The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« on: 2003-06-30 19:37:29 »
Enforced Conformity
Source: The Progressive Authors: Matthew Rothschild* Dated: 2003-06 [2003-07 Issue]
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who shared one of the paper's 2002 Pulitzer Prizes, was the commencement speaker at Rockford College's graduation ceremony on May 17. Hedges, the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, dispensed with the usual pap on pomp day and got right down to serious business.
"I want to talk to you today about war and empire," he began. (We reprint his speech in its entirety, along with the hostile crowd reaction, on page 24).
"Not long after I began speaking, a significant segment of the crowd began to shout me down," Hedges tells The Progressive. "They were yelling, 'God bless America,' 'Send him to France,' 'Get him out of here,' stuff like that."
Twice during Hedges's eighteen-minute speech, his microphone was unplugged.
Some people even charged the speaker's stand. "People were climbing on the platform," Hedges says. "It was threatening, and a little bit disturbing."
He had to abbreviate his remarks, and when he finished, he was lustily booed.
Rockford College in Illinois is 157 years old. "Our vision: to be Jane Addams's college in the twenty-first century," its website states, proclaiming its values of "Liberal Arts and Citizenship." (Jane Addams graduated from Rockford College in 1882.)
A few days after commencement, Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow apologized--not to Hedges, but to the students. In a May 21 letter to Rockford College graduates, Pribbenow wrote: "Unfortunately, our commencement address this past Saturday did not focus on your educational accomplishments and the challenges you will meet in the future. . . . Our speaker presented his ideas in a style that suggested the day was about him and not you. For this, I am very sorry."
Hedges told the Rockford Register Star, "You don't invite a speaker like this if you want 'Climb Every Mountain.' "
On Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, Hedges reflected some more on his experience. "Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs, are very frightening," he said. "As I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd--for that euphoria that comes with patriotism. . . . That kind of contagion leads ultimately to tyranny. It's very dangerous, and it has to be stopped. I've seen it, in effect, take over other countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I see it in my country." Hedges told Goodman that the campus security guards were worried about his safety, so they "hustled me out" while Pribbenow was "handing out the diplomas."
Hedges's speech also has gotten him into trouble with higher-ups at the Times. They are "looking into whether I broached the protocol in terms of my very pointed statements about the Iraqi war," he told Goodman. "That's something that makes them uncomfortable."
"Chris Hedges's commencement speech at Rockford College did not adhere to the guidelines set forth in our ethics code," says Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the New York Times Company. "Specifically, he engaged in public discourse concerning his political or personal views."
What happened to Chris Hedges is only a sample of the goon squad style that is so in vogue today. Rightwing talk radio ran an apparently successful effort to end Danny Glover's ad campaign for MCI because of his anti-war and anti-Bush views. Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo may have lost acting jobs for their outspokenness. Susan Sarandon was supposed to speak to the United Way in Tampa on the uncontroversial topic of women in volunteerism, but the United Way rescinded her invitation. She and her partner, Tim Robbins, were disinvited to Cooperstown to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Bull Durham. And everyone has heard about the Dixie Chicks.
Less well known, however, are the incidents of neo-McCarthyism that affect noncelebrities. Some of these make the national news, and some don't.
You may have heard about Stephen F. Downs, the chief lawyer for New York State's Commission on Judicial Conduct, who was arrested on March 3 for refusing to take off a peace T-shirt in a mall near Albany. The shirt said "Peace on Earth" on one side and "Give Peace a Chance" on the other. He had just purchased the shirt in Crossgates Mall, the same mall that ordered him to remove it. When the mall's security guards told him to take the shirt off or leave the premises, Downs refused. They called the police, and he was handcuffed, arrested, and charged with trespassing. Downs pleaded not guilty, and the mall later dropped the charges.
And you may have heard about Bretton Barber, a junior at Dearborn High School in Michigan. On February 17, he was wearing a T-shirt that had a picture of Bush on it and the words "International Terrorist." "At lunch, the vice principal came and said I had to turn it inside out or go home," Barber told The New York Times on February 26. Barber went home--and called the ACLU.
But many stories don't make the national news, and I'm sure some don't even make the local news. They simply go unreported: quotidian acts of repression. I've been trying to track incidents of neo-McCarthyism since shortly after September 11, 2001. And I can barely keep up.
"A chilling message has gone out across America: Dissent if you must, but proceed at your own risk," writes Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU, in the foreword to its report "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America."
"Some government officials, including local police, have gone to extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent wherever it has sprung up," the report notes.
One example comes from Iowa, where two police officers and a county attorney "threatened to arrest a pair of Grinnell College students for hanging a U.S. flag upside-down from their dormitory window . . . as a sign of their 'displeasure with the policies of the United States government,' " the report notes.
But it's not always the police who do the squelching, as other upside-down flag cases illustrate. Two were reported by Alisa Solomon in the June 2 issue of The Nation. One occurred at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. After seven housemates hung the distress-symbol flag, "their neighbors responded by throwing rocks through the students' windows, calling in death threats to their answering machine, and strapping a dead fish to their front door, Godfather-style," Solomon reported. "Restaurants in town stopped serving kids from Wheaton, and bar patrons harassed them. Norton police recommended that for their own safety, the housemates move out for a few days."
Katherine Lo, a sophomore at Yale, "also hung an upside-down flag outside her window," wrote Solomon. "Several men wielding a two-by-four tried to enter her room late at night while Lo was home. They left a convoluted note on her door that ended, 'Fuck Iraqi Saddam following fucks. I hate you, GO AMERICA.' "
John Fleming owns the Roost and Coyote's Den, an activist book and record store in Alamosa, Colorado. On the day that Bush began bombing Iraq in March, Fleming hung an upside-down flag in his store window. Some outraged residents complained to the police. "I had a half dozen calls in thirty minutes," Alamosa Police Chief Ron Lindsey says. Lindsey came over to the store and told Fleming that he couldn't legally have an upside-down flag on display.
"If I take the flag down and buckle under, don't you see what the implications will be?" Fleming recalls asking. "Don't you see what that does to the First Amendment, or has Bush destroyed that already?"
"You know, it's inflaming the community," Lindsey said, according to Fleming.
The ACLU of Colorado threatened to sue, and city attorneys quickly told the police chief he had no leg to stand on. Lindsey says he based his action on a flag-desecration statute. "I thought it pertained," he says. "Obviously, that was the wrong thing to do."
Fleming's nickname, by the way, is Coyote. The day after an article by Sylvia Lobato appeared in the Alamosa Valley Courier mentioning that nickname and the flag controversy, he found an unwelcome sight waiting for him at the office. "Someone went out and shot a coyote and threw the bleeding carcass up against the front door of the Roost," Fleming says. "I can't get the blood off the concrete. They took the ears off so they could claim the $5 bounty. I took it as a death threat."
Emily Jane Heynen is a tenant in Minneapolis. She had a problem with her previous landlord, Eulalia Rohleder, who lived downstairs.
Seems the landlord wanted to put up a plastic American flag on Heynen's porch, and when Heynen objected, the landlord and her daughter, Penny, took offense.
