Vote By Issue Quiz

Last night’s election results show that this election campaign is going to have more twists and turns to it than a braided river in the Yukon. For those who are interested in trying to separate out candidates’ campaign platforms from their personalities, there is a very instructive quiz put together by radio station WBUR. The way it works is you read a set of unlabeled quotes by issue from each of the candidates, mark which ones you agree or disagree with, and at the end the quiz tells you which candidates have views most similar and dissimilar to your own. Don’t be surprised if you’re surprised.

Democrats Want My Opinion? Not Really.

A survey arrived in the mail yesterday from the Department of Processing and Tabulation, Democratic Party Headquarters. It’s the stuff of nightmares: the way the questions are framed makes me wonder whether they aren’t just dying to hand the whole baby along with the bathwater back to the Republicans in 2008.

Consider, for example:

Which of the following would strengthen our nation’s economy?
_ More big tax breaks for wealthiest Americans (clearly, we’re not supposed to check THAT one)
_ Targeted middle-class tax relief (tipping our hand a bit, here, aren’t we?)
_ Both (not likely to be answered by anyone except by mistake but hey, that’s statistically as significant as “neither,” below)
_ Neither (hmmm… almost rhymes with “spoiler”)

If you check “neither,” there’s no way to say what you think might be appropriate in terms of “strengthening” the economy (always an assumed “good” thing, like “growth”). Like maybe weaning ourselves off this disastrous institutional perceived link between “consumer confidence” (read rampant spending on shit we don’t need based on lies and paper, debt and borrowing, all of it unhealthy and unsustainable) and “economic strength.” Like maybe taxing gasoline at appropriate levels to modify behavior because we’re going to need to modify it at some point, control of Iraqi oilfields or no, Arctic drilling or no, whether the democrats or the republicans or the half the country that votes or the other half that doesn’t like it or not, and they won’t like it, so they certainly won’t be “encouraged” to (one of the survey questions) by mere political cant.

If I had to make a decision today, I was asked, which of the following would I like to see running in the general election? Looking the names before me on the paper, Biden Clinton Dodd Edwards Kucinich Obama Richardson, I had to swallow hard. I looked at Kucinich, dismissed the notion as romantic fantasy. I nearly checked Obama. Romantic fantasy again. I removed my hand.

In the end, whatever they say about grass roots and listening to the “base,” it’s going to be the one with the war chest, with the big democratic machine behind her, that wins the nomination. (Just below the names was a place to check just how much money I was willing to contribute to the cause, in case we were in any doubt about this.) The lip-service paid to wanting my opinion is lip-service only; they don’t care about the progressive agenda. Our questions aren’t even on the survey form. (Like just f’rinstance the connection between poverty and race and how to address that, or the connection between justice and race and how to address THAT. If I were black and had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina, say, or if I were black and lived in Jena, Louisiana, and had been sent this survey, I’d have assumed, completely correctly, that it was being misdelivered. It doesn’t apply. N/A.)

I believe Hillary Clinton is unelectable. Her supporters still seem to have no idea quite how much she is hated and despised by the very constituency she’s trying so hard to court (who, exactly? NASCAR fathers’ wives? because it certainly ain’t me), tip-toeing around the hard questions, fudging, fudging, because you have to be so careful, don’t take any risks, but make sure you look and sound tough. (Those of us who endured Thatcher’s “be a woman but sound and act and as far as possible look like you have cojones and then go ahead and tear apart the national infrastructure to prove it” masquerade are weeping in disbelief.) I predict, however, that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

In consequence, I think the Republicans will win the 2008 general election. Despite the lies, the dead and maimed and irreparably damaged American military personnel (not to mention because we never do mention it, do we, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis they’ve killed maimed and irreparably damaged), the billions we’ve wasted on this interminable fiasco and are now so far in the hole that rebuilding any kind of human services will take years and probably be abandoned as impossible or unpopular or both. Despite the scandals. Despite the much more serious systematic disregard for the constitution. Despite the continued rape of the planet. Despite the rictus on the face of the demon-clown and the grotesque cackles of those who pull his strings. Despite the continued almost comical reappearance of the demon-clown’s nemesis, exhorting the faithful to commit this or that atrocity when he was supposed to have been smoked out of his hole how long? six years? ago by the demon-clown’s Action Men, by the most powerful military machine in the world. I’m angry, people. And I’m feeling patronized by questions such as “Should the Medicare prescription drug benefit plan be reformed to make it less confusing to seniors?” I mean, come on, are they kidding? Is this a joke question?

