomena. When no longer useful we must change them, he said, just as we would a blunt lancet, that no longer serves its purpose.

For this commentator, an unforgettable lesson was delivered by Archibald Cox, the brilliant Boston lawyer, whose honesty and courage launched the downfall of Richard Nixon and created the great people’s advocacy alliance, Common Cause. When liberal hot-heads lost patience with the pace of progressive change and threatened to desert, unless the response was just as they originally viewed and immediate, Archie would counsel tolerance and tenacity. The key to Democracy, he reminded, is tolerance. If all we can get is a piece of what we’re after, he’d urge, it’s better to take it and come back another time, for the rest. Far better than having to start over, from an iffy beginning.

Through many lean years, this observer has seen Archie’s approach work, time and again. For all those who see the present healthcare reform bill as far less than a full measure of success, this is the time for tenacity. That means hanging in there, together and gearing up for the next go ‘round, so we can then win the rest of what we set out to achieve. Walking away only increases the distance from success. Sure, we were promised change but the politics of democracy has never been nor will it ever be an exact science. It’s the art of the possible. That often takes more time and effort than we’re willing to give but that’s where one’s mettle is really tested. The question we need to answer now is: How strong is ours?

Back to the Top

December 15, 2009

In his “Reflections,” the French philosopher, La Rochefoucauld, wrote, that quarrels would never last long, if the fault were only on one side. It’s amazing to this observer, how the most evil deed and serious malfeasance can be clouded and often overshadowed, in the process of finger-pointing and fixing blame. Somehow, that process seems to have become a hallmark of our time and particularly so, if we can transfer even greater guilt, than the malfeasance itself. Turn an apparent social misdeed into a resultant injury, that visits personal pain, on all who hear of it.

The great change this commentator notes, in the time we’re living through, from times before, is a common failure to recognize the offense to principles, that were once universal guideposts for a whole society. Personal injury is now the dimension of right and wrong, most often measured by monetary loss or annoyance at the limiting of comfort or pleasure.

We’ve made it almost a habit, to place our trust in politicians who promise what we ourselves should recognize as impossible, if we’d just take the time and trouble to think their impracticality through. Like willful children, we wish for what – by now – we ought to know is undeliverable, except at exorbitant or unaffordable cost. In fact, we’ve become so habituated to hyperbolized statements as facts, we bridle at truth and seek to punish those who speak it to us. Former New York State Senate Majority Leader, Joe Bruno, sluffs off his clearly defined ethical misconduct with the lame alibi, that he’s “a businessman,” ignoring a law that prohibits using his public office, to enhance personal and/or especially business gain.

New York’s Governor David Paterson, who in good faith, took on a job he didn’t seek, finds himself disliked and the object of childish, selfish disfavor, for behaving like a responsible public official (something unheard of, in today’s politics), while those who deserve punishment are the instigators and expediters of the many difficulties he and we face. Meanwhile, the public temper ignores piggish bankers and insurance finaglers, to insist that Government keep its hands off programs, designed to make our lives easier and more manageable. Government, of course, being us, an onus we should have assumed in the first place but traded away, for fast cars that foul our air and media that glorify ignorance. Shakespeare had it right but his wisdom’s lost, in the I-pod mish-mash of ughs and grunts that we now use to communicate our self-centered search, for ambiguous answers. “The trouble, dear Brutus (and that includes most of us), lies not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Back to the Top

December 1, 2009

In the first century B.C., the learned Publius Syrus wrote: “It’s a bad plan that admits of no modification.” Since then, humanity’s greatest sages have hailed planning, as a requisite preamble to any meaningful action. We’re told (ad infinitum) it’s even an essential element for any effective capitalist endeavor. So, it’s with good reason one wonders, why do arch capitalists seem to abhor any social mechanism, that’s based on or employs a plan or worse luck, displays the term in its title?

The question has bedeviled this commentator, throughout a maddening series of machinations pursued by stalwart champions of “the Capitalist system,” who are now thwarting every plan advanced to reverse an eight-year repudiation of planning, practiced by a Bush administration that made a farce of the process. Bush boosters removed every sensible rule or regulation, installed to limit reckless squandering of the nation’s natural or developed wealth or any mechanism that signalled such intent had become a reality. The Bush/Cheney wrecking crew accomplished this decimation with thuggish impunity and the cooperation of the same Republican congressional wheeler-dealers, who’ve now donned the phony tin-foil armor of self-righteous negativism. Alas, their shameful shenanigans were aided by Democrats, who lacked the courage to defend canons they once proudly embraced.