"I told Penny that the American flag didn't stand for something I believed in at this point in time, and that I didn't agree with what our government was doing in preparing for this Iraq war," Heynen recalls. "She looked kind of horror-stricken and called me 'a little commie' and an 'American-hater.' Then she said that her mom was not going to like this and that I shouldn't let her mom know about this because she would want me to move out. And I asked her to not tell her mom, and she glared and walked away."
Rohleder called her the next day to raise the subject of the flag, says Heynen, who works at the Headwaters Fund.
"She started arguing with me about patriotism and the importance of the flag, and she said that Penny and she feel very strongly about it, and that I had hurt them," Heynen says.
Heynen wrote about the incident in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "At this point in our history, the flag does not represent freedom and liberty for all," she wrote. "The flag represents our government's intent to politically and militarily dominate weaker countries to support our addiction to oil and our love affair with the automobile."
Heynen drew the comparison to McCarthyism: "Is this how people who dared to dissent felt during the McCarthy era? Be careful what you say, lest you be branded a traitor? . . . It is a threat I now face: Comply or get out. It is a threat written in longhand on little pieces of paper that often greet me when I get home from work."
She has now moved out.
"It was the first time I'd heard that kind of anger," she says. "It was really a shock that I'd have to censor what I say. It was scary. I was frightened by that intensity."
When asked about the incident, Rohleder says: "Are you for the flag, or not? We have a great big flag flying in our yard, and if anyone has a problem with the flag, why would they move here?"
She says she never demanded that Heynen leave. "My daughter just said to her, 'Oh, are you planning on moving?' Because like I say, I have a big flag out front, and she doesn't believe in the flag. I tried to explain to her that the flag has nothing to do with Bush and his Administration. The flag is representative of the United States, and anyone who doesn't like it shouldn't be here."
Another tenant that ran into trouble for anti-war views is District 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. It was actually evicted.
District 1199, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, got hit by a complaint from its landlord, Carroll Ventures, Inc., claiming it had " 'breached the terms of its lease by holding an anti-war demonstration,' " Dan Shingler of the Albuquerque Journal reported on May 19. "The union local definitely held an anti-war demonstration, but it was at the intersection of San Mateo Boulevard and Cutler Avenue, and not at its offices."
"It's kind of scary," Eleanor Chavez, director of District 1199, told Shingler. "What's happening in this country? We talk about going to war with Iraq to defend freedom. Well, how do you define freedom?"
One reason for the eviction is that the union local did not respond to the complaint in court, Shingler reports. Both he and The Progressive called Carroll Ventures for comment but received no answer.
To be a freethinking high school teacher or student in New Mexico during the Iraq War was perilous. On March 11, Carmelita Roybal, who teaches ninth-grade English at Rio Grande High School, was suspended for two days without pay when she did not take down her "No War Against Iraq" sign. Heather Duffy, who teaches art at the school, hung a similar sign the next day in solidarity with Roybal, and she, too, was suspended, according to the Albuquerque Tribune.
On March 13, "forty-five students walked out of class" to support the teachers, the paper said. The students "were videotaped by school officials and likely will be cited for truancy. . . . School police arrested four students when they refused to go to class."
On March 19, Ken Tabish, a guidance counselor at Albuquerque High School, was suspended for two days without pay for refusing to take down anti-war material he had posted in his office, including a copy of a speech by Senator Robert Byrd.
That same day, Francesca Tuoni, a language teacher at Albuquerque High, who is the adviser to a campus group called "Students for Participatory Democracy," was ordered by a vice principal to remove a flyer on her classroom wall that advertised a peace rally. Tuoni complied with the order.
Meanwhile, at a third school within the same district, two other teachers got into similar trouble. At Highland High, Geoffrey Barrett and Allen Cooper "have been placed on leave for refusing to remove war-related student artwork posted in their classrooms," AP reports.
"Barrett, who teaches history and current events, said the student art carried both anti-war and pro-war messages, and was created as part of a class assignment," the April 1 AP story says.
Cooper, who teaches English, displayed one anti-war sign "by an Afghani student who has had family members killed in U.S.-led bombings in Afghanistan, he said," according to the story.
Cooper and Barrett were suspended for two days without pay.
Finally, Bill Nevins, a teacher at Rio Rancho High, in a different district, was suspended when a member of the student poetry slam club he supervises read an anti-war poem "over the in-school closed-circuit TV system," according to Green Left Weekly. "Following the reading, the student's parent (also a teacher at the school) was ordered by an assistant principal to go home and search the student's room for a print copy of the poem. The parent declined to do so."
On April 18, the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union sued the Albuquerque Public Schools and several administrators for violating the rights of Roybal, Tabish, Tuoni, and Cooper.
"There has to be a space for free speech for teachers," says Peter Simonson, executive director of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union. "And we're trying to carve out an appropriate space for that."
Tom Treece could use that space. He taught a course called "Public Issues" at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont. This spring, he and some of his students found themselves embroiled in a public issue.
It all started with a dialogue board the school hung up to facilitate an exchange of views after September 11. The administrators invited students and teachers to post their opinions. One day in March, "I posted a little notecard-sized paper that said, 'All hail the idiot boy king.' That started the whole fury," Treece recalls. Local residents Paul and Norma Malone, who have founded a group called Citizens Advocating Responsible Education, wrote a letter to the local paper, The Times Argus, that was published on March 28.
"It is unrealistic to expect that current world events would not be a topic of discussion among students or faculty," they wrote. "But it is quite another matter for a teacher to use taxpayer dollars (his salary, the school facility, and related resources) to proselytize his leftwing political rhetoric and anti-establishment rhetoric. Of particular concern is the lack of respect shown in this reference to the President of the United States as 'the idiot boy king.' We would advise the board and the administration to examine Mr. Treece's teaching practices and course materials."
Superintendent Dorothy Anderson says she asked Treece to take the "idiot boy king" note down. "It was in bad taste, it was strongly worded, and it may discourage his students from offering an opposite viewpoint," she says. Treece complied.
That did not mollify the citizenry.
At a school board meeting on April 7, "about three dozen residents" came "to confront the school board about a bulletin board they say has been abused by faculty promoting an anti-American agenda," The Times Argus reported. They also objected to bumper stickers Treece had on his door that said, "Impeach Bush," and, "Vermonters for a Bush/Cheney Regime Change."
Treece says that some of these residents have been calling for his head. He cites a flier circulating in town with his yearbook picture on it, along with a copy of his "Impeach Bush" sticker, and the words, "We cannot allow this kind of stuff to happen in our schools."
Things really got weird when a local police officer entered Treece's classroom in the middle of the night on April 9 with a camera. He convinced the custodian to unlock the door to Treece's classroom, and he took a picture of a student project that showed President Bush with duct tape over his mouth, and the words: "Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth." (Treece had students make posters defending their pro-war or anti-war views.)
