Lessons from MLK

This is my own photograph of the Dr. King mural in the basement of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.  Martin Luther King, Jr. served as pastor there from 1954 to 1960, in the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement.  I stood looking at the mural for a long time one afternoon in April, 2004, in the course of a long drive across the United States and through my distant memories of the Deep South. I was emotionally overcome by the sheer power of the art; the painting is simple, direct, but it contains everything.  You can see Rosa Parks, the buses organized by Dr. King as an alternative to the segregated buses of Montgomery, George Wallace, the Klan, the Capitol just up the street.  It was a quiet afternoon in this little museum, this shrine to Dr. King.  I was just about the only patron, and it felt almost silly to stand there with tears rolling down my cheeks. Almost, but not really.

Dr. King was that rarest of humans, a truly great man.  A noble being.  He graced our lives during his short span on Earth, gave us an insight into what true courage looks like.  How to stand up to evil power when you really don't know if you'll win or not, whether you even stand a chance.  He was, of course, the greatest orator in the history of America.  There are really no close seconds.  He was to public speaking what Muhammed Ali was to boxing, Jordan to basketball, Beethoven to the symphony. Simply in a class by himself..  He was as well a deep and courageous writer, a powerful and complex thinker, a visionary.

It is just and fitting that Barack Obama should be inaugurated the day after Dr. King's birthday, the national holiday finally installed after a battle with old guard racists like Dick Cheney and John McCain, who doggedly fought it.  Barack's ascension is in a sense the end of Dr. King's journey, the final resting place for the march that began on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma so long ago.  I know that Barack Obama reveres and emulates Dr. King, that he has internalized some of King's oratorical flourishes and cadences, and that his attitude of nonviolent inclusiveness is modeled on King, to a certain degree. It's important, however, to recall that Barack Obama got to the mountain top by a route different from that traveled by Dr. King.  Martin Luther King suffered through the sweltering heat of Southern racial bigotry and segregation, played always with a deck stacked against him,and came from nothing to become the unrivaled leader of the Civil Rights Movement.  I think Barack Obama still has to learn some of the things that Dr. King instinctively knew from the cradle.  If Barack really wants to be the "People's President," he's going to have to learn how to piss people off sometimes, to challenge their sense of power and supremacy.  Not all, not even most, opposition can be charmed and mollified.  He's taking on a power structure that is dedicated and consecrated, more than anything else, to the preservation of the perogatives of the very rich: tax structure, government funding of the military-industrial complex, health care - over the last 30 years, it has all been set up to serve their interests.  They are not going to give Barack what he says he wants; he's going to have to take it.

That's what Martin Luther King did.  He gladly accepted the help and good wishes of the sympathetic and well-intentioned.  And as to those who opposed him and his cause, he took it to the street.

An Open Letter to the Jews of South Florida

For Itz Brownstein,
to talk about at dinner (at 4 pm)

To begin with, I won't even pretend that I can appreciate, at an emotional, intellectual or visceral level, what you as a people have been through. Name another people and its genocidal treatment - Armenians, Rwandans, Bosnians, Native Americans - and what you will find is that they were once subjected to an awful pogrom which resonates through history, but that it was a singular experience, the product of specific historical circumstances. Not so the Jews. No, anti-semitism occupies a special place in human history, a blood libel and an institutionalized bigotry drawing its strength and endurance from religious sources, powered by hatred which never completely loses its potency. There are some, like David Irving or Ahmadinejad, whose hatred of the Jews is so complete, so consuming, that they even seek to deny you the dignity of remembering the truth about what happened in the Shoah.

Anti-Semitism is vile, diseased, a sickness which has served as the motive force behind the greatest crimes in history. The Inquisition, the wholesale pogroms and displacement in Russia and so many other places, and the most odious of all offenses against decency and humanity, the Holocaust. And beneath the skin of your supposed historical friends lies many an anti-Semite. Winston Churchill, who even after Kristallnacht in 1938 praised Hitler as a "great man." Charles Lindbergh, who was house hunting in Berlin even after the deportations began, who consulted with the Luftwaffe on their use of planes gladly sold to them by American aircraft companies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who as a young lawyer in New York proposed a system for reducing the numbers of Jews at Harvard, finding their representation there "excessive." Gandhi, who worked against the establishment of a homeland for Jews except in Tanganyika - there was a brilliant idea from the Mahatma - why not a refuge for the Jews in a former German colony? Churchill and Roosevelt again, who blocked the escape of the Jews from Germany at every turn, refusing to expand immigration quotas even as your parents and grandparents were rounded up and sent to death camps.

