Ignoring Nonprofits, Forgetting Public Service

More than three years have passed since the U.S. economy plummeted into the Bushes. We’ve seen massive bank bailouts and a bumper crop of tax incentives for businesses that might hire; and we’re told 3 million jobs have been generated since Obama took office. But so far, there’s been nothing but silence from our government about the jobs crisis in the nonprofit sector.

Much has been said and written to urge the Obama administration to launch a program supporting employment in the nonprofit sector. Public-service employment programs like the WPA and CETA offer models, however flawed, of how such programs can work. They can get more people to work faster than any other approach. So far, however, White House employment initiatives have focused exclusively on the for-profit part of the economy.

Mixed messages meanwhile confuse the picture of philanthropic giving to nonprofits. I tend to believe Giving USA’s recent revision of its own earlier, rosier estimates:

… donations fell by higher percentages in 2008 and 2009 than at any other time in the past five decades. … donations by individuals …  fell by nearly 15 percent, adjusting for inflation, over 2008 and 2009. That information, based on data released by the Internal Revenue Service, was not available when researchers produced their findings last year.

Prospects for any immediate turn-around, as summarized in the same report, look bleak: “… the recession cloud may hover for years, and it could be as long as 2016 before donations return to levels raised before the economy soured.”

Not every individual donor has been equally affected. The rich have notoriously continued to get richer. This means they can continue to support the philanthropies they prefer, resulting in nonprofit-sector success stories that mirror growing inequality elsewhere in the economy. Here in Kansas City, for example, much attention has gone to last fall’s opening of the  $414 million Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Not only is this venue necessarily unaffordable for most Kansas City residents, it has for years already sucked the air out of philanthropic support for other less prestigious cultural initiatives, much less the largely unaddressed needs for basic community development in sections of the city where poor people live and try to work.

An Economic Policy Institute Report asserts that using tax cuts to try creating jobs actually results in overall economic loss — with additional losses in our national quality of life. Instead it calls for direct investment in the public-service sector:

… raising taxes and using the additional revenues to pay for more public services enhances economic growth and expands employment.… By stimulating growth, generating jobs, and providing direct benefits to residents, improvements in state and local public services can be one of the most effective strategies to advance the quality of life of citizens.

Profit-obsessed pundits and critics alike frequently misquote Calvin Coolidge as having said, “The business of America is business. In fact he said something slightly different — “the chief business of the American people is business” — but in the same speech went on to moderate this simple slogan:

Of course the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence. … We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.

Why have our political leaders abandoned support for investment in public service? Millions of jobs need to be done for community development, broadly defined. Those employed would not only work to restore the quality of life in communities all over America: they would spend their paychecks directly in an economy that needs our confidence.

“The accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence.” Let’s put ourselves back to work for the public good.

Caring for the Elderly (Not): A Case Study

Some conflicts in cultural policy are complex. Others are not. While we may argue about a lot of ultimate aims in cultural policy, caring for the elderly is a no-brainer as a moral value. But to do this well does call on us to meet the most difficult challenge in cultural policy: to bring public action in line with our most heartfelt values. The caring we feel so easily as individuals is the hardest to manifest in our cultural institutions.

Let’s look at how community leaders faced an urgent problem of their isolated, elderly community and got to work. Comprising just 370 mostly elderly residents, Babanakayama is a small village that clung to the coast of Japan, backed by mountains, until it was devastated by the tsunami in March 2011 — the world’s most costly natural disaster to date.

Common sense dictated rebuilding on higher ground, outside the now well-established devastation zone.  Spearheaded by one of the village’s two chiefs, villagers quickly moved to make it so, not waiting for the central government before they cleaned up the wreckage and made plans to rebuild. Their can-do spirit brought them attention on NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting network, as a role model for others.

The mountainous terrain of coastal Japan presented few buildable alternatives when new sites were scouted, making the choice fairly easy, and preliminary work began on a road that would lead there. Village leaders dubbed it “the Road to the Future.” Some 50 property owners in the hilly path of the road were approached, and almost most agreed — all but one, in fact. But this one dissenter was the other village chief.

Personal insecurity was the reason this man would not consent to the plans forged by other village leaders. His home’s location in the hilly upland spared him from the total devastation that befell most others. He explained to a New York Times’ correspondent, “I’m now 60 years old. Even if we’re allowed to move to high ground, how will I build a house there? What bank is going to lend me money at the age of 60?”

Despite its praiseworthy early response, the village is now torn by controversy. Right now, the Road to the Future appears to be going nowhere.

Once consensus had broken down, the insecurities of age moved other village residents to seek private solutions to their village’s public problem. Another older resident explained why she had her son start building a modest new home last August on a lot where a larger home had been swept out to sea: “I’m already 80, and I may not have that many years ahead. That’s why I decided to move back here.”