The police officer, John Mott, told The Times Argus, "I wanted everybody else to see what was in that room. . . . Having spent thirty years in uniform, I was insulted. I'm just taking a stand on what happens in that classroom as a resident and a voter and a taxpayer in the community."
Mott, incidentally, used to work at Spaulding High as the Junior ROTC officer.
Superintendent Anderson was not happy that Mott entered the school at 1:30 in the morning to further his own political agenda.
"I find this behavior, at the very least, in violation of our policy for visitors at the school," she wrote Police Chief Michael Stevens on April 16. "I also find it disturbing that a police officer would wear his uniform under such circumstances, thereby intimidating our employee into letting him in the building at a very unusual hour. I question the intent of his visit. Why could he not have come during regular school hours? Please look into this matter and determine if any ethical or legal guidelines were breached."
According to Anderson, the police chief told her "he was going to handle it administratively." Stevens did not return several phone calls from The Progressive.
On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called Mott a hero and posted the students' artwork on the Limbaugh web page.
"These kids didn't turn these projects in with any understanding that they would end up on Rush Limbaugh," Anderson says. "Their parents feel very violated and angry."
Anderson defends Treece's teaching practices. "In the course of his teaching, he does present both sides and gives resources on both sides," she says.
But she is pursuing administrative action against him.
"I can't teach that class anymore," Treece says. After this year, "they've removed me from the class."
Treece is "very upset" about losing this class. "This is purely a political move on their part," he says. The controversy has taken a toll on him. "My reputation has been spoiled," he says. "I haven't got a lot of rest in the last month."
While the climate right now is not as bleak--unless you're a Muslim immigrant--as it was during the harshest days of McCarthyism, these incidents indicate a powerful, frightening trend. Today, deeply reactionary forces don't need a Joe McCarthy in the U.S. Senate. The hecklers, goons, radio and TV talkshow hosts, nativists, and know-nothings in our midst are perfectly capable of doing the tarring and feathering themselves. Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive. He wrote "The New McCarthysim" in the January 2002 issue [Hermit: of The Progressive]. He tracks this subject on the magazine's website, http://www.progressive.org, under "McCarthyism Watch".
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my wife, Marlene, joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of time in the U.S.A. teaching, reading in its marvelous libraries, writing, or having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville, that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America, the best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a journey of not more than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the U.S.A. the same as his.
If written today, de Tocqueville's book would certainly be attacked as anti-American, since much of what he said about the U.S.A. was critical. Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A. has been a subject of attraction and fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the cold war that people's attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged essentially in terms of approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are also likely to seek out "un-American" behavior in their own fellow citizens, but also internationally. It substituted the question "Are you with the U.S.A.?" for the question "What do you think of the U.S.A.?" What is more, no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since America, having won the cold war against the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided on September 11, 2001, that the cause of freedom was again engaged in another life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about the United States and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.
And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval! Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success story among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world's largest, both pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement was unique; its research in both natural and social sciences, even its philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its hegemony in global consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the only surviving global power and empire. What is more, as I have written elsewhere, "in some ways the United States represents the best of the 20th century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the U.S.A., I illustrate the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or liking to live in the U.S.A. -- and especially in New York -- does not imply the wish to become American, although this is still difficult for many inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a lasting choice for most people between one's own country and another, as it did before the Second World War, or even until the air-transport revolution in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the 1990s. Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives have become common.
Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater openness to talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the reminder of an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian intellectual inquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose treasures are still, unlike in the other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. On the other hand, the human costs of the system for those outside it or who cannot "make it" were equally evident in New York, at least until they were pushed out of middle-class sight, off the streets or into the unspeakable univers concentrationnaire of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world. When I first went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump or "skid row." In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the streets of Manhattan. Behind today's casual mobile-phone calls on the street, I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the pavements of New York in one of the city's bad decades of inhumanity and brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism, in a country where "to waste" is the common criminal slang for "to kill."
Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning is not just the most important thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one's own civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least of these cultural peculiarities is the U.S.A.'s own sense of its strangeness ("Only in America ... "), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self. The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events in the 1960s, even those of complex Central European cultural background, as they seemed in local academic discussions. "What is this identity crisis they are all talking about?" Marlene asked me after one of them. She had never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.
Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were probably more immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture. For, whatever was the case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A. What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the -- by our standards -- everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in and by the U.S.A. to establish who can command whom.
It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming subject of the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of somehow encompassing all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United States still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at "the great American novel," even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the U.S.A. to seize the totality of their country, Warhol's vision is not that of the successful pursuit of happiness, "the American dream" of American political jargon and psychobabble.
To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime, or at least in the 40-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly told, is not America, and, as Auden said, even those who could never be Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the same Spanish lady, who in her 12 years in the city has never found it necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers, Marlene and I would give tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two) unlike the permanently resident friends -- the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers -- we would not entertain at home. Like a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a favorite establishment like that of a relative; I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, with the mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors, and United Nations staff members that makes up the local intellectual scene -- for one of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly exist anywhere except the U.S.A. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum, hematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh for a project of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York, and, unlike in large stretches of the United States, more people there are aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest and California.
Curiously, the experience, what in the '60s they used to call "the vibes," of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of other countries I have known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities today; even Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the skyline of London, as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of Parliament Hill, has changed -- Parliament is now barely visible -- and Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind of social and economic upheavals as other cities -- deindustrialization, gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World -- it neither feels nor looks like a city transformed. That is surprising when, as every New Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of fundamental innovations in New York life, such as the Korean fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class institutions as the Gimbel's department stores, and the transformation of Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its most ambitious postwar addition, the World Trade Center, has disappeared.
[This seems a little otioise to me. Most European cities are now crowded with skyscrapers - go to Potsdammer Platz in Berlin and it looks like Manhattan. Eighties Parisian architecture was rather more esoteric than that, as are the current developments in London, but these are still adaptations of American style - Kharin]
Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A. is part of global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. Those changes there looked less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass-consumer society that did not arrive in Western Europe until the 1950s was not new in America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way Britons lived and thought before and after the middle '50s, for the U.S.A. the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of the kind of 20th century its more prosperous white citizens had known for two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before, though some sections of its citizens -- mainly the college-educated -- began to think differently about it, and, as the countries of what is now the European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which European tourists came into contact began to look less "advanced," and even a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving through it in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s from what it had looked and felt like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London that became one after the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in the short run.
As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones. Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an 18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national decision-making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job, without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent, that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower, however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.
(Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above paragraph was originally written calls for a revision of the views expressed in it. The "occupational disease of conquering powers" has been reinforced by the Iraq war. The policies and strategic ambitions of the global dominators have destroyed the genuine "coalitions of the willing" on which U.S. supremacy could rely in the cold war, and even more so in the international mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and after 9/11. They have left the U.S.A., unable to win a plurality of free votes in the U.N.'s Security Council, in unprecedented isolation and global unpopularity, surrounded by fear rather than hope. The world has unquestionably been more destabilized not only -- patently -- in the Middle East but everywhere: in Europe, where the European Union is divided and weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East Asia; in what existed of an organized international system, whether of states or nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics, self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.)
Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the model of U.S. politics and society. That is probably because America is less of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest. So, far from being a clear example that the rest of the world can imitate, the U.S.A., however powerful and influential, remains an unending process, distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering with institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in the unalterable text of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it*. Since puberty I have spent more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain. All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.
[* To be strictly accurate, hardly anyone has copied it, and where they have, the results have not been a great success. - Kharin]
Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of the "American Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its solution.
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #2 on: 2003-07-01 11:42:15 »
I'd only raise one quibble. As I see it, the development of "American architecture", outside of the Prairie Style movement (which was largely indigenous (think Sullivan) though massively influenced by Japanese (Wright) and German (Schinkel) architecture), was driven, by and large, by the refugees of the Bauhaus, Zehner Ring, International and Arbeitsrat für Kunst movements, who fled Europe when innovative design became impossible under the heel of the National Socialists. As one example, think just of the influence of (Ludwig) Mies van der Rohe (particularly his 1921 Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper and work at IIT) without whom, I'd suggest, Chicago and New York would look remarkably different.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #3 on: 2003-07-01 12:02:41 »
Quote:
"Bauhaus, Zehner Ring, International and Arbeitsrat für Kunst movements, who fled Europe when innovative design became impossible under the heel of the National Socialists."
Rather ironic really. Only two nations did not attend the 1925 Paris design and architecture exhibition; Germany and the US. The French deliberately made it very difficult for the former to attend, while the latter stiffly replied something along the lines of "there is no modern design in the United States."
Incidentally, the British did attend, though it was widely felt that the nature of their contriibution was to the same effect as what the Americans had said of their own absence.
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #4 on: 2003-07-01 15:03:05 »
Freedom and conformity... Maybe we digress somehow but, since we are talking architecture, here is an interesting place I visited in Vienna a couple of years ago:
"Man is surrounded by three layers, his skin, his clothing and walls, the building.
Clothing and the walls of buildings have in recent times undergone a development which is no longer in keeping with the individual's natural requirements.
Windows are the bridge between inside and outside. The third skin is interspersed with windows as the first one is with pores" <snip>
"The flat floor is an invention of the architects. It fits engines - not human beings. (...)
If modern man is forced to walk on flat asphalt and concrete floors as they were planned thoughtlessely in designers' offices, estranged from man's age old relationship and contact to earth, a crucial part of man withers and dies. This has catastrophic consequences for the soul, the equilibrium, the well-being and the health of man.
(...)
An uneven and animated floor is the recoverery of man's mental equilibrium, of the dignity of man which has been violated in our levelling, unnatural and hostile urban grid system.(...)
.The uneven floor becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet and brings back natural vibrations to man.
Architecture should elevate and not subdue man.
It is good to walk on uneven floors and regain our human balance.
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #5 on: 2003-07-01 16:48:55 »
"If modern man is forced to walk on flat asphalt and concrete floors as they were planned thoughtlessely in designers' offices, estranged from man's age old relationship and contact to earth, a crucial part of man withers and dies."
Spanish art historian says they put enemies in disorienting cells
Giles Tremlett in Madrid Monday January 27, 2003 The Guardian
A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country's bloody civil war.
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.
Most were the work of an enthusiastic French anarchist, Alphonse Laurencic, who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture, according to the research of the historian Jose Milicua.
Mr Milicua's information came from a written account of Laurencic's trial before a Francoist military tribunal. That 1939 account was written by a man called R L Chacon who, like anybody allowed to publish by the newly installed dictatorship, could not have been expected to feel any sympathy for what Nazi Germany had already denounced as "degenerative art".
Laurencic, who claimed to be a painter and conductor in civilian life, created his so-called "coloured cells" as a contribution to the fight against General Franco's rightwing rebel forces.
They may also have been used to house members of other leftwing factions battling for power with the anarchist National Confederation of Workers, to which Laurencic belonged.
Hidden
The cells, built in 1938 and reportedly hidden from foreign journalists who visited the makeshift jails on Vallmajor and Saragossa streets, were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant garde art theories on the psychological properties of colours.
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial.
The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.
Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.
Laurencic told the military court that he had been commissioned to build the cells by an anarchist leader who had heard of similar ones used elsewhere in the republican zone during the civil war, possibly in Valencia.
Mr Milicua has claimed that Laurencic preferred to use the colour green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colours, it produced melancholy and sadness in prisoners.
But it appears that Barcelona was not the only place where avant garde art was used to torture Franco's supporters.
According to the prosecutors who put Laurencic on trial in 1939, a jail in Murcia in south-east Spain forced prisoners to view the infamously disturbing scene from Dali and Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou, in which an eyeball is sliced open.
El Pais commented: "The avant garde forms of the moment - surrealism and geometric abstraction - were thus used for the aim of committing psychological torture.
"The creators of such revolutionary and liberating [artistic] languages could never have imagined that they would be so intrinsically linked to repression."
I would go as far as saying that much of America's success has to do with the public sector seeing itself as "constitutional technicians".`
This is, whatever happens, reallity must somehow be submissive to the constitution. Constitutional domination over life, one might call. This simply doesn't exist in other nations, where authorities let reallity evolve, and only then think of ways to solve the emerging problems. In America, the society evolves within the constraints of the constitution. Outside, constitutions "evolve"(legislators design it and re-design it) to meet the necessities of people. "Unnegotiable Constitutional domination over life" may be one the key points of America's strenght.
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #7 on: 2003-07-03 13:04:57 »
I'd suggest that evolution is good, that far from being "constitutional technicians" most Americans don't have a clue about why it is important and don't give a shit about how it is being abused. Which forces the thinker to draw parallels with previous occasions when totalitarianism became the norm - and the citizens were left wondering when and how it happened. As but one example, let me quote a story by a respected journalist, Jimmy Breslin, in a recent Newsday.
A Fate Sealed Under Secrecy
Source: Newsday Authors: Jimmy Breslin Dated: 2003-06-22
On Friday, I rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, whose gray netting went with the sky, and as long as there was tension about the bridge, I was remembering Richard Seaberg, a big cop from Emergency One, who climbed to the top of the bridge so many times and pulled somebody down before he jumped. Seaberg protected the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now there is a charge by the government that terrorists intended to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, or pull it down. Simultaneously, while protecting the bridge, the government was doing frightening damage to the life of the country.
Because of it, I am thinking that it could be time for me to begin thinking about leaving this news business. It is not mine anymore. Let me tell you why.
Friday, the newspapers and television reported the following matter with no anger or effort to do anything other than serve as stenographers for the government:
On March 1, give or take a day, in Columbus, Ohio, the FBI arrested an American citizen they say is Iyman Faris. There wasn't a word uttered. He vanished. No lawyer was notified. He made no phone calls and wrote no postcards or letters.
He was a United States citizen who disappeared without a trace into a secret metal world.
This citizen's proper name was Mohammed Rauf. He took the Faris from a street name in his neighborhood in Columbus. I don't know why he did this for sure. A friend of mine in Columbus, Mike Weber, told me Friday that he thought the federal agents wanted him to use Faris because the real name, Rauf, purportedly would alert others that he had been caught. Who knows? You believe the FBI, you belong back in public school.