Now, we’ve literally reached a point of no return, in not one but several crises that could spell the end of life on this planet, as a place of orderly, convivial and continuing productivity to sustain survival. And the same, stupid, stubborn, self-serving and sanctimonious saboteurs who encouraged and escalated this havoc, are now finagling with half-measures, all aimed at delaying the inevitable, imposing on ourselves the liabilities and limits, necessity demands. Spendthrifts, who squandered fortunes they were sworn to safeguard, now have the gall to complain about the cost, for unborn generations. Ignoring the ultimate truth, that no place may be fit for anyone to inhabit.

As world leaders prepare to meet and agree on limits that all know are key to human survival, piratical profiteers still press for deals that allow them ‘green stamps’ for environmental short-shrifting. Credits they can trade for bad behavior passes. But why stop there? Why not use this system to promote bogus adherence to all socially-necessary behavior? We could short-change banks on debt payments, settle grudges with beatings that stop just short of homicide, a whole new order that allows us to be sort-of but not quite in sync with what’s required. And think of the trading possibilities; the swap of lesser infractions, to cover huge and harmful crimes. Welcome to the corporate/capitalist cosmos of free trade, without hindrance or regulation; just profit to encourage good behavior… and hope it occurs, in a world, unfettered from plan or limit.

In 700BC, Hesiod added this post script to Syrus’s wisdom: …”Evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.”

Back to the Top

November 24, 2009

For many embroiled (by choice or circumstance) in the American Revolution of 1776, the words of the Greek philosopher Democritus were starkly true. Theirs’ had become a “world turned upside down.” All the traditional guideposts and norms that ordered their lives were overturned and disordered. What most failed to grasp were the character distortions of fellow humans, drunk on power, that triggered the ensuing cataclysm. Nearly two and a half centuries later, the truth in these words has never been clearer.

For Americans, ours is truly a world turned upside down. Especially noticeable is our total lack of sense, spurred by a twisted ignorance of our own history. A horde of citizens who demanded change and achieved its means, now not only turn their backs on it but vehemently oppose it – in the streets and outside offices of government bodies. Their demand? An end to government interference in their lives. A moment of honest thought should remind them, they’ve already accomplished this, when they deserted interest in their own affairs, turned them over to self-serving surrogates and became obsessed with the acquisition of gas-guzzlers and gadgets.

Now, they’ve traded bales of a tyrant’s selfishly overtaxed tea, for tiny sodden discards of what they’ve already consumed, as symbols of discontent, which only advertise their ignorance. A current world we’ve largely created is truly upside down. A majority of those we’ve elected to lead and represent us have done and continue to do nothing but line their own pockets and abet those whose lucre lines them. From when they first created it, our founders saw government, of, for and by the people as the most efficient means of achieving the most necessary ends for most of us. That doesn’t mean dictatorship, it means self-imposition and constant supervision of mechanisms, that best serve our needs and interests, in other words: public options honestly and efficiently run.

A despicable attitude of “me and mine, only,” has spawned an entrenched national system, that winks at official impropriety and has transformed the vital art and science of healing into a means of profit for corporate connivers, who’ve not only made a crap game out of human survival but want to fix the odds, to ensure that they can always win.

When he coined the phrase: “the world turned upside down,” Democritus also added some critical advice: He warned against following bad examples: “Like Aesop’s fox, who when he lost his tail, would have all his fellow foxes cut off theirs.”

Wake up Americans. It’s time we all took a hand in turning our world right side up.

Back to the Top

November 17, 2009

Slogans are not new to the manipulation of mass mindset, in the stratagems of American political history. One need just think of the early depiction of George Washington, as: “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen;” or “The Iron Armed Soldier of Tippecanuoe,” used in William Henry Harrison’s 1840 presidential campaign. The repetitive slogan has played an intimate role in our historic political development. But when slogans are replaced with the insidious innuendo of pure hyperbole or political libel, to establish rigidly negative public beliefs, some means is needed to expose the danger of their infecting the entire body of our national thought.

