Letting America Work

Fulltime for just over two years, I’ve been researching and writing my next book. This multi-year project was inspired by my belief that the American Right is working overtime to redirect a refreshing, progressive political momentum —  which miraculously carried our first African-American President and his family into the White House — to suit their anti-democratic aims.

Just as they began to do in the late Thirties — following FDR’s landslide victory in 1936, and continuously ever since — corporate-supported Masters of Distraction have been exploiting reactionary sentiments and freak events to contain our ability to use government to address the serious economic crisis created by Reagan Era policies they had a hand in crafting. They are sapping our nation, bringing us down, and distracting us from the Big Picture at a time when way too many people are really suffering.

Two words might show what I mean: gun control. Everybody, myself included, is all heated up over this issue, after yet another crazy individual committed a horrific act against defenseless innocents. But really, it’s Big Picture forces that are really at work here, and they’re not mainly about guns. The economy has been destroyed by thirty-two years of relentless kowtowing to the rich — big corporations and a tiny minority of individuals and families. A bitter pill was  smoothly swallowed when that affable actor Ronald Reagan first appeared on the national scene, and we’ve all made the fool. The economic collapse of 2008 revealed how badly the nation’s wealth had been plundered.

As President Obama prepared to publicly recited his oath today, on this official commemoration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birth, I had a dream that he might take a page from Dr. King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). I hoped that he might say something like this:

We the People need to put every American to work right away — not by the end of my term, not next year, but as soon as we can make our government take action.

Until we assure everyone in this country of the dignity of earning a living wage, we’ll fall prey to ideologues who cast aspersions on our democracy — setting one American against the other with their blaming, and our nation against the world. Shopkeepers won’t have customers. Healthcare will be postponed because of money. Children will go to sleep hungry. People will seek refuge in drink, drugs and distraction. Frustration will explode in violence against family members, neighbors, and strangers on our streets, in movie theaters and even elementary schools.

Too many of us have fallen into the danger of forgetting Dr. King’s message: that having and sharing a dream that includes every one of us is the highest ideal of our nation — not the protection of profits.

We know how we can solve this problem, as history has shown us. When corporations and businesses stop hiring, and Americans still need work, we can work for each other: in local government, in schools, and in community centers and improvement projects driven not by profit, but by our very certain dreams of how to make life better — truly worth living — in our own local communities. If business doesn’t need everyone’s talent, skills, and honorable work, the rest of us still do — our nation does.

This administration will lead the way by assuring that your government’s resources are redirected into helping everybody find a way to work for the public good — especially since businesses are struggling, and can’t yet afford to hire. Public-service employment will not only allow us to rebuild our communities.  It will allow everyone to step back into the mainstream of the nation’s economic life once again, and that will be good for business.

President Obama said quite few things in his speech that are consistent with this dream, but the dots were not connected as clearly as they were in Dr. King’s 45-year-old book. Of course, this was an Inaugural Address: the State of the Union speech on February 12th is traditionally much more programmatic. I hope there will be much more to come.

Dr. King’s final book was  subtitled Chaos or Community? Could there be any clearer indication of the woeful misdirection of our political culture than the sorry “Gun Appreciation Day” earlier this weekend? We won’t forget about the gun-control issue, now that so many people has reawakened to it; Slate reported yesterday that 1,104 Americans had died in firearms incidents since the Sandy Hook school massacre. But let’s regain our focus on the Bigger Picture, and concentrate instead on rebuilding community. That’s the only honorable work that can mobilize and harness the efforts of the great numbers of workers who are unemployed and under-employed.

Let’s put ourselves and every other American back to work on this most important national project, starting from the grassroots of every local community in the United States.

Render Unto Caesar …

Jews rarely cite the New Testament, but this morning’s newspaper brought to mind that famous piece of advice from the Christian education of my childhood: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” (Matthew 22:21) So much of what passes for politics in America today could be cleaned up, were we to keep this guidance in mind.

A primary challenge for the State in a multicultural society is to take care in defining national identity, so as to embrace the beliefs and cultural identities of all of its citizens. President Obama took an important step last week in embracing American families that are formed by same-sex couples. This is inarguably a step forward in extending our national embrace to include countless Americans who were previously pushed to the margins, extending our sense of the national family in a positive way that reflects the values of cultural democracy.

President Obama is not only our head of state; he is also a religious man, and turns regularly to advisors in his own spiritual tradition for personal guidance as he makes his way through what must be the most challenging job of his life. In this morning’s paper, an account appears of the response of some of these advisors to his pronouncement in favor of same-sex marriage. The article highlights some of the mistaken ways many Americans look at questions of personal belief as they migrate into the political arena.

The article quotes a minister who works for “a conservative megachurch in Florida” to this effect: “Some of the faith communities are going to be afraid that this is an attack against religious liberty.” This is the essence of a common failure to render unto the state that which defines issues of citizenship, and unto our personal spiritual communities that which resides in the realm of personal belief. All those who relish or fear the possibility that Obama’s stance will lead to electoral blowback in November are focusing on a gray area that needs much better delineation.

Defending the liberty of one person does not necessarily deprive another of his or her liberty. Acknowledging that some of us fall in love with people of out same gender requires nothing of those who don’t. Each is respected. The innovation is that both are respected.

This falls squarely at the center of the history of our progress in realizing our ideals as Americans. It took us a long time, untold misery, and the shedding of much blood to get over the vile compromise — actually written into our Constitution, until it was edited out by Amendments 13, 14 and 15 — to allow slavery in a nation that declared its independence on the premise that each of us is created equal. It took us even longer to recognize that women could be trusted with the vote. It’s taking us longer still to work our way more deeply into the cultural manifestations of the core issues here — racism and sexism — to move ourselves closer to our democratic aspirations. This is the higher motive force in American history,

Liberty and respect — like love — are not limited commodities. (In truth , they are not commodities at all.) They are enlarged as they are extended. They are also deepened and refined, becoming more fully realized as they are extended: the victims of racism are clear beneficiaries as we officially cast racism out of the public sector, but the perpetrators are also freed in the process: all the energy previously spent maintaining an unnatural and unjust order become available for good — if we so choose.

This morning’s press account reports of the ministers whom Obama consulted that “A vocal few made it clear that the president’s stand on gay marriage might make it difficult for them to support his re-election, ‘They were wrestling with their ability to get over his theological position,’” one reported. Two processes are being conflated here: one political, the other theological — one lies in Caesar’s realm, and the other in God’s.

Sometimes, what is revealed when we reflect on the latter should surely affect our behavior in the former. When personal convictions lead us to deprive others of political rights — or worse, to use the apparatus of the State to oppress or even murder those different from ourselves — our personal sense of morality illuminates the wrong choice being made in the political realm. But when personal beliefs would lead to exclusion and oppression of others in the political realm, the values of cultural democracy require us to separate personal belief from public values and allow the same liberty to others that we expect for ourselves.

Obama made this point explicitly in this case, drawing on the Christian faith tradition to point out the gray area that should lead true Christians toward restraint: “… it’s also the golden rule, you know? Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”

Careful consideration must be our watchword as we consider public ethics and political rights as against personal belief and religious freedom. The latter is by no means diminished by our generosity toward others when we step into a voting booth: rather, our freedom is enlarged when we stretch ourselves to make a more generous embrace.

As a Jewish spiritual leader, Jesus himself was drawing on a more ancient teaching about reciprocity in public life in the articulation recorded on the Gospel according to Matthew — that of Hillel, who said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

Here’s hoping that this will be our learning between now and November and beyond.

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.