They held him secretly in an iron world for the next six weeks. This is plenty of time to hand out giant beatings. Oh, yes, don't gasp. If cops are performing a Fascist act, then always suspect them of acting like Fascists. They have fun beating people up.
In mid-April, again in deep secrecy, the government says Faris was allowed to plead guilty to plotting to pull down or blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. He was in a sealed Virginia federal courtroom. If he had a lawyer, that was some lawyer.
After that, he was sentenced. We don't know what the sentence was because it is sealed.
I don't know what Faris looks like or sounds like or what he thinks and what he was doing. He could be the worst. I don't know. Prove he wanted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and let him paste a picture of Osama bin Laden on the cell wall for inspiration over the next half a century. But first bring him into open court and try him. Pretend you live in America. Even pick a jury. I don't know. What a thing it would be if he comes up not guilty.
What we do know is that this is your country now.
Once before this, in 1942, we detained Japanese-Americans in secrecy. The nation swore never to do it again. We haven't. This case is out of the old Soviet Union. He was neither booked with television watching nor arraigned in front of a judge. Anybody concealed by government agents and guards for more than three months could have marks on him somewhere. And our newspeople write like the worst of the old Pravda. I read in papers from everywhere yesterday morning, "After Mr. Faris was secretly arrested three months ago... " and "court papers this week said that Mr. Faris secretly pleaded guilty to charges of terrorism last month." They say. They were simply typed out, as if to report the guy getting a parking ticket. Now, the FBI doesn't even tell you the right name of a kidnapped man and makes the news reporters love it.
Why would the government say he is a terrorist if he isn't guilty?
The only thing that could possibly bother anybody is the thought of somebody reading this 50 years from now and saying, "Look at that. This is where they blew a couple of amendments."
This government's kidnapping of Faris/Rauf violated the laws handed down by Madison, Jefferson, Marshall. A small religious zealot, John Ashcroft, takes their great laws and bravery and using our new Patriot Act, turns it into Fascism.
He could do this openly because news reporters go about the government like gardeners, bent over, smiling and nodding when one of the owners shows up. You only have to look at a White House news conference to see how they aggressively pursue your right to know.
The newspeople stand when the president comes into the room. They really do. They don't sit until he tells them to. You tell them a lie and they say, "Sir."
And now you have a citizen kidnapped by agents and there is no anger. The day's news is about a children's book, and a has-been heavyweight, Mike Tyson, under arrest in a Brooklyn precinct at the foot of the bridge. Newspeople like to be called "journalists" and write of "the need to protect sources." They don't have any. Here's a guy held for three months and nobody even got a phone call.
The newest attribution in today's news reporting is, "senior law enforcement official." That is news report for a cop. Newspeople can speak French all over the place but I know of only two reporters in New York who can speak Arabic, and one of them is in the Middle East now and is of no help. That means you can't even quote somebody and attribute it to a "senior Arab."
There is not even the beginnings of anger about an American kidnapped by his government, over freedom being taken from us all, and bet me you won't see it back. The newspeople are comfortable with being known as the "media." That is a dangerous word; all evil rises around those afflicted with it.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
"The FBI is here,"Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it's not, because Mom isn't that funny.
"The who?" I say.
"Two FBI agents. They say you're not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store."
I work in a small, independent bookstore, and since it's a slow Tuesday afternoon, I figure, "Sure." Someone I know must have gotten some government work, I think; hadn't my consultant friend spoken recently of getting rolled onto some government job? Background check, I think, interviewing acquaintances ... No big deal, right? Then, of course, I make a big deal about it in front of my co-workers.
"That was my mom," I tell them. "The FBI's coming for me." They laugh; it's a good joke, especially when the FBI actually shows up. They are not the bogeymen I had been expecting. They're dressed casually, they speak familiarly, but they are big. The one in front stands close to 7 feet, and you can tell his partner is built like a bulldog under his baggy shirt and shorts.
"You Marc Schultz?" asks the tall one. He shows me his badge, introduces himself as Special Agent Clay Trippi. After assuring me that I'm not in trouble, he asks if there is someplace we can sit down and talk. We head back to Reference, where a table and chairs are set up. We sit down, and I'm again informed that I am not in trouble.
Then, Agent Trippi asks, "Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?" And I realize this meeting is not about a friend. Despite their reassurances, and despite the fact that I haven't committed any federal offenses (that I know of), I'm starting to feel a bit like I'm in trouble.
They ask me if I was driving my car on Saturday, and I say, reasonably sure, that I was. They ask me where I went, and I struggle for a moment to remember Saturday. I make a lame joke about how the days run together when you're underemployed. They smile politely. Was I at work on Saturday? I think so.
"Were you at the Caribou Coffee on Powers Ferry?" asks Agent Trippi. That's where I get my coffee before work, and so I tell him yes, probably, just before remembering Saturday: Harry Potter day, opening early, in at 8:30.
So I would have been at Caribou Coffee that Saturday, getting my small coffee, room for cream. This information seems to please the agents.
"Did you notice anything unusual, anyone worth commenting on?" OK, I think. It's the unusual guy they want, not me. I think hard, wondering if it was Saturday I saw the guy in the really cool reclining wheelchair, the guy who struck me as a potential James Bondian supervillain, but no: That was Monday.
Then they ask if I carried anything into the shop -- and we're back to me.
My mind races. I think: a bomb? A knife? A balloon filled with narcotics? But no. I don't own any of those things. "Sunglasses," I say. "Maybe my cell phone?"
Not the right answer. I'm nervous now, wondering how I must look: average, mid-20s, unassuming retail employee. What could I have possibly been carrying?
Trippi's partner speaks up: "Any reading material? Papers?" I don't think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: "I'll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that's why we're here, just checking it out. Like I said, there's no problem. We'd just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that."
You don't want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?
The partner speaks up again: "Maybe a printout of some kind?"
Then it occurs to me: I was reading. It was an article my dad had printed off the Web. I remember carrying it into Caribou with me, reading it in line, and then while stirring cream into my coffee. I remember bringing it with me to the store, finishing it before we opened. I can't remember what the article was about, but I'm sure it was some kind of left-wing editorial, the kind that never fails to incite me to anger and despair over the state of the country.
I tell them all this, but they want specifics: the title of the article, the author, some kind of synopsis, but I can't help them -- I read so much of this stuff.
"Do you still have the article?" Probably not, but I suggest we check behind the counter. When that doesn't pan out, I have the bright idea to call my dad at work, see if he can remember. Of course, he can't put together a coherent sentence after I tell him the FBI are at the store, questioning me.
"The FBI?" he keeps asking. Eventually I get him off the phone, and suggest it may be in my car. They follow me out to the parking lot, where Trippi asks me if there's anything in the car he should know about.
"Weapons, drugs? It's not a problem if you do, but if you don't tell me and then I find something, that's going to be a problem." I assure him there's nothing in my car, coming very close to quoting Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite: "There's nothin' in my trunk, man."