The most current pernicious ploy is the unfounded and totally distorted use of “Socialist,” as a derogatory description of any effort or program that embodies the involvement of government or any of its agencies. The whole idea of a federal union of states, to establish and oversee activities which literally required public involvement was elemental to the origin of these United States. So was the establishment of the labor union, as a necessary instrument of collective bargaining, for workers at the mercy of callous company owners, who forced employees to endure sweatshop enslavement. The unified strength of many is a logical antidote, to any singular enveloping despotism. .

There’s also a malicious add-on, that invariably accompanies the use of insidious accusations, based not on facts but labels. All too often the practice is meant to deflect attention from an even more injurious threat, that the accusers themselves may represent. The “Socialist” pejorative is most often applied by corporate and pro-business agents, with agendas that feature much more regimentation and abuse of the civil and economic rights of those they seek to control, than any current Socialist system.

The rampant, rapacious retailer, Walmart, is a glaring and overtly ominous example. While the most crippling decline in economic circumstance, since the ‘Great Depression’ of the nineteen-thirties, threatens to erase an entire class of independent small-businesses, while adding hundreds of thousands to the ranks of the homeless and unemployed, Walmart, now the world’s largest retailer, boasts record profits, while denying those it employs even a semblance of fair labor practices: like stipulated work-hour shifts, paid holidays and overtime, plus decent, humane health-care. Meanwhile, using syncro-slashed price reductions, it dooms smaller competitors to oblivion. Believe it. The tyranny of the all-powerful, all-encompassing corporate collective is about to replace any remaining semblance of citizen-participation in our government, with corporate sector control; a tyranny that makes simple Socialism resemble a nostalgic option of the past.

Back to the Top

November 3, 2009

The news media’s political pundits, even those leaning leftward, have become so engrossed in analyzing what’s happened and will or may occur, to the disparate remnants of the Republican Party, that Democrats have virtually become an endangered species, short shrifted of the valuable time and space, so vital to political viability, in today’s struggle to seduce the fickle electorate. Sad to say, the Democratic leadership has done little to reverse this sorry trend. Apparently, they’re fixated on money to rebuild the muscle, lent by historical perspective and the productive pride it once imbued. But no amount of money can purchase courage or unity of purpose and both are what the Democrats lack, in amounts needed to inspire and attract emulators and followers.

Financial support is always a necessity for any organized political effort but when complicity to providers turns ordinary dollars into ‘filthy-lucre,’ credibility accrues the greatest loss and right now, it’s a loss Democrats can ill afford.

Realizing the incredible confederation that created his miraculous election victory, President Obama is walking a thin line among elements tenuously allied, under a barely visible Democratic banner. But he and they have a treasure trove of historic precedents, from whom to borrow corroboration and courage. Long before the astounding likes of Martin Luther King, then-President Franklin Roosevelt was goaded to political deeds, even he hadn’t envisioned, by the courageous leadership of A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, who waged a courageous battle for workers to have decent conditions and a fair wage for honest labor, whatever their careers or color.

FDR chose creative people of principle, to craft programs that reclaimed the nation’s forests and farms. He challenged the Congress to pass legislation that forced financial finaglers and money lenders to play by rules that not only kept them from conspiring in secret but held them to public account… and the Congress responded, in clear and no-nonsense language. Power for factories, farms and homes became a publicly regulated commodity, available to all. Yes, and a little known Senator, named Harry Truman, chaired a committee, that investigated corporate connivers and price-gougers and brought them to justice.

Then, as now, those with selfish axes to grind called it “Socialism” and warned we were on the road to wrack and ruin. We all know, now – or should – it made us a prosperous giant, known to the world as “The arsenal of democracy.” Sure, there were some wealthy visionaries who also led, along with some very brainy folks who understood that United States, always needs both words, together, to succeed. The Democratic Party needs to reconnect with those whose honest efforts helped them create such history: the ordinary thousands known as “The People.” But they’d better do it soon, before misery makes The People seek other company to love.

