Promise Them the Moon, But Give Them a Walmart Discount Card

Barack Obama defends DOMA.

UPDATE:

Before we rip down our Obama posters, Toujoursdan points out that there may be less to this story than we think.

Is there Such a Thing as "Just" Discrimination?

Simon Sarmiento over at Thinking Anglicans posted a fine discussion of this issue, raised by the Roman Catholic Church and other churches over Britain's proposed new Anti-discrimination Laws.

I hear complaints about "political correctness" and Affirmative Action all the time.   And yet, I hear few complaints about legacy admissions and old boy networks that are the enduring  systems of "affirmative action" for white men.  The most famous beneficiary of those systems is the former President GW Bush.  How many sheet metal workers, or their children, could get into Harvard or Yale with a C average?

  

I knew a young man who graduated from Columbia with honors, and who was definitely not from a privileged background (father was a mentally ill Vietnam vet, mother was a Mexican cleaning lady), who always said that about a third of all the students at Columbia were there only because their parents could pay the tuition bill and pull strings.  That story is probably true at most prestigious universities.

Until those old systems of entrenched privilege are eliminated from academic and professional life, complaints about "affirmative action" will continue to fall on my deaf ears.

No one chooses the circumstances into which they are born.  The playing field of opportunity is not, and never was, level.  As far as I am concerned, the only permissible discrimination is the self-selection of merit and character.  Everything else is just so much arbitrary privilege.  I think it's a safe bet that 3/4 of the world's ruling elite only won the lottery.  

The Traditionally Intolerant Are All Alike

I used to get yelled at over in the comments section of Father Jake's old blog every time I compared conservative Christianity to conservative Islam and found them to be similar.  People would be just outraged that I could possibly draw such a comparison.  Well, now that the Christianist fringe is going all violent, maybe the comparison is not that far-fetched.  Both Christianists and Islamists hate Western liberalism.  Both have an obsessive terror of female sexuality.  Both are very freaked at the appearance of feminism, and its fellow movement, gay emancipation, and the direct challenge of both to traditional gender roles and understandings about sexuality.  Both Christianism and Islamism insist upon very exact and legalist interpretations of their faith.  Both believe in an apocalypse that will exterminate all of their enemies, and leave them in sole possession of the world as God's darlings.

Listen to this report from the NPR program "Tell Me More" about a Muslim woman journalist (a close friend of the late Daniel Perle) who had a child while unmarried, and who came back from the Haj to Mecca determined to challenge the traditional segregation of the sexes in mosques, starting with her own congregation in Morgantown, West Virginia (men and women pray together as equals in Mecca before the Kaaba).  The resistance, the bitter feelings, the arguments that she encountered sounded very familiar to this Episcopalian.

The White Man's Last Stand

Frederic Remington, Defending the Waterhole, 1903

Charles Schreyvogel, Defending the Stockade, 1905

There is a surge in Right Wing violence. We saw it yesterday in the shooting at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and last week in the murder of Dr. Tillman, and in other recent incidents.  Indeed, we were warned that such a surge in right wing extremist violence would happen by no less than the Department of Homeland Security in a recent report which Republican Congressmen forced the department to withdraw and publicly apologize for (which the Obama Administration did, adding to my fears that they are just more spineless Democrats, quavering in the face of corporate power and right wing intimidation, and  capitulating at every challenge).

There certainly is a long history of left wing violence in this country, but it pales in comparison to the frequency and death toll from right wing violence.  The largest and deadliest single act of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City bombing, was a right wing attack.

As we saw in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, conservative and right wing people are not necessarily violent, nor do they in any way endorse such violence.  Timothy McVeigh died convinced (wrongly it turns out) that white right America was secretly with him, and that his death would spark the Blanco Reconquista.   On the contrary, those same white right folk drank toasts to his execution.  Most of the violence is the creation of paranoid obsessives who would stand out in any ideological camp.

And yet, that violence does not spring from the earth sui generis.  It comes out of a set of very deeply rooted myths that go way back in American history, and still have a powerful hold on a lot of people (including members of my family).   There is a whole series of myths around the idea of embattled white people with their backs against the wall, facing inundation by the swarthy hordes.  It is that old story of the conqueror identifying with the conquered.  It is the powerful nightmare of the conqueror; all that they did to others will be done to them.  Almost all of those myths revolve around the conquest of the West; or more accurately, around the memory of that conquest long after it was over. 

The Western artists at the beginning of the 20th century did much to shape that memory.  I illustrate 2 of the best known above.  They both show a story line that abounds in this type of art, the cowboy or the frontier soldier making their brave last stand against Indians, bandits, or the elements.  All of these compositions are variations in one form or another of Custer's Last Stand.  We are always there with Our Heroes in the menaced and shrinking bunker.  The Indians are always in the distance shooting at us, or coming over the stockade to kill us.  Victory is uncertain.  In fact, a sense of doom pervades these pictures. 