The excitement of the questioning -- the interrogation -- has made me just a little bit giddy. I almost laugh out loud when they ask me to pop my trunk.
There's nothing in my car, of course. I keep looking anyway, while telling them it was probably some kind of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it article about the buildup to Gulf War II. Trippi nods, unsatisfied. I turn up some papers from the University of Georgia, where I'm about to begin as a grad student. He asks me what I'm going to study.
"Journalism," I say. As I duck back into the car, I hear Agent Trippi informing his partner, "He's going to UGA for journalism" in a way that makes me wonder whether that counts against me.
Back in the store, Trippi gives me his card and tells me to call him if I remember anything. After he's gone, I call my dad back to see if he has calmed down, maybe come up with a name. We retrace some steps together, figure out the article was Hal Crowther's "Weapons of Mass Stupidity" from the Weekly Planet, a free independent out of Tampa. It comes back to me then, this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media, focusing mostly on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch -- really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11. So I call the number on the card, leave a message with the name, author and origin of the column, and ask him to call me if he has any more questions.
To tell the truth, I'm kind of anxious to hear back from the FBI, if only for the chance to ask why anyone would find media criticism suspicious, or if maybe the sight of a dark, bearded man reading in public is itself enough to strike fear in the heart of a patriotic citizen.
My co-worker, Craig, says that we should probably be thankful the FBI takes these things seriously; I say it seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees.
Special Agent Trippi didn't return calls from CL. But Special Agent Joe Paris, Atlanta field office spokesman, stressed that specific FBI investigations are confidential. He wouldn't confirm or deny the Schultz interview.
"In this post-911 era, it is the absolute responsibility of the FBI to follow through on any tips of potential terrorist activity," Paris says. "Are people going to take exception and be inconvenienced by this at times? Oh, yeah. ... A certain amount of convenience is going to be offset by an increase in security."
Marc Schultz is a freelance writer in Atlanta. The Weekly Planet happens to be Creative Loafing's sister paper in Tampa. For a copy of the column [Hermit: "Weapons Of Mass Stupidity"] that got Schultz in hot water, go to here.
It's the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people -- an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask "the people" to swallow something exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his fellow citizens a candid and disparaging assessment of their intelligence.In the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the bewildering possibility of a United States of Asia, the patriotic pageantry and premature gloating call to mind an obsession that once gripped the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. (In my recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things French.) Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his own work and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of stupidity, a relentless tide of gullibility and muddled thinking which made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.
At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything he had written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string of the most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch for months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar of moronic utterances, painstakingly collecting hundreds of what he called betises -- stupidities -- and arranging them in his "Dictionary of Received Opinions."
The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.
Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network, Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.
With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.
Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.
But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.
Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)
Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war.
It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous words, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- by which, of course, Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical weapon, not as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism to achieve political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can travel, the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to hammer its critics.
Liars With Secret Agendas
Years ago in Moscow, at the dawn of perestroika, a pair of Russian journalists showed me headlines from the New York Post that made Kruschchev's "We will bury you" sound like "Have a nice day." How can there ever be peace, they asked me, if America hates us so much? Handicapped by the yawning gap between our respective press traditions, I tried to explain that the Post had nothing to do with our government or even the American media machine, that it was owned by an Australian whose Red-baiting and saber-rattling was an act designed to sell newspapers to morons. That he was unconnected to our government was something I believed about Murdoch in 1984, though no doubt Ronald Reagan was eager to naturalize a lonely immigrant with billions to invest in right-wing media.
But now? Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox News?
If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.
How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.
"I almost choked," said my mother's friend Doris, who's 90. "I had to lie down." It's possible that even old George Bush, who served with distinction in World War II, had to stifle a groan over that one.
The invasion of Iraq was in no way what it seemed to be, either. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His "weapons of mass destruction" remain invisible, his terrorist connections remain unproven, and he had absolutely nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center. Most cynical of all was the "liberation" lie, the administration's sudden concern for the helpless citizens of Iraq. Saddam, as grotesque as he was, wasn't getting any meaner, and "liberators" like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing brisk business with him when he was in his murderous, citizen-eating prime (and in Cheney's case, as recently as 1999). It would take half a page to list all the US-sanctioned dictators, killers of their people, who will be sharing hell's hottest corner with Saddam Hussein.
Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like frightened children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript of Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's liberal by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of constructing "a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war on Iraq.
According to polls, at least half of us were so eager to be deceived, we believed the one lie Bush never dared to tell us, except by implication: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
According to a CNN poll, 51 percent believe this -- "The Moron Majority," declares the headline in The Progressive Populist. And at that point, like poor Flaubert, I feel the sand around my ankles. I want to lie down and give up. On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: "The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time" -- Albert Einstein; and "Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies." -- George Santayana.
It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens "idiots." (Unless they're liberals -- "We all agree that liberals are stupid," writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word "retarded." It's "intellectually disabled," and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of "supporting the troops"? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are "locked and cocked" I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me.
According to this woeful logic, whoever controls the armed forces in the country where you live owns your conscience and your soul. It mandates unanimous civilian support for King Herod's soldiers smashing Hebrew babies against doorposts. It holds our soldiers hostage to silence our common sense, independent judgment and moral autonomy -- the foundations of each thinking individual's self-respect, not to mention the foundations of every theory of democratic government.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public," said President Theodore Roosevelt.
The Madhouse Choir
They don't make Republicans like they used to. The troop-support doctrine, so universally and smugly conceded, is logic for the intellectually disabled, for people who've been hit in the head repeatedly with a heavy shovel. The stupidity of those who buy it is no more astonishing than the hypocrisy of those who sell it -- Republicans who preach our sacred duty to the army's morale and simultaneously cancel $15 billion in veteran's benefits and 60 percent of federal education subsidies for servicemen's children. If you can't believe that, look it up.
When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason. In the meantime, Iraq is a bloody mess and Afghanistan a tragic mess, and most of the earth's one billion Muslims think the US and Israel are trying to conquer their world and destroy their religion. America's economy is suffocating ("A sickly economy with no cure in sight" says this morning's paper), her currency is in free fall and her reputation flies below half mast on every continent. We've been instructed to hate the French, our allies since the days of Lafayette, because they dared to tell us the truth.
What our best friends think of us is epitomized by a new play in Paris titled George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy. Another in London is called The Madness of George Dubya. Our only original enemies, the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, seem to be thriving -- and quite naturally gaining recruits. There's a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: "If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now."
Is that the children I hear singing, or the madhouse choir? (Calling Dr. Strangelove. . .) But polls tell us that through all the wars and lies and logical meltdowns that followed 9-11, 70 percent of adult America declared itself well satisfied and well served.
"I think it is terrifying," said the late Bishop Paul Moore, a Yale aristocrat who, like most mainstream clergymen, did not support the Bush wars. "I believe it will lead us to a terrible crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it."
I believe it has, and I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn't need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he "has doubts" about evolution.
Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency. New research published by the National Academy of Sciences asserts that human beings and chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of their DNA. Would the polls (or the elections) change if subjects had to submit to DNA tests to prove they possess the qualifying .6 percent? American readers have purchased 50 million copies of Tim LaHaye's gonzo Apocalypse novels, still more evidence that what awaits the United States of America is not a physical but an intellectual Armageddon.
Was it dry, desert sand or quicksand that the despairing Flaubert imagined? When we look down, can we still see our knees? Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls -- if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?
When the sand begins to grip us and no lifeline appears, we clutch at straws. Yet there's anecdotal evidence that the polls could be wrong. Brownshirts targeted the Dixie Chicks, and they survived handsomely. At the Merle Watson bluegrass festival in rural Wilkes County, singer Laura Love ridiculed President Bush from the main stage and harvested thousands of cheers to perhaps a hundred catcalls. At a crowded bookstore in Charlottesville last month, I tossed aside the book I hoped to sell and read a white-knuckled antiwar essay I wrote in 1991. One woman walked out, but everyone else applauded and grinned at me. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know hates these wars and these lies as much as I do.
Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign -- like Saddam's missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it's going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #9 on: 2003-07-27 03:52:00 »
My god (or lack there of)! I read about a few of those things before, but there are a lot more occurances than I knew about. I've been following the political realm pretty closely for the last couple of weeks, and it's very frightening. A lot of the things that I hear others have gotten in trouble for, I do, and have done. Hell, I even dressed up as Osama Bin Laden for Halloween! I guess maybe I've just gotten lucky and haven't had any trouble.
Maybe it's time for us to start to watch what I do and say? Or perhaps this is the point in time we should do and say what we wish the most? Sorry, I'm babbling again.
Safe from the pain and truth and choice and other poison devils See.. they don't give a fuck about you, like i do. Just stay with me, safe and ignorant, Go back to sleep Go Back to sleep
Should a person go to jail just for linking to websites that post information about how to make bombs? That appears to be the position of the United States government. Sherman Austin has been sentenced for doing just that - he pled guilty to "distributing information related to explosives" because he was afraid that he would be charged under anti-terrorism laws, a designation that might put him in a deep, dark hole from which he would never be heard from again.
Newsday reports:
Austin told the judge Monday he "wasn't really thinking" when he created the Web site. "I'd be devastated if someone used this information to harm others," he said. ...Austin said he took a plea bargain because he feared his case was eligible for a terrorism enhancement, which could have added 20 years to his sentence. The plea deal had called for him to serve four months.
This is not the first time that a criminal defendant has felt pressure to plead guilty to something in order to avoid the excessive power of government prosecutors under recent anti-terrorism laws. The question is, who will be next? You? As I recognised the name of the webmaster of "raisethefist.com" from some posts I made about him in early 2002, I did some further research which yielded: Vigilant TV 2003-08-06 Californian sentenced for anarchist Web site
U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson sentenced Sherman Austin Monday to more than the prosecutor had recommended under a plea bargain.
Austin, 20, pleaded guilty in February to distributing information related to explosives.
Austin told the judge Monday he "wasn't really thinking" when he created the Web site. "I'd be devastated if someone used this information to harm others," he said.
Austin admitted posting links about bombs to enable people to build and use them during demonstrations against interstate and foreign trade. He told FBI agents he wanted the Web site to teach people about police brutality.
Austin must also pay a $2,000 fine and is barred for three years from using a computer without approval. Wilson said he also may not associate with anyone from a group that "espouses physical force as a means of change." 2002-09-26 raisethefist: RTF Webmaster to be Convicted RaiseTheFist webmaster Sherman Austin has pleaded guilty to charges of distribution of explosives information. Austin made headlines in February when an FBI raid took his web site offline. Initial charges were dropped; his subsequent indictment in late August didn't receive much attention. Link via Duncan Frissell*, who laments Austin's decision to plead guilty and let the charges go unchallenged. *Hermit: Who provided these links: http://www.raisethefist.com/news.cgi?artical=wire/----9846413t4a.article http://www.raisethefist.com/news.cgi?artical=wire/----9845643t4a.article
Both of these still work and point into the site, which is probably worth a visit.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity
« Reply #11 on: 2003-08-18 04:15:16 »
Report: 5.6M Have 'Prison Experience'
[Hermit: Perhaps worth noting that Holland still maintains a ratio of about 50 inmates per100,000 vs 1,000 per 100,000 for the USA - twenty times the Dutch rates, or double that if you include people sentenced to custodial periods of less than a year - in other words forty times Dutch rates. This means that the US has outstripped even the Peoples Republic of China in incarceration levels. Other huge differences between the US and European countries, are the lack of social security eligability for felons, their disenfranchisement, and most importantly, the growing tendency in the US to completly strip them of their possessions, which can leave families devastated and released prisoners with no hope of creating any worthwhile business opportunities to make up for the near impossibility of their finding sufficiently well paid jobs to keep them out of jail (Refer also [ Blunderov, "RE: virus: Re: None so blind...", 2003-08-18 ] ). Yet another significant factor is the fact that prisons are the fastest growing industry in the United States, creating massive pressure on the legislature and judiciary to continue this soearing trend.]
WASHINGTON - About one in every 37 U.S. adults was either imprisoned at the end of 2001 or had been incarcerated at one time, the government reported Sunday.
The 5.6 million people with "prison experience" represented about 2.7 percent of the adult population of 210 million as of Dec. 31, 2001, the report found. The study by the Justice Department (news - web sites)'s Bureau of Justice Statistics looks at people who served a sentence for a crime in state or federal prison, not those temporarily held in jail.
The study is the first to measure the prevalence of prison time among American adults. Last month, the bureau reported that a record 2.1 million people were in federal, state or local custody at the end of 2002.
Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current and former inmates rose by 3.8 million, the study found. Of those, 2.7 million were former inmates.
Experts say the growing numbers of ex-prisoners means more people in society have difficulty finding jobs because they have felony convictions. Many cannot vote and they are more likely to have family or emotional problems that exact a toll on state and local government budgets.
"We're talking about a large number of people — bigger than a lot of countries in Western Europe — who face the barriers that exist when you have been in the correctional system," said Jason Zeidenberg, director of policy and research at the Justice Policy Institute, which advocates alternatives to prison. "That's a really upsetting number."
The number of people sent to prison for the first time tripled from 1974 to 2001 as sentences got tougher, especially for drug offenses. There are more ex-prisoners as well, the result of longer life expectancies and a larger U.S. population.
Prison experiences vary greatly by gender and ethnic origin.
"At every age, men have higher chances of going to prison than women, and blacks and Hispanics have higher chances than whites," statistician Thomas P. Bonczar said in the report.
Almost 5 percent of men in 2001 had done prison time, compared with less than 1 percent of women.
Almost 17 percent of black men in 2001 had prison experience, compared with 7.7 percent of Hispanic men and 2.6 percent of white men. The percentage of black women with prison time was 1.7 percent, compared with less than 1 percent of Hispanic and white women.