Back to the Top

October 27, 2009

The linchpin slogan of Barak Obama’s Presidential campaign promised: “Change we can believe in!” Now, nine months into his presidency, we can believe, without a hint of contradiction, the promise has become a prophetic fact. Alas, its embodiment is neither one of Obama’s intent nor of his accomplishment. Actually, it began a number of years before he decided to seek any office and his decision had little to do with its evolution.

The essence of this change was best described by Jessie Unruh, the once legendary Speaker of the California Assembly and later powerful State Treasurer, better known as ‘Big Daddy,’ who ran that state’s affairs throughout the nineteen sixties and seventies.

Jessie Unruh, who said:”money is the mother’s-milk of politics,” putting into words what the U.S. Supreme Court, some twenty years later certified, when it redefined money as speech. Given this final sanction, money has become the measure and the muscle for every political action that defines and determines the conduct of our government, its leaders, functionaries and ultimately, its citizens.

Under the most objective and non-political definition, we’re told that in the ideal sense, a democratic system of government is supposed to do for people, what they’re unable to do for themselves. It’s from this belief that such activities as national defense, policing, legislation, energy, natural resource conservation, mass transit, and yes, hospitalization and public health were – from the first – considered responsibilities of government; either for oversight or outright management. No more. The latest to consider privatizing all its prisons is the State of Arizona. It’s also an accepted fact that many of the nation’s largest and most prestigious hospitals are now owned and operated by for-profit corporations. It’s plain fact, that areas of social necessity, once considered the province and responsibility of government, are now answerable to the profit-making requirements of corporations and their investors. Activities of government once ascribed to the ‘good and welfare’ of the populace are now secondary to the monetary return their operations provide to owners and investors. Their dollars having now become the same means of persuasion as words, providers of healthcare and medicines can literally pay legislators to enshrine their dictates as policy and write them into law, as receivers of legalized payoffs, once correctly branded as bribes. So much for the possibility of ‘a public option.’

But the grossest and cruelest cut of all is the sanction which allows those with the most monetary resources, to literally purchase elective office. The once holier-than-thou New York Times recently trumpeted, in passing it along with other news of daily interest, that Mayor Bloomberg’s quest for reelection is the costliest ever in U.S. history, putting the amount at 250 million dollars of Mr. Bloomberg’s own money.

With no decisive word of criticism or opposition, why not just do away with elections and put national, state and local offices up for public auction, each post going to the highest bidder? Yes, fellow citizens believe it. Change is here and ours has become the first wholly monetary democracy, in which anything’s for sale, to those who’ll pay the price. Here’s a hint for the Supreme Court to further reduce the prison population. Having already sanctioned the carrying of firearms in public, they could now declare the phrase “Hand it over,” as simple speech and voila! Armed robbery’s no longer a crime.

Welcome, fellow Americans, to Washington Irving’s land of “the almighty dollar.”

Back to the Top

October 20, 2009

If citizens from every segment of this imperfect union seem confused by a serious disconnect, between their own situations and the economic eruption that has split us into a disparate splatter of geo-social atoms, a corrupt combine of corporate profiteers has succeeded in their design. This spirited and sanguine amalgam, that once seemed capable of just about any achievement, has not only lost its momentum but the decisive ‘mass-attitude’ that impelled it. The obvious proof of this is the almost primitive patois that our language has shrunk to and a universal fixation on gadgets, designed to discourage intellectual initiative and keep the greatest number of us focused on tripe and trivia.

Even more discouraging is the evidence, that we are being intellectually outstripped by the populace of nations we’ve long considered unfit, either as trading partners or geo-political allies. We demeaned and denigrated Venezuela’s Chavez, whose oil was offered along with criticism of our arrogant pressure on smaller countries, to emulate our policies and posture. One wonders, how can Venezuela, with such an apparently crude and unintelligent leader, produce over one hundred student symphonic ensembles, all at incredible levels of score reading and instrumental performance? Their awesome accomplishment is attributed to a learning program entitled ‘El Systema,’ now being copied world-wide. The newly appointed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel is a notable alumnus, said to have memorized all nine scores of the Mahler Symphonies by the age of eighteen. While such mind-boggling accomplishment is now being emulated in countries, much poorer than ours, the mavens of American TV, who’ve made millions from glorifying trash as talent, continue to air their assessment, that classical music and other such art forms are either extinct or near-death. Instead, they urge hordes of ash-heap audio/video addicts to think less and patronize more of Face-book effluent and fast cars. Meanwhile, their hireling gutter-level grunge grinders fill the spaces between TV commercials with deceptions that redefine liberty as license.