In truth, the scarcity of suitable flat land — the very reason that so many Japanese lived in communities clinging to the coast, regardless of the tsunami threat — meant that the costs of recovery are likely to be high. This is where the state, as our most powerful and definitive social mechanism, has a responsibility to intercede, at least by clarifying its cultural-policy commitments. Social mechanisms can achieve practically anything that citizens deem to be of deep cultural value: the state, the commercial sector, and the nonprofit arena provide all the actors needed for the most remarkable achievements of human history. There remain only the problems of raising consciousness, deciding on the best path to take, and mobilizing the various actors required to achieve what’s needed: not trifling obstacles, but no excuse for abandoning our most cherished, fundamental human values. The state’s role is key, as the only authoritative mechanism for defining democratic policy.

Of course, states have a reputation problem. Governments that aspire to democratic values can be stymied by dissension. They suffer from all the dangers against which the prickly French philosopher Jacques Ellul warned: their tendency to ensnare us in bureaucracy. But state action is the most powerful mechanism we have at our disposal: look at the period when the U.S. government disgorged its most generous subsidies (no, not the Thirties, regardless of what the Reaganistas say): the Fifties. Generous education and housing benefits and the largest public works project in human history — the interstate highway system — fueled unprecedented prosperity: wise state investment in times of need truly benefits the public.

As should be expected of effective political leaders, Babanakayama’s moved forward with dispatch: “We didn’t depend on the government, we moved first,” said the village chief who led the recovery effort. Of course, he meant the national government: implicit in the village government’s action was the idea that where there is a will, there will be a way.

But when that way is not made clear by higher-level policymakers, the consensus people can achieve in local communities is too easily undercut by insecurities. That Babanakayama’s residents are elderly created the two dysfunctional responses quoted above: build in a devastation zone, in a gamble with the (short-term) future, or sit tight in your privileged position, fearful of the future.

That Babanakayama’s population is elderly is no coincidence. In recent decades, its children have mostly moved away, seeking better opportunities elsewhere. In truth, the national government might have declared a national policy of relocation, rather than rebuilding; but it has not. Babanakayama’s own leaders might have banned construction in the devastation zone, as other affected municipalities have; but the same independent spirit that fueled their early response often goes hand-in-glove with a disinclination to limit the individual’s liberty to do what seems patently — well, out of the respect to the elderly — inadvisable.

Supporting the victims of the catastrophe has been the national government’s main talking point. Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda has been quoted as saying most of the rebuilding will be completed in five years, with the national government spending 19 trillion yen ($243 billion) over that period.  Meanwhile, their attention — and the world’s — has gone to the deeply disturbing, headline-grabbing problem of the meltdowns at Fukushima and attending to the needs of larger communities like the provincial capital city, Sendai. (Building nuclear reactors in an earthquake/tsunami zone is a whole other kettle of cultural-policy fish.)

Even in larger cities, citizen choices have been made in a policy vacuum. Taking a break from repairing his own home in August — just when the 80-year-old woman in Babanakayama started rebuilding — a resident of Sendai expressed the citizen’s dilemma:

Only 30 percent of people affected in Sendai have received money. The government says this is a really massive disaster so people should understand it’s slow, but it’s very frustrating. If the government would say that here is not a good place to live, that you can’t live here, I wouldn’t fix this house, I would leave. But the traffic signals are being fixed just over there. So it seems like we can still live here. No one knows.

A public effort as massive as Japan’s in rebuilding after the Tohoku earthquake are inevitably complex and detailed; but priority must be given to stating the policy values that will guide action, to give decentralized actors the confidence needed to move forward.

Clearly, Japan’s national government has bigger fish to fry than a village of elderly people. And in fact, Japan is often cited as an example of a state where the elderly are held in the highest regard. Yet it is Japan that provides our simple example of national policy failing to make its cultural policy clear in an urgent case with unique real-life consequences for the elderly: when times are tough, it’s often possible to dishonor even the deepest cultural commitments.

The insecurities of age are clear factors in Babanakayama’s dilemma, but similar economic forces and the lack of assurance in cultural policy that the nation will care undermine security of people everywhere. Were there no other heartfelt factor involved, simply assuring citizens that they will be helped in meeting inevitable and unique challenges faced in the final phase of life is fundamental to the sense of security and well-being — not to mention national pride — that this assurance provides to people of all ages. This is why, despite the anti-state fever that Republicans have promulgated with a vengeance since Reagan, Social Security remains one of the United States’ most popular public programs. Even Tea Party fanatics carry signs paradoxically (and ignorantly) insisting, “Keep your government hands off my Social Security.”

Mahatma Gandhi is widely attributed with articulating the common wisdom that “A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” In an historic moment when cold-heartedness limits our own federal efforts to bail-outs and tax breaks for businesses and rich people, we would do well to return to warm ourselves by the fire of real compassion and make a dignified place there for those among us who are most isolated and vulnerable. Let’s build a Road to the Future, and not reduce our weakest to scrapping together half-lives in the zone of certain devastation.

Retreating from Fairness in Universal Health Care

Republican Party critics of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that President Obama signed on March 23, 2010, have attacked the law they failed to defeat in Congress as prescribing “a one-size-fits-all standard” standard for health care in the United States, according to Robert Pear’s Friday report in the New York Times. In a nasty holiday-season surprise, Obama’s secretary of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius announced that the federal government will not be setting national standards for the new health care law. This is a policy error of major proportions.