No matter their ethnic origin, people between ages 35 and 44 in 2001 had the highest rates of lifetime incarceration — 6.5 percent for men, almost 1 percent for women.
About one-third of the former prisoners in 2001 still were under correctional system supervision, including 166,000 in local jails. The rest were either on parole or on probation.
The study projects that, by 2010, about 3.4 percent of the adult U.S. population will have had served time in prison. That translates to about 7.7 million people.
If 2001 incarceration rates remain the same, about 6.6 percent of people born that year can expect to serve a prison sentence during their lifetimes, based on life expectancy tables, the study said.
That compares with 5.2 percent of those born in 1991 and 1.9 percent of people born in 1974, according to the estimates.
About 11.3 percent of men and 1.8 percent of women born in 2001 will go to prison during their lifetimes. For black males, that translates into a one in three chance of doing time, compared with one in six for Hispanic males and one in 17 for white males, according to the projections.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
> > Report: 5.6M Have 'Prison Experience' > > [Hermit: Perhaps worth noting that Holland still maintains a ratio of > about 50 inmates per100,000 vs 1,000 per 100,000 for the USA - twenty > times the Dutch rates, or double that if you include people sentenced > to custodial periods of less than a year - in other words forty times > Dutch rates. This means that the US has outstripped even the Peoples > Republic of China in incarceration levels. Other huge differences > between the US and European countries, are the lack of social security > eligability for felons, their disenfranchisement, and most > importantly, the growing tendency in the US to completly strip them of > their possessions, which can leave families devastated and released > prisoners with no hope of creating any worthwhile business > opportunities to make up for the near impossibility of their finding > sufficiently well paid jobs to keep them out of jail (Refer also [ > Blunderov, "RE: virus: Re: None so blind...", 2003-08-18 ] > (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54! > ;action=display;threadid=29066)). Yet another significant factor is > the fact that prisons are the fastest growing industry in the United > States, creating massive pressure on the legislature and judiciary to > continue this soearing trend.] > A lot of that has to do, I'll bet, with the deplorable policy of the US of imprisoning casual soft drug users (which the Netherlands does NOT do), and the more deplorable policy of China of executing them (and a whole lot of other people, including political prisoners). > > Source: Associated Press > (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=2&u=/a > p/20030817/ap_on_re_us/prison_experience_1) Authors: Curt Anderson > Dated: 2003-08-17 Noticed By: Mermaid Refer Also: Bureau of Justice > Statistics (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs) > > WASHINGTON - About one in every 37 U.S. adults was either imprisoned > at the end of 2001 or had been incarcerated at one time, the > government reported Sunday. > > The 5.6 million people with "prison experience" represented about 2.7 > percent of the adult population of 210 million as of Dec. 31, 2001, > the report found. The study by the Justice Department (news > (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://search.news.yahoo.com > /search/news?p=%22Justice%20Department%22&c=&n=20&yn=c&c=news&cs=nw) - > web > (http://us.rd.yahoo.com/DailyNews/manual/*http://dir.yahoo.com/Governm > ent/U_S__Government/Executive_Branch/Departments_and_Agencies/Departme > nt_of_Justice__DOJ_/) sites)'s Bureau of Justice Statistics looks at > people who served a sentence for a crime in state or federal prison, > not those temporarily held in jail. > > The study is the first to measure the prevalence of prison time among > American adults. Last month, the bureau reported that a record 2.1 > million people were in federal, state or local custody at the end of > 2002. > > Between 1974 and 2001, the number of current and former inmates rose > by 3.8 million, the study found. Of those, 2.7 million were former > inmates. > > Experts say the growing numbers of ex-prisoners means more people in > society have difficulty finding jobs because they have felony > convictions. Many cannot vote and they are more likely to have family > or emotional problems that exact a toll on state and local government > budgets. > > "We're talking about a large number of people — bigger than a lot of > countries in Western Europe — who face the barriers that exist when > you have been in the correctional system," said Jason Zeidenberg, > director of policy and research at the Justice Policy Institute, which > advocates alternatives to prison. "That's a really upsetting number." > > The number of people sent to prison for the first time tripled from > 1974 to 2001 as sentences got tougher, especially for drug offenses. > There are more ex-prisoners as well, the result of longer life > expectancies and a larger U.S. population. > > Prison experiences vary greatly by gender and ethnic origin. > > "At every age, men have higher chances of going to prison than women, > and blacks and Hispanics have higher chances than whites," > statistician Thomas P. Bonczar said in the report. > > Almost 5 percent of men in 2001 had done prison time, compared with > less than 1 percent of women. > > Almost 17 percent of black men in 2001 had prison experience, compared > with 7.7 percent of Hispanic men and 2.6 percent of white men. The > percentage of black women with prison time was 1.7 percent, compared > with less than 1 percent of Hispanic and white women. > > No matter their ethnic origin, people between ages 35 and 44 in 2001 > had the highest rates of lifetime incarceration — 6.5 percent for men, > almost 1 percent for women. > > About one-third of the former prisoners in 2001 still were under > correctional system supervision, including 166,000 in local jails. The > rest were either on parole or on probation. > > The study projects that, by 2010, about 3.4 percent of the adult U.S. > population will have had served time in prison. That translates to > about 7.7 million people. > > If 2001 incarceration rates remain the same, about 6.6 percent of > people born that year can expect to serve a prison sentence during > their lifetimes, based on life expectancy tables, the study said. > > That compares with 5.2 percent of those born in 1991 and 1.9 percent > of people born in 1974, according to the estimates. > > About 11.3 percent of men and 1.8 percent of women born in 2001 will > go to prison during their lifetimes. For black males, that translates > into a one in three chance of doing time, compared with one in six for > Hispanic males and one in 17 for white males, according to the > projections. > > ---- > This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2003 board on Church of > Virus BBS. > <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;thread > id=28775> --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to > <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
Attorney General John Ashcroft is currently putting on a little road show to garner support for the bill, as well as for the USA PATRIOT Act, which had two of its more Draconian provisions targeted for defunding by the House of Representatives in late July.
(Though it does contain similar provisions, the VICTORY Act is not the same bill as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, popularly known as PATRIOT II, which was leaked in January.)
The draft obtained by Libertythink is dated June 27, and word in the Beltway is that the VICTORY Act is still being retooled over the August recess before it is introduced in the Senate. Although this may not be the final form of the act, Libertythink encourages its readers to study the bill and hit Ashcroft with hard questions when and if he comes to your town.
Measures in the 89-page draft include:
Creation of a new category of crime called "Narco-terrorism."
Radical expansion of asset forfeiture powers for the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.
Expansion of the definition of money-laundering to several kinds of transactions, including offshore banking as a means of tax evasion.
Creation of a ludicrous new "crime" of "reverse money-laundering."
Longer jail terms for a number of nonviolent drug and nondrug offenses.
Expanded opportunities for judge-shopping in wiretap cases.
Expansion of nonjudicial "administrative subpoenas" for "terrorism" investigations as broadly defined in the USA PATRIOT Act.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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