I’ll send in my survey, though, because in spite of everything I still believe in democracy, and because I do actually have an opinion, in case that’s not apparent. The survey will be heavily annotated, even though I expect the annotations will be ignored, because along with a bonkers irrational aversion to taxes Americans have an irrational aversion to the complexity of the “essay question,” favoring instead multiple-choice answers that can be easily tabulated by Diebold and their ilk, from kindergarten quizzes to IQ tests to customer service at Jiffy Lube and Burger King to tertiary-level examination questions to deciding an “official presidential strategy.”

Yes No Maybe Not Applicable? Check.

Ethical Shopping In Your Back Pocket

Pica ran into a pal at the coop today who was raving about a book entitled The Better World Shopping Guide, by Ellis Jones, who is here in Davis. So she picked up a copy of it. There are plenty of books about socially and environmentally responsible shopping but this is a very practical guidebook. It’s small, so it easily fits in one’s pocket, purse, or pack. It gives A to F grades to many of the prominent companies in about 75 categories of consumer goods ranging from airlines to wine. Some of these ratings are expected (under ice cream, Ben and Jerry’s is an A, Nestle is an F); others are not, and may cause us to rethink our shopping choices. The author has a website for his book here.

Raising Hell for Molly

Molly Ivins is dead after a long fight with cancer. In her final syndicated column, Stand Up Against the Surge, dictated because she could no longer write, she reminds us: “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

Her editor Anthony Zurcher has written a moving tribute here.

What will I do? What will you do? What will we do for her memory, and the memory of the dead in Iraq, and the memory of those who died, recently or long ago, risking their lives or at least their comfort to do what was right?

I write this as a beautiful set of colored pencils sits on the counter, waiting for me to use. Time for some more subversive calligraphy, methinks… last time I did that on Feathers of Hope, the blog was put under military surveillance. Ha. Go ahead, guys, you’re welcome here…

State of the Union Scorecard

I’m posting this by Bob Wicks, who is a friend’s sister’s high school English teacher down in Southern California in a dim and distant past. Bob is welcome to guest-blog here any time.

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Many of you have misplaced your State of the Union Scorecards, so I am providing an updated copy to make your watching more productive tomorrow night [tonight—ed.]. You may remember that Bush scored an unprecedented 80 points in 2001 due to a fluke in the scoring system that year where an unlimited number of self-satisfied smirks were allowed. His smirk score alone that year was 42, and it prompted a rules change so that subsequent to 2002, no more than five points could be garnered for smirking. The rules for this year are essentially unchanged from last. The chart below will make your scoring easy and convenient. Remember that questionable calls are to be recorded in the president’s favor.

Action Points

Any self-satisfied smirk is good for one point to a maximum of five points.

Any sentence with the words bi-partisan or co-operation, one point.

Any sentence with the meaning that we will stand down when the Iraqis stand up, one point.

Reference to Iraqi combatants as killers or murderers, two points.

Call for support of troop build-up in Iraq, one point.

Warning to Osama Bin Laden that his time is about up, five points.

Reference to Iran’s nuclear program destabilizing the area, one point.

Any use of the word “brave” in describing our troops, one point to a maximum of five points.

Camera panning to members of the armed forces in the audience, one point. Marines in dress uniforms count two points.

Reference to parents of dead servicemen, one point.

Letter from little girl in Kansas supporting our troops, one point.

Asserting that the Iraq war keeps terrorists away from our country, one point.

Mention that the world is better off without Saddam, one point.

Acknowledgment that global warming is real, one point.

Suggesting government help to corporations developing alternate fuels, one point.

Noting the advance of the Dow Jones Average to record highs, one point.

Promising to reduce deficits at some future time, one point.

Noting that the Bush administration has added over three trillion dollars to the national debt, 100 points.