Pressure from right-wing fringe movements like the “Tea Party” and the pervasive GOP political shenanigans that have held Congress hostage since the 2010 midterm elections led to this disaster. Their tactics are typical of the reactionary bent in American political culture. Right-wing activists and politicians since the New Deal, frustrated by their minority status, have often taken a “states’ rights” position to resist federal initiatives with which they disagree.

In many cases, local variation makes sense. In fact, decentralization is a central tenet of cultural democracy: enabling citizens to control the conditions of community cultural life by bringing cultural-policy decision-making closer to home. But this is meant to work for a greater good: decentralization is the subsidiary part of a package that places higher value on protecting and promoting cultural diversity and encouraging active participation in community cultural life and equal access to public goods. The Right’s version of states’ rights means to divide and conquer, as they have (so far) in every area of (not) caring for those disadvantaged by our winner-take-all economic system.

In any system committed to cultural democracy, central authorities  are obliged to protect those whose cultural rights are being thwarted whenever provincial and local authorities fail or refuse to provide for diversity and access. This was famously true at the height of the 20^th Century civil rights movement. Federal intervention proved necessary to break the logjam of long-standing, racist state and local policies.  (Continuing resistance to cultural diversity is why the once solidly Democratic South became so solidly Republican for the first time in U.S. history, since the Reagan Gang appeared on the scene.)

From the viewpoint of American cultural policy, health care is a public good analogous to basic human rights. In many ways, this is more obvious in health care than in the contentious area of human rights.  I don’t need more or less health care when I walk four blocks west to the Kansas-Missouri border. (The University of Kansas hospital complex happens to be located right there, at State Line Road, making the KU Hospital my neighborhood health-care facility, though more of us live in Missouri.) Since our health-care needs do not change when we cross state borders, “one-size-fits-all” is an appropriate standard, passing the test of democratic fairness in federal legislation.

By definition, states have not been not providing for their citizens’ health-care needs, which is why it has been a federal-election issue in so many presidential races, including the one that swept Obama into office in 2008. This is also why Congress passed the Affordable Care act in 2010, and it became our national law. This political consensus was not “made up” by politicians in Washington, DC:  polling data have shown that universal health care is preferred by a decisive majority of the American people. It stands as the will of the people, now being whittled away by anti-democratic interests.

The Affordable Care law of 2010, though widely celebrated, is far from perfect as an approach to national health care. Economically and on other grounds, it makes most sense to have a “single-payer” plan, eliminating massive profit-taking by the insurance industry. Even physicians have advanced arguments for the single-payer approach. But in many legislative — and sausage-making — processes, all kinds of considerations shape the final product. Eliminating “the public option” deflated progressives who hoped that national health care might be more than a market-based system. Requiring us all to purchase insurance, as this new law does, is scary when so many of us are out of work and apparently without immediate hope of this changing. Government subsidy for the poor under Affordable Care remains undefined, and thus subject to upon the same political end-runs in Washington, DC, that brought Secretary Sebelius’s disappointing announcement. Of course, the same tactics also hold sway in every state capital: the Right hopes once again to divide and conquer.

As a policy wonk, I was myself disturbed at the Obama administration’s failure to take the single-payer high road in creating this law. Then I read Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol’s excellent, lucidly written Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know.  It details the careful, deliberative strategy set by the Obama administration in 2009 and analyzes the content of the legislative sausage it produced in 2010. By political-science standards, this book a simple read, and every American should know and understand what it tells us before they open their mouths, much less slap teabags on their hats and take to the streets or write their Congresspeople.

Jacobs and Skocpol’s relatively optimistic conclusion remains uncertain and unsettling in light of the profoundly disturbing current political moment. Successful and cost-effective implementation of this law — and yes, it has been designed to save money and stem the explosion in health-care costs, despite what’s being said by the Right! — requires strong political will on the part of the electorate and strong leadership in Washington and in political organizations. (With the Republican Party in an ideological stranglehold, this means the Democratic Party in the national electoral system.)

This is why Secretary Sebelius’s Friday announcement is so profoundly disturbing. (See page 176 of Jacobs and Skocpol’s 178-page book to put this in context.) It’s looking like the Obama administration is already capitulating to the Right, when we all need to “stay the course” in a process that will go on through 2018 and beyond. The 1% don’t care about making the law work: they will get even richer without letting the poor take their sick children to the doctor — though we will all pay more as a result, as Jacobs and Skocpol effectively argue.

Dealing with complexity in public policy is what makes democracy seem sometimes like a bad idea. It’s certainly easier to stay stupid, limit one’s reading to protesters’ placards and vote from the gut. Still, democracy beats authoritarianism, and we need to be careful to control which authors we allow to write the book of our future history. Here’s hoping that these collective authors  — we the people — turn out to be democrats, and may the Democratic Party fully support us in the enterprise.  Lead us in strength, President Obama, so we may re-elect you in gladness!

P.S. What I want for Christmas is public-service employment substantial enough to put every American to work for community development. The local-government and nonprofit workforce is already drowning in fat-cat Grover Norquist’s proverbial bathtub. The economy needs jobs, and the true heart of America needs something besides the naked pursuit of profit to create them. We do care about more than making money: health care’s just a start.