So you learned to trust yourselves and only yourselves. You could do without the "help" of such false friends. Jews built a country of their own in Israel. They built a mighty nuclear arsenal, probably the second most powerful in the world with the additional advantage that it probably works. The American nuclear arsenal is run by the same people who managed FEMA's response to Katrina. As your ancestors did, you entered the learned professions in numbers vastly disproportionate to your representation in society, the kind of thing that bothered FDR so much. Yet it was a survival mechanism; corporations, clubs, neighborhoods all could be restricted. You needed a direct means of making a living which did not depend on the solicitude or occasional enlightenment of Gentiles.

You learned to think for yourselves as well. You are not easily persuaded by the reassurances of the goy; you've been down that road too many times, and it has led to tragedy. Even Albert Einstein, still in Germany in 1933, wanted to believe that Nazism was not as bad as it appeared to be. It was exuberance, he said, as the German people shook off the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty. They don't mean it.

Never again. If Albert Einstein could make such a mistake...So now here comes this smooth talking guy with the Muslim middle name running for President, and he sat in a church in Chicago for twenty years, and one of the things that this pastor whom he admired so much did was to confer a lifetime achievement award on the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. When I lay it out like that, it's pretty heavy. That doesn't look too good at all. It's small surprise that Barack Obama stopped just short of dancing the hora when he visited with AIPAC not long ago. And that prayer he slipped into the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? I think I know what it said: "Fellas, please - hak mir nisht ken tshaynik with this Reverend Jeremiah shtick."

Here's my sense, from a guy who has searched his own soul for traces of anti-Semitism and has never been able to find anything worse than occasional envy at the professional excellence of some of his legal colleagues: I don't think Barack Obama is an anti-Semite. I just don't think he rolls that way. I think he's spent some time around anti-Semites. So have I. Know how I know I have? I'm not a hermit. So all I ask, as an American who's very concerned about the possibility of an unsuitable, quite possibly unstable candidate like John McCain winning this thing and leading America to ruin, is just give to Barack Obama what you have always asked of the world, but have not always gotten: a fair chance. That's all. If you vote against him, make sure it's for a reason you've thoroughly examined, and that you're convinced your decision against him is not based on the kind of prejudice which you, as a people, have always abhorred. I'm not talking about prejudice against blacks, because Yahweh knows the American Jews, as Barack acknowledged in talking so movingly about the deaths of the Jewish Mississippi Civil Rights workers, have done more for civil liberties than all other American nationalities combined. Even today it is Jewish legal leadership which champions the rights of Muslims detained unfairly at Guantanamo, who represented them, and won, in the historic habeas corpus case just decided. No one can fairly question your commitment to ethics and equal justice. So I draw on that and ask you to exemplify, once again, that spirit of fairness in November. Delve deep, in that peerless intellectual tradition which has always been your hallmark. And then decide. For we're all in this together.

Okay, so Barack is not a "LightWorker"

It's not my phrase, actually. I read the term "LightWorker" in a Mark Morford column on SFGate, and it seemed kinda twee, really, but that's life on the West Coast. A "LightWorker," I take it, is some sort of avatar of enlightened beings who visits us and leads us away from darkness and despair, dispatched by The Force when It sees we're in over our heads. I don't know if a LightWorker is actually armed with a LightSaber, for example, but one can hope, if only for ease of identification. When I read Morford's column, I thought maybe the canonization of Barry had ventured into dangerous, unsustainable territory. Lest we forget, Obama is the official nominee of the Democratic Party, that stained, compromised and completely co-opted political organization which also features Nancy Pelosi at the top of the org chart.

Obama has put matters to rest on the LightWorker front; we can now regard him as a canny political player who shows increasing signs of knowing, at least, what it takes to get elected in this sound-bitten society. Barack has backed off an earlier promise to filibuster the House-approved FISA rewrite in favor of "trying to amend" that part of the 4th Amendment Abolishment Bill which grants the big telecoms immunity for past illegal conduct. Otherwise, Barry is on board with the rest of the "compromise" legislation which essentially grants the Executive Branch unfettered access to all e-mail and telephone communication of Americans while...well, while using the Internet or the phone. The "restrictions" and "court review" built into the new FISA process are essentially meaningless. It's way too much to call them "warrants," that good ol' fashioned Fourth Amendment word. If the President, the Attorney General or a fourteen year old hacker in Beijing thinks he needs to read your e-mail to see if you're planning to blow something up, that's good enough. Be forewarned: the concept of a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in your heretofore private communications is about to be repealed.