These paintings were made when the conquest of the West was long over, and significantly, at the height of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.  The real history of the conquest and settlement of the West is very complex and full of crime and cruelty as are all episodes of conquest.  Artists and writers reshaped that complicated and problematic history into a kind of heroic Arcadia of manly virtue.  The myth of Manifest Destiny worked more powerfully in memory than it did during the actual westward expansion.  It absolved the conqueror of guilt.  In a parody of Calvinist Predestination, it was believed that the western wilderness was pre-ordained by God as the home for His true Chosen People, Caucasian Protestants.  The people who actually lived there for millennia, the Indian nations, were simply considered part of the wilderness that had to be cleared.  Every ordeal and hardship of western settlement became in memory the Lord's refining fire.  Those who survived and prospered were the refined gold, they had endured and prevailed in the harsh tests from the Lord.  The cowboy, who in reality was a badly paid, despised, and exploited drudge (and almost half of that workforce was Black), became in memory the paragon of Caucasian manliness, braving the wilderness to claim what God had given him.  That so many early cowboys were Southern whites who lost everything in the Civil War fed the idea of Western conquest as the redemption of defeated Southern manhood.

Remington and Schreyvogel painted these pictures with passionate conviction.  They intended their audience to project their own anxieties over extending the franchise to labor and immigrants onto these paintings.  Remington was a true believing racist and xenophobe.  He wrote, "Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns!  rubbish of the earth...  I've got some Winchesters, and when the massacring begins I can get my share of them, and what's more I will!"

The Western myth is at the heart of so much American identity politics, and still has a very powerful hold on the imaginations of many.  The reason why there has never been an effective Left in this country is for one reason, race.  No one has played identity politics more successfully over the decades than the American plutocracy.  The easiest way to break a strike and destroy a union for decades was to bring in a busload of desperate Black scab workers.  After the race riot was over, the owner could be assured of a docile workforce.   Organized labor did not begin to have much success or influence in the USA until it self-segregated.  Birmingham, Alabama, a city notorious for its violent resistance to the Civil Rights movement, was a heavily unionized city. 

In my experience, those myths that fail all tests of evidence, reason, and virtue are the ones that people cling to most tenaciously.  The Western Conquest myth does not stand up to evidence, is implausible, and is arguably very harmful to others and to those who believe in it.  It is at the heart of so much racist thinking.  Commonplace bigotry, aided an abetted by some very wrong headed religious fanaticism, gets magnified into apocalyptic visions of divinely ordained supremacy.  Those notions are exacerbated by economic hardship and downward mobility. 

I'll Bet Our State Legislature is More Dysfunctional Than Yours

There used to be an old joke in Texas about a reporter who was asked if he had ever covered a crime scene.  "Yes," he replied, "I covered the Texas Legislature for years."

You could say the same about Albany, especially about that corrupt boys club that passes for a legislature.  Monday, in a coup engineered by Rochester billionaire Tom Gollisano, 2 Democratic Senators crossed party lines and signed up with the Republican coalition.  The state Senate, controlled by Democrats for only 70 days after more than 40 years of Republican domination, is now back in Republican hands.  The 2 Democrats who flipped are particular standouts in that rogues' gallery of the state Senate.  Pedro Espada is under investigation for multiple campaign irregularities and corruption, accused of moving state funds into his own charitable organizations.  Hiram Monseratte of Queens faces assault charges, accused of slashing his girlfriend with a piece of broken glass.  Espada is now Senate president, which means he would effectively be the governor if Governor Patterson leaves the state or becomes ill.

Gay marriage is not the only thing in the state legislature that is now on indefinite hold.  Now, almost all the business of the state is held up until this is resolved.

Gay Israelis Press For Marriage Rights

Some couples plan to "marry" at the annual Tel Aviv gay pride rally.  Tel Aviv has had gay pride rallies for years.  Jerusalem started having rallies only a few years ago with heavy police and military protection, and menacing crowds of religious fanatics counter-protesting.

I've never been to Israel, but from what travelers and Israelis themselves tell me, it's a deeply divided country.  The majority of the population lives along the coast, and is quite secular, about as secular as Scandinavia.  About 30% of the population is very pious, some militantly so, especially those in the settler movement.  What adds to the deep mutual resentment between the pious and the secular populations is that most ultra-orthodox are exempt from military service.

Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are not only different cities, but different worlds.  I remember one Israeli friend years ago telling me that Jerusalem is so soaked in religious associations that it literally drives people mad.  Supposedly there is a hospital in Jerusalem that specializes in treating "Jerusalem Syndrome," the madness induced by the city's religious charisma.  Friends tell me that there is a whole wing of that hospital for people who think they are Christ. My friend David Kaplan, who is seriously religious though not a fanatic, found the city to be too much.  After a day praying at various religious sites, he had had enough and went back to his hotel and watched Simpsons reruns.

American Idiot

Here it is, the official anthem of America's Dirty Fuckin' Hippies:



I must admit that I like Chumbawamba a little better, but this is great for those times when George Will, Cokie Roberts, and Andrew Sullivan are on the teevee telling me to respect my Betters. It sure beats throwing things at the teevee.