Why is it, that at the height of the worst recession in more than half a century, an aroused electorate decries expenditures to combat it as wasteful but utters not a disapproving word at billions spent on sports taj mahals and still more millions, for a handful of players who use them? Meanwhile theaters and halls for drama, music and art go dark, and programs in arts curricula are cut, for lack of funds. The list of such failures, in the northeast, grows with each passing day, as patrons groan on, at the cost of tickets to rank routines, that are passed off as extravaganzas but line up to pay for them, nevertheless.

Far-right Republicans and worry-wart Democrats can denigrate FDR’s New Deal as socialist demagoguery (which truly it wasn’t) but it produced a cultural renaissance and ultimate prosperity, that still elicits foreign respect and honest national pride. The real problem we face, now, is the lack of leaders with the guts and brains to enlist our best talents and rekindle our highest aspirations, and an enlightened populace to support both.

Back to the Top

October 13, 2009

One wonders whatever became of the noble experiment that Abraham Lincoln called: “the last, best hope of earth?” Have we truly and finally traded this incredible heritage for a misspent and mundane payoff of paltry dollars and cents? Amid the myriad calls for change, from the political left, right and a scatter of fringe groups on the outer- edges of this restive society, what kind and how much change can we really afford?

So much that shaped this incredible social experiment has changed already, that its identifiable outlines have grown dim and difficult to recognize. Take, for example, the bedeviling question of healthcare reform, that currently divides us into a myriad of disaffected fragments. What we’re really talking about, here… or should be, is the well-being and survival of a populace, without which this nation, as a cohesive entity, literally ceases to exist. Since its inauguration, in 400 B.C. the healing art of medicine’s ethic has been “to help or at least to do no harm.” How many of those, who literally now lead the legislative endeavor to reconstitute our national healing effort, can honestly say they believe in and subscribe to this principle? Do actions truly speak louder than words? The most vociferous members of the United States Senate and a healthy number of imitators, in the House of Representatives are out to prove just the opposite. Most are craven hirelings of insurance, healthcare and pharmaceutical providers, for whom the irresistible goal is corporate and investor earnings. For these ringmasters of the human circus, the hours and minutes in which we breathe are the essence of dollars and cents. Life, to them, is but a time-frame allotted for profit.

Now here’s a hypocritical irony to fracture all logic: The so-called public options and government sponsored plans, that recalcitrant members of Congress are dead-set against are modeled after the exact health-plan options already provided to every one of them and paid for, with money collected from taxpayers, for whom their ‘NO’ votes ensure the denial of equal treatment. And the reason, they say, is that they’re worried about passing the cost of all this on to our children and grandchildren. Not the cost of their own healthcare, mind you, that’s a given… but ours. What doesn’t bother them one wit, is the blood money they’ll pocket for their dirty work, from corporate sponsors who can now smugly boast of how they saved us from socialist degradation. If all this makes you more than a little upset, next time you pass a mirror take a good look at yourself and think of the adage you should have remembered: “Sheepish voters beget wolfish politicians.”

Back to the Top

September 29, 2009

It’s tragic, that religions are exempt from the compulsory accountings imposed on other organized American endeavors. What sins would have been by now acknowledged? In the wake of Ramadan and Yom Kipur, holiest days observed by two of civilization’s three great faiths, we find little abatement in animus, despite much breast beating and professions of peace, justice and forbearance, they all claim to represent. What’s perhaps most disturbing to one who still retains great faith in the constitutional document, that’s said to set this democracy apart from all others, is the extent to which the separation of church and state activity, a primary aim and proscription of our founders, has been subverted and literally contorted to abet what it was meant to prevent.