Proposing that wealthy people should get a tax deduction for their health insurance premiums, two points.

Calling for continuation of “No Child Left Behind,” one point.

Mention that the world has changed because of 9-11, one point.

Any joke about Nancy Pelosi, five points.

There you have it. Keep this scorecard handy as you listen to the speech. A score of 35-40 is considered average. It is very unlikely that we will ever see the 80 points of 2001 surpassed. There is very little for Bush to smirk about these days, self-satisfied or not.

Another Long Walk Through the Desert to the Mountains

On September 11, 1973, the first democratically elected Marxist president in the world, Salvador Allende, was killed. Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-supported coup ushered in one of the most violently repressive regimes the world has ever shuddered to see (so it mostly shut its eyes. For this, we will pay a price, I think, as we will pay a price for Darfur, and Rwanda, for Bosnia, for Auschwitz).

When I worked at the Latin American Centre in Cambridge in the early 1980s, I often met Chilean refugees. They were respectful, intelligent, torn apart by what was happening at home. Mostly they didn’t talk about it. There was an international network of people who worked hard to find them somewhere to land, to have a safe place, maybe even to find meaningful work (difficult, though, in Thatcher’s Britain). They made empanadas to bring to potlucks. A pocket of potatoes, a pocket of Andes. Who knows what they had escaped; who knows what they lost, away from home. Not even they will ever know, probably.

Various attempts have been made to bring Pinochet to justice in the past ten years. They have all failed. Now, he’s dead.

In the vein of “L’enfer c’est les autres,” I hope the “autres” encountered by Pinochet on his final journey through the desert of black sand are those who will call him to account. Like Milosevic, he has escaped sentencing in this life…

Minority Party

As in “the Republicans are the minority party.” What a sweet sound that has. We had champagne last night, and apple-cranberry sparkly this evening, to celebrate. And Charlie joined in the celebration by breaking into an unopened bag of cat food and having a bit of a feast.

Here in California, two victories were especially significant and gratifying. First, Congressman Richard Pombo, who was in my mind the most vile member of Congress from the environmental point of view — having taken it on as his mission to eviscerate the most important environmental laws of the last half-century — was defeated in an upset by Democrat Jerry McNerney. McNerney’s victory was basically a grass-roots effort, for which we thank a large number of Bay Area activists who travelled over the hills to canvass for him.

The second was the defeat of California’s Proposition 90, which was something of a libertarian stealth bomb that received relatively little attention. It was marketed as a measure to limit the eminent domain rights of government, but it contained provisions that would have effectively made it impossible to do any land use planning in California. The measure didn’t lose by that much (47% to 53%), and California definitely dodged a bullet.

Let us hope this week’s victories really are the turning of the tide.

Paging the Ghost of George Washington

The United States is now officially a tyranny. You might not have heard—at least our local rag had no mention of the final debate—but the Senate today passed the torture and detention bill (or whatever it was officially called) 65-34. The torture bit is horrible enough, but the suspension of habeas corpus rights is the real kicker. Congress has just given the President the right to detain anyone anywhere indefinitely without any right to judicial oversight or trial by jury if they are an ‘unlawful enemy combatant’. And who gets to decide who is an unlawful enemy combatant? That’s right—the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a U.S. citizen or not. And if Bush were to declare that some group—let’s say left-wing bloggers—were in fact ‘enemy combatants’ , oops, into the gulags they go.

Glenn Greenwald sums up today’s cravenness perhaps best of all:

During the debate on his amendment, Arlen Specter said that the bill sends us back 900 years because it denies habeas corpus rights and allows the President to detain people indefinitely. He also said the bill violates core Constitutional protections. Then he voted for it.

The bill is probably quite unconstitutional, even to the eyes of today’s Supreme Court, but why will it ever see review? If you’ve been disappeared, how are you ever going to bring the case forward in the courts?

Didn’t we once fight a revolution against such tyranny? To quote Thomas Jefferson (thanks again, Glenn Greenwald): “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”

There’s not a whole lot of checks and balances left in the system. Unless of course the ghost of George Washington himself were to summon the spectres of the soldiers at Valley Forge to a march on the Capitol to rout this adminstration and their despicable enabling crony congresscritters from the nation, in a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings.