Hillary Sets the Tone

How can you tell that Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has gone over the edge? When he blames justifiably angry Russian protests against his rigged election on Hillary Clinton.

Her offense? On Monday, in Bonn to attend a meeting on Afghanistan, Secretary Clinton stated the obvious: “The Russian people, like people everywhere, deserve the right to have their voices heard and their votes counted.” Her words were diplomatically parsed and cool, in light of the shameful “irregularities” in Russia’s recent election. Called on the carpet by the Russian martinet, she explained today in Brussels that “the United States and many others around the world have a strong commitment to democracy and human rights. It’s part of who we are. It’s our values.”

Bravo, Hillary! At last, the international wing of U.S. cultural policy is asserting the values of cultural democracy. 

Ever since we declared the Cold War, the Unites States’ foreign policy establishment has mainly been what we Yiddish speakers call a shandah (שאַנדאַ) — a more powerful term for what in English we more blandly call “shame and embarrassment.” The bland English word would not do, because of the deplorable moral and material costs of U.S. foreign policy from the Fifties right on through Bush the Younger’s regime. In the name of protecting America’s interests (read “American corporations”) abroad, our CIA and military have been the undoing of democratic movements throughout the world. Untold tens of thousands have died, and millions deprived of democratic hopes for their own countries by the very military-industrial complex (with its oxymoronic “intelligence” apparatus, where the brain and heart should be) that President Eisenhower warned us to contain.

This has begun to turn around, at long last, with the Obama administration. Though we are still mired in Bush’s ill-conceived War on Terrorism, and its irrational “hot” wars in Southwest Asia, Obama’s Secretary of State Clinton has appeared all over the world, doing what we should have been doing all along: promoting and supporting democratic principles in a way that riles up not only oppressive tyrants abroad, but the radical Right who dominate the media here at home. (In case you missed it, she did a similar thing on Tuesday in Geneva, asserting our intent to protect the rights of sexual identity throughout the world.)

It’s no surprise that Vladimir Putin and his American fellow travelers Limbaugh, Gingrich, O’Reilly, Palin — well, the list’s too long to mention — have staked out the same end of the political spectrum vis-a-vis our Secretary of State. Demonizing Hillary is of course nothing new: a graduate seminar on political science recently required me to relive the vilification of the Clintons in Eric Altermann’s fairly biased What Liberal Media? While I was disappointed that Hillary’s husband, the only Democrat elected in the 30 Years’ War (and counting) declared by the Reaganistas, not only failed to harvest the surprising consensus in 1992 that we get ourselves a national health plan — and downright disgusted four years later, when he tore a huge hole in what was left of the social safety net (on this, see Michael Katz’s excellent book, The Price of Citizenship, pp. 317-328) — Altermann shows that he was never given a chance by a media establishment dominated by corporate interests.

One can only imagine the kerfuffle we’re about to hear from the fat cats in rightwing American media as they jump aboard the Trash Hillary bandwagon. By and large, they are of course more easily imagined chasing a secretary around a desk, but Secretary Hillary seems perennially able to get their thoughts out of their proverbial pants and back to their weapons of mass-media destruction. Let’s hope that we the American people allow our hearts and minds to lead on this occasion, not follow.

We can and should do much more to assert principled leadership for democracy throughout the world. We’ve said we were doing this all along, though our record since World War II has been a shandah. Just as one person — Secretary Clinton in this case — cannot be blamed for rousing the Russian masses to anger against political corruption in that country, neither is it plausible, as American media pundits assert, that Obama can be blamed for the 30-year war of attrition that the Right has been winning — with the rest of us losing — as most of our own votes have been bought off by propagandizing Republican administrations.

Cultural policy is about identifying the values that ought to guide public action — cultural development. Thank you, Secretary Clinton, for deploying the “V” word in describing the policy that should be guiding the United States citizens’ real interests abroad. Let us also hope we’ll be able to take this to heart and begin to develop a culture of democracy where we’re best able: here at home. There would be plenty of jobs in it.

Field Work

I’ve been silent on this site for a very long time. I’ve been busy doing field work.

Were I Dr. Leakey, passports would have been required. But since since I live in Kansas City, Missouri, all that was called for was a ten-minute drive across town, to what practically all the metropolitan (if not cosmopolitan) white people call “east of Troost” — Avenue, that is.  As I learned, unless you’re a cop — or a field-worker — white people just won’t venture there.

There’s really not much reason to go, if you don’t live there. Even those who do would confirm that that’s true. East Kansas City is more like the Indian reservations of my native South Dakota than any urban area I have ever experienced. (And you must remember that before moving here, I lived in Richmond, California, the homicide capital of Northern California, ahead of only Compton and Watts in the State of California.)  Practically every public building has long since been boarded up, not to mention many, many private homes. It is a scene of urban desolation that one would never imagine in a place whose name sounds so quintessentially midwestern to outsiders’ ears, and which styles itself as the “Heartland of America.” All I can say, after three years of living here, is that America is suffering from a terrible heart condition.