President Obama campaigned on the premise that while faith-based organizations retain religious freedom to practice, they have no basis for participation in programs organized and funded by local, state or federal governments. Now, as President, he seems to falter in actions to reverse involvements initiated by the previous Bush administration. Such hesitance only emboldens movers of faith-based initiatives, already supported by government, to seek new venues of public insinuation, cultivating acceptance they didn’t rate in the first place. One recalls such unsavory examples of religious pandering, by politicians, as the insidious use of public funds, to provide school busses for the restricted orthodox Jewish School District of Kyrias Joel, in New York, which then refused to hire female bus drivers, because of a theocratic gender prejudice.

The callous disregard of humanity by fundamentalist religious leaders of all faiths, in their efforts to impose theocratic tyranny, is far reaching and unapologetic. Typical of those abroad is the Taliban’s indiscriminate use of explosives which more-often kill and maim innocent bystanders, while pursuiing intended political targets, in Afghanistan. Here in America, a leading Orthodox Jewish Rabbi recently told a Jerusalem Post interviewer, he looked forward to saying Kaddish (the memorial prayer for the dead) for Conservative and Reform movements of Judaism. In Israel, followers of these sects are still denied equal rights, though Israel calls itself a democracy, much like ours. By what connotation is hard to understand, since religious parties and leaders hold positions, there, that strongly influence the policies and actions of the government.

Interfaith animus has been a fact, since before burnt offerings. Church-state shenanigans were a catalyst for American democracy. The efforts of hard-line Christian fundamentalist leaders and groups, to influence and participate in our nation’s political decisions and programs, were once loudly and energetically opposed by such groups as the national Interfaith Alliance and Interfaith Impact, in New York State. Of late, though, while these groups have taken positions antithetical to those of the religious right, on issues of choice and gender, they’ve become silent on issues directly related to church/state separation.

Like our founders, this commentator respects the right and belief of every deist. But when those who claim the right to speak for God decide to claim and levy God-like power, it’s the duty of every caring citizen to oppose them.

Back to the Top

September 22, 2009

It’s not clever or commendable to carp at critical statements by highly regarded persons, at pivotal moments in history. But despite my respect for Jimmy Carter, this commentator must take issue with a remark the former President made, in a recent, widely aired TV interview. Referring to a rude slur shouted at President Barak OBama, by a South Carolina Congressman, during a formal Presidential address to both houses of Congress, Mr. Carter was asked if he thought the discourtesy was spurred by race prejudice. His answer expressed the belief, that much of this country, North and South, still showed distinct symptoms of racism, against African-Americans and this is the point at issue. Given his comprehensive experience, gained over years of on-sight observation, why would he stop there? Why not complete the prejudicial thesis to its undeniable conclusion, that the malevolence goes far beyond a single racial group? It’s not just “racism” that plagues Americans, it’s “-ism,” per se and its fanatical extent is far more injurious than the mere shouting of insults.

The literal definition of “ism” is an extreme ideal, doctrine, system or practice that disparages. In today’s mean and abusive atmosphere, we needn’t look far, to find one.

If George W. Bush and his so-called advisors had just glanced beyond their noses, they might have discerned the implacable hatred of Sunni for Shiah, and vice versa, in Iraq. That insight could have averted thousands of needless deaths and endless carnage. Our own founders saw and understood the evil theocratic alliances of Catholic and Protestant dictators with monarchs whose installations they facilitated. The founders were so affronted, they pointedly barred such practices in our constitution. The Jihads, not just of power hungry caliphates but of warring intra-familial sects have embroiled the Muslim world in turmoil and terror for centuries. Even the Biblical Israelite ‘People of the Book,’ have engaged in internal intrigues and blood feuds, the results of which still impede their modern attempts to salvage residual peace for their followers. In present-day Iran, either a totally villainous or totally deranged leader screams hysterical denials of History’s most depraved “ism:” Nazism, while adherents of related sects unsettle the social fabric of nearly half-a-world.

Then, there’s the worst kind of “ism,” contrived Conservatism, organized and goaded by dispassionate but greedy instigators whose only aim is profit. Embedded in the fabric of this democracy are the boll weevil cabals of corporate skulduggers, whose hirelings inspire fellowships of zealot Fundamentalist faithful with hard-core Conservatives, their only goal, to confuse and confute the orderly achievement of governance that places public need ahead of personal gain. Jimmy Carter wasn’t wrong. He just stopped too far short of where he should have gone, to make a point that needs to be hammered into the consciousness of every thoughtful and concerned American, still capable of speaking up and pulling a voting machine lever down. Until their enlightened voices are raised beyond denial, there will always be a lurking danger of our hearing an equivalent of “Zieg Heil!” and seeing a frightful Nazi-like salute, on some American street.