Landscapes Of Moral Rot

Two institutions of higher learning and several lifetimes ago, a progressive colleague of mine recommended the book The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, by Andrew Bard Schmookler, saying that it was brilliant. I read it and concurred, gleaning from it the idea that the vast majority of evils result from layers upon layers of acts of power across successive civilizations, not from anything innate in our nature. Moving on to the present, I just discovered that Mr. Schmookler has a website and blog. The site is his response to the amorality and fascistic impulses of the present administration.

But his premise is that this moral crisis is the result of the failings of both liberals and conservatives. In the introduction to the site, he writes:

Many Americans feel a sense of alarm about the moral condition of American society today.

Many in the liberal half of America worry that the political right has been taken over by amoral forces that only pretend to be righteous while they indulge their lust for power and wealth. Many in the conservative half of America fear that America’s moral integrity has been eroded by an “anything goes” culture abetted by the moral permissiveness of contemporary liberalism.

Both these worries are well-founded.

His critique of liberalism is of particular interest:

First, unable to recognize the truth in the old idea that the battle between good and evil is a central part of the human drama, liberalism has been unable to recognize the nature of the forces it’s up against. It is this inability to see these forces for what they are that has rendered liberalism impotent to make an effective stand against them.

And, second, unwilling to take seriously the distinction between right desire and wrong desire, liberalism has been complicit in the emergence of a trash culture that undermines standards and ideals and that cultivates what is base and degrading. This moral decadence, in turn, has created among many Americans a kind of moral anxiety that has historically provided fascistic forces an opening to exploit in their quest for power.

In one post on his blog, he asks his readers for “vignettes of ‘moral rot’ in America”. He cites as an example the routine nastiness in the media, even in in his favorite television show that is at times prophetic and brilliant.

Violence and nastiness in the media are clear examples of moral rot, but what I am curious about is finding instances of cultural degradation in our landscapes. Does the way we create landscape have a moral component to it? And concomitantly, doesn’t inhabiting a degraded landscape lead to moral decline in other aspects of culture?

I believe this is the case. Trying to define a “landscape of moral rot” I come up with the following—a landscape where the forces of greed or lack of respect for personal or collective space predominates.

What are examples? At the small-scale level of individual action, graffiti is clearly one. At the opposite end of the scale would be the the result from the act of drilling for oil in ANWAR. (One perspective on the Republican fixation on ANWAR is that once the taboo on tearing into that last pristine landscape is broken, all other acts of environmental destruction would be simple.)

Closer to home, don’t we see an expression of moral rot in our current housing slump, one that I predict will be long-lasting and deep? It’s sheer greed upon the landscape. People buy huge houses they can’t afford which leads to developers building vast tracts of huge, ugly, and shoddily-constructed things until the system collapses of its economic contradictions.

The antidote to such landscapes is cultivating a sense of aesthetics in our built environment. Of course this means doing something that is completely academically uncool and counter-postmodern—making moral judgments about aesthetics in cultural production, claiming a role for high culture, asserting the primacy of social order, and so on.

Some landscapes just are ugly—let’s cultivate!

The Loser Democrats, or My New Wheelbarrow?

I can hardly bear to think about politics these days. I’m outraged in all kinds of ways about the administration, of course. But I’m so despondent about what is the only presented alternative.

I got a phone call from the Democratic party the other day. At work. I’m at work, I said. Oh, they said, well can you just send us some money to counteract all the negative publicity the Republicans are throwing our way, to the tune of millions of dollars?

For what? I said. I don’t know what the Democrats’ program is. I don’t know what they stand for. It seems to be a wimpy version of what the Repos are doing. That’s what they want you to think, said my telephone volunteer.

I felt blackmailed. I’m outraged at both of them. And, yes, the Repos are probably rubbing their hands about people like me. In a year when the war in Iraq is an obvious slam dunk for the Democrats, they’ve decided to run mid-term elections on the economy.

So I bought a new wheelbarrow, in which I plan to transport many hundreds of pounds of Republican manure from across the road onto next year’s summer garden.