At the same time, I have returned to graduate school in history and political science; because of this, in a kind of double life: I have been studying the foundations of the conditions I’ve been experiencing in the field. Monday night, at the final meeting of a highly stimulating but blandly titled graduate “Seminar in American Government” — taught by a committed progressive, Dr. Max Skidmore (himself a convert from youthful Show Me state Republicanism) — the meaning of all this crystallized for me. Our discussion of the social costs of our public policy of not caring about anything but profit hit me on an emotional level I have not felt since my childhood visits to Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Discussing the political state we’re in, I thought of the people I’ve fallen in love with across town and could barely hold back my tears.

The force of the universe brought me to study even more deeply the terrible political sickness plaguing America just at the time that I fell in with a community of artists who have been deeply injured by the heart of America, and to taste of the cultural milieu from which they sprang. In contemplating the costs of three decades of post-Reagan retreat from all that is best in this country, I have finally seen and felt very, very deeply the real human costs of the car wreck unfolding around us.

My field work is not without personal cost. I have been robbed multiple times, and assaulted twice. Having forsworn violence all my life, I’ve stepped forward in the past six months into three physical fights for the first time in nearly six decades of life. I’ve had to call upon the court for protection from stalking. At the urging of my East Kansas City friends, I have also used the “social justice” system to press charges against those who have attacked me, though I have yet to see how this comes out. The taste of of (hopefully) the waiting game lies thick on my tongue, but I’ve also learned that the social-justice messiah may never come. Politics and policy cannot be merely theoretical — ideological — in this setting: they affect us deeply and personally.

The elusive truth I realized in our seminar room on Monday night is that the hidden cost of America’s refusal to care is felt well behind the headlines, in our families. Those who suffer should not be blamed, especially not from the relatively safe suburban roosts occupied by most Americans. People are struggling for survival in the heart of America, and the human costs are incalculable. Gifted people have been turned back upon themselves and each other. Talented dancers are turned to a an anguished danse macabre while the rich play with resources robbed from the 99% who have allowed it, with the poorest and most powerless paying most of all. I have understood this in theory from childhood, thanks in large part to visiting South Dakota’s reservations, but only in this past year have I been required to view it not only intellectually, but also emotionally, from inside. When — how — will this struggle end?

The dangers of the path we’ve been following have been known for a long time. This was the resurgent  idiot savant insight of The Sixties, though Looking Out for Number One — licensed by the Right — has taken most of us idiots out of the political game just when wider insight and knowledge should have flowed into the vacuum defined by the ignorance of our youth. Instead, the brainwashers of the Fifties came back with a vengeance in the Eighties and have held sway ever since. I thank God for the pain and suffering of my personal experience, right here in river city, for revealing to me freshly the deep cost being paid by well-meaning innocents, struggling to survive.

As a country, we are not so young any more. From abroad, our cracks and wrinkles — and those of the false ideology that corporate America has crafted for us — are all too apparent. But in truth, we don’t even need a passport to see what they mean: just drive across town, to those quarters we generally avoid, eyes open, and perhaps we can see the truth.  Maybe then, we can act — before it’s too late.

Inspiring Democracy

Another explosion in the Middle East this morning: but this time, it’s one of joy, as we see Egyptians dancing in the streets and waving the flag of a country that’s kept them down — but clearly is now theirs. Only the coldest heart could not melt in the heat of so many joyful tears.

But the joy of the moment and the power of popular action in this age of accessible media are the only two things that are clear. Three weeks ago, when the Eqyptians first poured into the streets, I was in the midst of a very changing and sobering book: Jack Snyder’s From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York, Norton, 2000). For a dyed-in-the-wool cultural democrat, this was not an easy read. A mere listing of the some of the democratizing countries he discusses says it all: the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, the Caucasus… Go slow, he counsels, or thousands will die, as the manipulation of ethnic nationalism is cynically unleashed by threatened elites.

This was the backdrop for my personal reading of each day’s paper and countless Internet messages and my otherwise hopeful response to the scenes of swelling crowds on Al Jazeera. My excitement — the inspiration of people moving toward freedom and democracy — was infectious. Yet Snyder’s warning is fresh in my mind, and kicking and screaming, I have to credit its truth.

Drawing from historic reality, Synder perceives two primary preconditions for viable democratization:

• an unthreatened elite, reluctantly willing to empower people at the margins by calculations of their own benefit; and
• an institutional infrastructure to sustain open democratic debate and channel mass politics.

Ideally, he’d also like to see a prosperous society with a large, educated middle class.
How often do such conditions exist? As many Yiddish-speakers have said, If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Must we lower our expectations and wait?

Decades ago, looking for hope in history, I came across the idea of accidental points (I’ll look for a citation): moments when, against all trends and likelihoods, something unexpected would arise that would dramatically confound all rational predictions. This is what we’ve been seeing in the Middle East since Tunisia surprised us last month and their inspiration spread. After three decades of suffering, unnoticed in most of the rest of the world, a mass of presumably “leaderless” Egyptians appeared.