Back to the Top

September 15, 2009

Okay… the mishchief makers have had their play and the tantrum throwers have had their way. Now it’s time for reasonable Americans to get on with what they know has to be done, if their nation is to survive as the world’s only still-working democracy. It’s time for the fundamentalist hypocrites and their political panderers – all of whom seem bent on committing sacrilege – to stop using The Lord’s name, in the vain pursuit of power and profit. The message to them from every concerned citizen, from the President-on-down, should be: “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t preach false warnings against government-imposed ‘death panels’ in one breath and urge us to keep healthcare, a ‘good old competitive American, profit-making business, in the next. Saving lives, anyone’s, is a serious and necessary endeavor and no one should rate it on the same level as banking, investment and insurance sales; none of which is extolled in any of the Bibles being thumped!”

We’ve now sadly learned the horrendous cost of farming out our nation’s defense efforts, on-contract, to mercenaries. The health of our people is of equal value and should be a national requisite, not just another means for market forces to ‘make-a-buck.’

The upshot of all this should be clear enough for any normally intelligent and truly concerned citizen to understand. Prodded by devilish brats, the thoughtless, pampered- darling, usually normal American offspring has gone off-the-wall and lost all self-control; numbing embarrassed parents and shocking onlookers into stunned silence. After a thoughtful pause, a wise parental President will be calm but firm--- and a prudent Congressional family will support him, using reasonable yet necessary words and actions, to do it. When all’s said and done, it’s the only sensible way out of a situation for which there’s but one and no other logical resolution.

If we’re insightfully lucky enough for this crisis to end this way, a reasonably healthy and intelligent future generation of Americans, in a still functioning democracy, will someday read about this in their history books and may even find it, somewhat surprising.

Back to the Top

September 8, 2009

Where have all the Americans gone? Gone to Cell-Phones, every one….or I-Pods…or Black-berries…or text-messaging, whatever. The real point of this parody is that profiteers, control freaks and fear mongers have sold us on the disastrous division of ‘To-each-his-own.’ The one-time, world’s most “We-can-do-anything, together!” nation, that proudly stamped “E Pluribus Unum,” on its coinage, has chucked this winning belief for the mass myopathy of “All-for-one” and “Me for myself.”

The mini-minded ideologues who seek to impose a lock-step life style on all of us, fly false banners, like Fundamentalist Freedom and Family Values. They indict every cooperative effort to achieve a common goal as a subversive plot for a Socialist takeover. In their zeal to impose a real theocratic or governmental dictatorship, they deliberately ignore other socially significant signposts, like “popular,” “public;” “civic,” “community” and the all-important: “humane.”

One of the growing legion of media pundits, now trying to make sense of the destructive and misnomered debate on “Healthcare Reform,” has urged an effort to turn a Republican charge that OBama will “ration Health-Care,” into an argument for “rational Health-Care,” not realizing that the mere similarity in sound can fuel a false and baseless fear.

What a short sense of history we have. Are there none left, who can recall the stirring sound of choruses singing the New Deal’s “Marching Along Together,” in FDR’s national effort to end the depression? Or how he mobilized the nation to become “The Arsenal of Democracy,” against an Axis threat? The key to our eventual defeat of those enemies was a simple pronoun, repeated in slogan and song: “We’ve done it before and We can do it again!” Moving on, Ronald Reagan may have ordered the Berlin Wall to be taken down but it was the Marshall Plan, “We” Americans unanimously backed, that made it happen. So now, why not launch a Healthcare campaign with a unifying motto, like “FOR A FAIR SHARE IN HEALTH CARE! EVERYONE INTO THE POOL!”

The secret of any national success we’ve ever achieved has come with the remembrance that U.S. also spells “US,” which is just another way of saying “WE.” To reform any problem we now face – and there are many – our only effective approach will be in making the effort as “one nation indivisible.” We’ve done it before and we can do it again. But this time, as always, it will take all of us… together, to do it.

Back to the Top