Thomas Jefferson had this to say in 1799: "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence . . . . Let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitutions." Wise Tom was telling us that we should never forgo a freedom on the promise of a well-intentioned man or woman who tells us they have our best interests at heart and won't abuse the license. Keep your freedom and demand that the elected official do his best with the latitude he has left. And, as a specific, historical example, no one has ever demonstrated that the attacks of 9/11 resulted from the exercise of civil liberties by the American people. Indeed, the rough outlines of the plot were exposed while respecting these rights. It was a question of Executive Branch competence, not of restraints upon its freedom of action.

Some commentators, such as Glenn Greenwald linked over on your right, have been very, very hard on Obama for this lapse in "principle." I can't go quite as far as he does. Barack Obama is trying to get elected President in a country which elected George W. Bush President for a second term less than four years ago. Think about that for a moment. A vote against the FISA bill approved by the Democratic leadership will expose Barry to charges of "radicalism" and worse by the always-scrupulous John Sidney McCain. And then from the vast trailer parks of Florida to the lean-to shacks of Appalachia to the tent cities of Ontario, California, will issue the cry, "Barack can't keep us safe because he really is a Muslim!"

So what the hell's he supposed to do? Listen to civil libertarian eggheads like Glenn Greenwald and yours truly? Or get elected and use his new, unConstitutional powers responsibly, that is, until with a new majority on the Supreme Court made possible by his LightWorker appointments, the Court strikes down the FISA bill he supported on grounds it violates the Fourth Amendment? That's about as good as it gets in this, our 232nd year.

Handicapping Obama-McCain

First, a word from my current favorite Outside Observer, Dmitry Orlov:

"The United States has traditionally been a very racist country...It was founded on the exploitation of African slaves and the extermination of the natives. Over its formative years, there was no formal intermarriage between the Europeans and the Africans or the Europeans and the Indians. This stands in stark contrast to other American continent nations such as Brazil. To this day in the U.S. there remains a disdainful attitude toward any tribe other than the Anglo-Saxon." Reinventing Collapse, p. 98.

Well, undoubtedly true, Dmitry; but what's your point? Although when he mentions Brazil...is that what's going on down in Ipanema? You mean we could have looked like that? This must be part of the high price of emerging from British stock, people who really look like hell but think their genes are too precious to mingle.

Speaking of which, we now have a real horse race, with the Scots-Irish McCain (meaning: he's British, a descendant of the Ulster colonists) versus a man who can trace his connections to Africa more immediately than most of the rest of us can.

Certain auguries tilt toward Barry. Number one, I note that the country is beginning an orgy of self-congratulation. Even George W. Bush gushed that he thought it was great that a "major political party" had nominated an African-American. He then quickly reaffirmed his support for John McCain, but who's buying that? Bush is an Obama supporter, we both know it, and good for him. Besides, McCain treats W more or less as one might the albatross-accessorized Ancient Mariner. My guess is that those two guys hate each other. Two snobby Anglo-Saxons from the old ruling class, inbred toward middling intelligence, united solely by membership in an obsolete party.

So I think it will be hip to support Obama, and in a country as susceptible to trendiness as this one, that counts for a lot. Barry's a cool guy, after all, and it will be cool to support him. He speaketh with the tongues of angels and he hath charity in his heart.

McCain, meanwhile, is a true dogmeat candidate. Boring, cranky, unpleasant, corny, tiresome to look at in all his monochromatic blahness. He's got one thing going for him, and one thing only: he was a prisoner of war. If he had flown his missions without getting shot down, he would have been another nameless Vietnam War aviator, one whose dad and grandpa were big cheeses in the Navy and got him into Annapolis. But without the Hanoi Hilton back story, a group of fat cats from Phoenix would not have made him into an Arizonan and inflicted him on the country. He would not have ditched his crippled first wife and married the trophy wife/ beer heiress. (Well, he would have ditched his first wife anyway, but I doubt the rest of it would have fallen into place.)

Under these conditions, Dmitry's assessment can be put to a modern, definitive test. There is no reason for anyone, anywhere, to vote for John McCain other than from racist motivations. It's that simple. Barack is very smart, quick on the uptake, inspirational, and tuned in to modern technology. These qualities will be absolutely essential if we're going to surmount a staggering list of serious economic and environmental problems. McCain, on the other hand (and this is not a joke), does not know how to use a computer.

It's 2008, the world runs on electronic communications, and McCain does not know how to use a computer. So far, then, McCain has admitted that he doesn't know anything about economics and he doesn't know how to use a computer. And he wants to be President of the United States in times like these.