Of course, this was no accident: only the predictions make it look like one. In truth, it is deeply predictable. Each of us knows the strength of the human spirit, for good or ill. Ultimately, you can’t keep us down. What we’ll do next, we never know — again, for good or ill.

But that, ultimately, is our choice. We can respect the diversity that surrounds us and commit ourselves to truly democratic values. We can respond to Rodney King’s famous plea — Can’t we all just get along? — in the affirmative. Or we can relent to darker forces and harness our animal power to defeat and oppress.

So many commentators — including my own Anchor Man Within — have counseled caution in the past three weeks, speaking from our fears of all that can go wrong. This is the great veto-power of democracy: our caution and reluctance, cloaked as rationality. When historic opportunity knocks, though, there can only be one answer: open the door!

May we now see the Egyptians rise to this historic occasion and inspire us with their ongoing project of democracy and freedom. And may we support tolerance and diversity where control and imposition have reigned for far too long.

Into the Twilight Zone

I just finished my first semester back in grad school in 34 years last week. I must say, there’s a lot more required reading as a doctoral candidate in history than as a Master’s student in arts administration (though I took a text-heavy path even then). However exhausting, it’s been wonderfully stimulating.

I gave myself until the Solstice to take a break from the heaviness of history: I even read a novel, and saw ten performances between my generous, dreamy sleep. But now I’ve plowed back in

At the insistence of my professors and friends, I’ve tightened the focus of my dissertation a lot since August. I still plan to produce that history of U.S. cultural policy, because I think the world needs it. But for my Ph.D., I’m focusing now on the impact of anti-communism on U.S. cultural policy, starting with the New Deal and carrying through the rise of the New Right. Even for me — obsessed by that topic all my life — this is the Twilight Zone of American culture. And it’s got me a little spooked.

My first foray is The Trojan Horse in America, a 1940 book credited to Rep. Martin Dies of Texas, the first chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but ghostwritten by HUAC’s ex-Commie research staffer J.T. Mathews. Alone in the house, I’ve been free to release gales of laughter at the unbelievably circular logic of his fear-fest. If only I didn’t know where it was leading.

Thanks to Google, I scared myself even worse. Early on, there’s an extended clip of the HUAC testimony of a young guy from Wisconsin, Kenneth Goff, who literally turns in his Young Communist League membership card right there in the hearing room, along with a clutch of meeting minutes. The Inquisitor (unnamed in this book, which totally lacks footnotes, though it names names and quotes people extensively) wrings all the facts out of his hapless witness he needs to attack the WPA and end the Federal Theatre Project. Amazed at how mercilessly he was used, I found myself wondering what happened to this witness in the 70 years since.

I wish I hadn’t asked. Google and my curiosity about Kenneth Goff took me for my first ride to Metapedia. I’m warning you to think twice (or thrice) before clicking on that link; but there you can read about how Kenneth Goff became an anti-communist crusader for Christ. No balance in this account, which looks like Wikipedia, but is more like Wickedpedia.

I’d read about Metapedia, but was not prepared for such a baldly one-sided telling of history. Then it got worse. I asked, Who wrote this dreck? The writer’s username is NatAll75 — that’s short for “National Alliance,” of which he’s no longer a member, though you’d never know it from the other articles he’s contributed. You should think three or four times about going further, but I wasn’t so smart, and stumbled into his amazing write-up of Israeli Art Students, such a bizarre rendition of 9/11 that I had to wonder if this wasn’t some incredibly sophisticated piece of performance-art something-or-other — an anti-Right parody.

Then my gales of laughter at the American Trojans turned to groans. I clicked my way onto Metapedia’s home page, where the “Featured Article” on Leo Frank really made me feel like a Jew on Christmas. If you’ve got the stomach for it, here’s the stinger:

Leo M. Frank is remembered as the liar, adulterous whore monger, lascivious sexual predator, creepy child molester, vicious pedophile-rapist and strangler, whose arrest, indictment and conviction for the strangulation murder of thirteen year-old little Mary Anne Phagan in 1913, inspired and brought out into the open, again, the full extent of the Jewish peoples ongoing historical tendencies of perfidious tribalism and loathsome self-deception.

The Right is alive, but it’s certainly not well. I go back to 1940 with real yearning to find some way to root this out. Sorry for sharing. Wish me luck.

Re-Thinking “American Values”

I’ve gotten used to the phrase “American values” being used as a club. Fundamentalist Christians and other Right-wingers have been swinging it since the advent of the Reagan Era, to smash down any sign of diversity from their own narrow positions. It’d do us a lot of good to rethink what “American values” really are.

My recent studies have me focusing on that historic moment when the New Deal was swallowed up by the Cold War. Soon, I’ll write a whole book on the subject. But right now, I’ve been reading a lot about the ideologies of the Market Empire the United States began to peddle to the world in the late Forties and Fifties, as we pushed the “freedom” of the consumer society as against the evils of communism. If you’ve read my work on cultural policy (there’s some in my “Library,” and I’ll post more if yu have questions), you know I’m not a big fan of Coca-Colonization. But tonight, as I read about Marshall Plan field trips for the French to see the glories of the “American way of life” in Richard Kuisel’s fascinating book, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, it makes me nostalgic for the country he describes.

At the time, everyone — right up to top of progressively managed American enterprise — was operating in a context of democratic values that’s hard for post-Baby Boomers to imagine. (And for some of us to remember: a whole lot of brainwashing water has passed under our collective bridge, and many of us have fallen in and drowned.) Yes, a virulent anti-communist witch hunt was underway, as well as dozens of interventions in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe — outright military campaigns and even more numerous covert CIA machinations — to protect American corporate interests; but still, there was a substantial positive result to our putting ourselves out there as the world’s only atom bomb-dropping Cold Warrior.

When Governor Faubus and the white mobs he inflamed defied the Supreme Court to keep black students from entering Little Rock High, and when Bull Connor turned German shepherds, fire hoses and even a little white tanks on nonviolent Civil Rights protesters, the propaganda cost was simply too great for the “Leader of the Free World.” Even our timid, racist Presidents du jour were forced to intervene to assure plausible deniability of our national culture of racism, and we made some progress in spite of ourselves. Similarly, the shifts in widespread anti-Semitism and anti-Asian feeling in the United States from the Thirties and Forties to the Fifties is downright mind-blowing (see Michelle Mart’s Eye on Israel: How America Came to View Israel as an Ally and Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism: The Far East in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 for interesting discussions on those topics) — also the result of the American government and the American people being called to represent the higher standard of “American values” we were claiming in our Cold War against the Soviet bloc. Our claim to be people with values created enough shame at the cultural realities we hadn’t faced at home to require us to be better than we’d been.

Since the Reagan victory, a decidedly colder wind began to blow. The federal government has been in thrall to the winning gang of greedy capitalists for most of the last 30 years. These people have apparently no shame in awarding themselves for outrageous disdain for their workers and for democratic cultural values. “Looking out for number one” replaced looking out for everyone, and we entered into an orgy of celebrity excess, cutting taxes to the rich — the poor things: why punish them? — and such new constructions as “the homeless” have entered the American lexicon: their sorry state is just as much of their own construction as the runaway success of the mega-rich. Ditto the “illegal aliens”: people of such criminal mind that their selfish eagerness to mow affluent Americans’ lawns and wiping our babies’ bottoms outweighs their wish to engage with the same government bureaucracies that the Right loves to hate and wait for legal authorization before swimming the Rio Grande, tunneling from Tijuana, or climbing into the back of some coyote‘s van. Go figure!

Reading and thinking about the United States of the American Dream has put me back in touch with a truly kinder, gentler notion of the promise of democracy. It’s the dream that really arose from genuine feeling for American values that it would behoove us to take up once again — witch hunts excepted, and that’s a bitter pill and premonition of much of the evil that would swallow up not only those values, but us along with them. (You’ll have to read my book, though of course I will first have to write it.)

I do believe we still have it in us to make our way out of this wilderness, headlines notwithstanding. But first we have to wake up from the nightmare and start living the dream. Are we ready?

Calling a Slave a Slave

In a history seminar last night, the professor made a parenthetical remark: that anybody who said the Civil War was about states’ rights, and not slavery, was a fool. Deeply true and yet, recently buried in books about other eras, I wondered why he bothered to make the assertion. Then I turned to this morning’s Times.

“Celebrating Secession Without the Slaves” reads the headline. I found it funny — in fact, charming — to imagine 21st century Charlestonians begowned and spinning about in “a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink” at their “secession ball.” (Everybody in that town’s a little crazy, I remember hearing from colleagues in surrounding rural counties in the mid-Eighties. On that recommendation, I spent not a few days-off there, wanting company and being a little crazy myself.)

Then the cannonball dropped in my morning cereal: “All we wanted was to be left alone to govern ourselves,” says a TV ad placed by the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. (“…the oldest hereditary organization for male descendents [sic] of Confederate soldiers” — what’s a girl to do? Or an undescended guy, for that matter?) Are we celebrating a Civil War or having a Tea Party? Oh yeah: I forgot.

Once again, I’m intrigued by the shifting sands of cultural discourse and history. [Grandpa voice: "I remember, back in the Sixties…"] There was a time when it was important to debunk the mixed motives of Unionists in entering into the Civil War: “No, this was not a sacred national crusade to free the slaves. That just happened (thank God!), and let’s not deify Yankees with feet of clay.”

The insight behind this earlier historical revision? History emerges from a welter of wildly chaotic forces. We need to keep our hubris in check, lest we place our hope in some false messiah who looks strangely like a “young Abe Lincoln.” (Not an unpopular look in the Sixties, and even moreso in the back-to-the-land Seventies.) This opens the way for us to get down with other less-then-perfect souls to try to save today’s world, as potential historic actors in the 21st century.

Clearly, we’ve circled the sun quite a few times since this insight dawned of us, and we’re overdue for several others. To paraphrase Freud: sometimes a slave is simply a slave. Slavery was the deepest of many contradictions folded into our Constitution at that revolutionary moment three centuries ago when “all men [sic] were created equal.” The fundamental issue here was not “States’ rights”: that was 19th Fox-trot for “we want to do anything we goddammed want” — to have our slaves and beat ‘em too.