The table is set. I am hoping that there have been huge changes in attitude among my fellow citizens over the last forty years or so. I know, from seeing those election returns from Appalachia, and from listening to wackos like Geraldine Ferraro (who has so internalized her racism that she can't even see it for what it is), and from long personal acquaintance (and even blood relation) with many dyed-in-the-wool racists from the Old South, that a huge discriminatory tide in this nation must be overcome for Obama to win. Hillary Clinton counseled the party elders that it could not be overcome, and she and Bill make political book for a living. Hillary, however, was hardly an objective observer, and even Hill & Bill may be somewhat behind the power curve when it comes to modern sociology. Those of Obama's generation and younger don't really see dermatological melanin percentages as defining criteria of personal worth. That's a hang-up for those who are old at heart and for losers, and if they want to remain hung-up and keep losing, they can vote for that pasty old fraud with the nasty temper. Their choice.

Interesting times, and we'll see just how much they've been a-changin'.

Obama beats McCain: then what?

It appears that the Democratic elders have seen enough of the Obama/Clinton road show and are about to ring down the curtain. Fun while it lasted; if the superdelegates definitively side with the majority of the chosen delegates, then Barack will be the nominee. If Hillary persists in her "campaign" past that point in the hope that Obama implodes or dies or something, she will be seen as someone who simply went around the bend, and as a crazy person who needs restraining more than anything else. Maybe that will become Obama's strongest selling point; he is now the only viable candidate from the two major parties who is not clinically insane.

I notice that the latest California poll shows Obama leading Clinton by a vote of 51-38%, despite Hillary's 9% victory in February's primary. This appears to be a reliable marker of her depreciation in the public eye, given the variegated nature of the California electorate. McCain barely registers in the poll; Obama demolishes him. To this hopeful sign must be appended the caveat that California's 55 electoral votes will go to Obama no matter what, so the size of his margin doesn't really matter. But I think Obama will defeat McCain in the general election. For one thing, McCain is a terrible campaigner. He's boring and uninspiring. He doesn't look or sound like anyone who can lead the country out of serious problems that most thinking people see all around them. When people are spooked, they want a leader who seems resourceful and innovative, who can lead them out of the box canyon. George W. Bush in 2000 was helped along by the good years Clinton left behind, by the relative peace and quiet. And Bush was a much more talented campaigner than McCain, using his narcissistic, phony personality to convince Americans he was a good ol' boy, and not a prep school cheerleader with serious intellectual inadequacies. The irony being, as Americans have learned, that Bush's obnoxious personality has become one of the major sources of national insecurity for the country. I'm convinced that many national leaders work against our interests not out of an animus against the USA generally, but because they just can't stand him. That could be yet another singular distinction of the Bush presidency.

So Obama gets elected. This is where my predictive limits are certainly reached. I think the major, immediate difficulty he will encounter is the energy crisis, reflected in the "structural" high price of imported oil. He will succeed to the leadership of a country wholly consecrated and dedicated to the private automobile, where the living arrangements of suburban sprawl far from urban work centers are now a serious problem. Where the viability of commercial airlines is uncertain, and where the public transportation system is mostly haphazard and dilapidated. I've read his website and it's certainly progressive on energy efficiency, carbon abatement (cap& trade, e.g.), higher CAFE standards (which are now beginning to take care of themselves as many Americans have to choose between filling the tank and eating) and renewable energy, such as cellulosic ethanol, which shows a hip familiarity with work being done at the University of California at British Petroleum (UCB-P). But his ideas are almost too little, too late before he starts, and he will have to deal with an intractable Congress protecting the corn-for-ethanol-growing Midwest and other irrationalities.

And the affordability of food, which is related. Maybe Barack will urge, as a matter of government transparency, reinstatement of the CPI standards which existed during the Reagan years, instead of all this Greenspan malarkey about "hedonic enhancement" and substitution of Spam when ground beef becomes too pricey. If so, Americans will see in print what they already feel, that inflation is currently running at 11% or so.

Not to mention the solvency of the entitlement programs. As the turnaround date for Social Security, 2017, nears (and that's if there is no serious recession), surely it's impossible to keep talking about using the Social Security "surplus" as general tax revenue and replacing it with a fictitious "trust fund." The bill has come due, and there is no money to pay it with. And the health care system is simply DOA at this point.

If Barack Obama is honest in his first State of the Union, there will be very little talk about national security in terms of foreign "wars" (in Iraq, on terror), other than the recognition they have to end immediately. His speech should sound like a FDR radio address in the depths of the Great Depression. An honest call to serious action before it is entirely too late.