The Times article goes on to summarize the contemporary cultural-policy dilemma here:

Commemorating the Civil War has never been easy. The centennial 50 years ago coincided with the civil rights movement, and most of the South was still effectively segregated, making a mockery of any notion that the slaves had truly become free and equal. Congress had designated an official centennial commission, which lost credibility when it planned to meet in a segregated hotel; this year, Congress has not bothered with an official commission and any master narrative of the war seems elusive.

How ironic, with the Obamas in the White House, that we’re missing this opportunity! (I guess we’ve distracted ourselves, fighting other people’s Civil Wars.) No matter: that’s what the Internet is for, so let me boldly blog where national cultural policy has not gone before. Prepare for my grand pronouncement (and feel free to comment below):

Slavery was one of our top two biggest mistakes as a nation. It was the elephant in the room when our not-so-great-grandparents were blathering about “States’ rights”: they wouldn’t have slain each other with such passionate disdain for the lives of “their fellow Americans” over an abstract principle of federal authority and decentralization. Raw power was involved, and Southern power didn’t want to be tread upon in the matter of owning other people outright. Nor keeping their descendants from drinking from the same fountain a century later.

This is the modern cultural-policy concept at play when Americans bring up the old states’-rights idea: decentralization of cultural authority. (Sorry to get all wonky on you, but I do have a point.) In order to continue moving toward the goal of cultural democracy, we and our communities should be able to determine the conditions of our cultural lives to the greatest extent possible. But there’s a crucial condition on this operational principle in modern policy that requires us to throw “states’ rights” into the bullshit pile, and be clearer about our language, for historic reasons: that overriding substantive principle is respect for cultural diversity.

Could slavery had ended with the Civil War? That would be an interesting question to pursue at this national Sesquicentennial moment. The fact is, it didn’t end until that War. And the further fact is that the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t really work — another interesting and crucial national question, 150 years gone and still counting.

As we pick up this national conversation, please just don’t go all “States’ rights” on me: I’ll have to call in the National Guard. (A good excuse to pull them back from Asia…)

Building a Cultural Policy of Peace

The beauty and potential power of cultural policy lies in its all-encompassing nature. It’s our truly democratic forum, where the largest thoughts and visions we can conceive are “on topic,” and all of us participate on our own terms. This is important, because even the simplest, most obvious things need to be said, if they’re really going to remain alive in our culture: nothing goes without saying. Like peace.

I think all of us deeply yearn for peace. Ask any child — at least, anyone who has not become hopeless and hardened from abuse. Even if they can’t talk yet — perhaps especially — they’ll answer you right away. Yes. We all want peace, if only to stay alive longer to enjoy more of the excitement of life.

Many of us have formed a shell of anger or hate or vengeance around our hearts that yearn for peace. Mostly, though, we have a thin candy shell — enough to get us through the day without melting in the hand of reality. Still, it keeps us from that sweet chocolate center.

I was greeted by a blue M&M this morning: more news of settlements planned in the war zone that is East Jerusalem. Oy vey! This is bad for the Jews, as we say, and so I’ve spent time worrying about it, as we do, and wondering about what I might actually do. Obviously, wonk that I am, I decided to write about the cultural policy of peace.

In Hebrew, my holy language, peace is shalom, a word that more basically refers to wholeness. How perfectly apt, when we think of the situation in Israel. The Promised Land, we often think, and yet after reading Michelle Mart’s Eyes on Israel recently, I’ve though once again of a very different image: the dumping ground. Rather than embrace the broken Jewish peoples of Europe in 1945, and and restore them to their homes — all long since seized and destroyed anyway — we Americans and our allies quickly became eager advocates of Israel. The painful story has been unfolding ever since.

So is this the Promised Land? No wonder we’ve produced so many comedians, because you really have to laugh. And yet, most everyone has long since lost their sense of humor when it comes to Israel. Our perspective has narrowed from the big picture — our yearning for peace — and shrunk down to a macabre kind of elbowing each other to get the last ticket for an selling-out concert (no matter how bad the seat). So what’s the point? I know I had one…

No, I haven’t meditated my way into a magical solution this morning, thanks to the miracle of cultural-policy thought. But I have opened my heart to peace. And even thought of a joke: the only accessory that will go with that outfit is a wand. We sure could use one in the Middle East! After shaking loose my worry with a big laugh, no magical solution springs forward: this a season when we fall back. So let me close with a few more puns.

To everything there is a season, and this is not time to be building homes in East Jerusalem. Winter is coming to the Northern Hemisphere. It’s time to gather up our nuts and make use of the shelters we have. Let’s start with the shelter of peace, where we know we can find it: in our hearts.

Sending perhaps the most horrifically traumatized refugees in history into unbounded conflict with colonized Arabs was perhaps not the best idea, 60-plus years ago (no matter how Great the Generation). But it’s never too late, as long as our hearts are beating, to remember how to laugh, breathe, relax and talk about building a culture of peace — many cultures of peace. And while we’re at it, let’s have some tea, even if we’re not ready for the party yet.