Dominating the news this week are the achievements of Barack Obama’s remarkable first eight days in office. If anyone had any doubts that this President is a leader, he has dispatched those doubts with a flurry of actions that recalls the New Deal’s famous Hundred Days.

In fact comparisons with the New Deal’s first week are all over the Internet and in the media, but in typical blog and media fashion few actually tell you what happened.  This is one case where print far surpasses the Internet and its  rigged search engines. You can find the best list of New Deal Hundred Days legislation and the dates for each on pages 20 and 21 of Arthur Schlesinger, jr.’s classic The Coming of the New Deal.  Schlesinger’s prologue on the Hundred Days is still the best short account of that achievement.

According to Schlesinger’s list, Obama is actually ahead of FDR.  Roosevelt did pass the Emergency Banking Act almost immediately after assuming office, but the next piece of significant New Deal legislation does not come until eleven days later–the Economy Act. The Civilian Conservation Corps comes eleven days after that. It took over a month to abolish the gold standard. It was in early May that the New Deal hit its stride, passing in a period of six days the Federal Emergency Relief Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.  That six days still ranks as the most productive and far-reaching legislative week in American history. Two of the New Deal’s crown jewels–the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Glass-Steagall Banking Act would not come until mid-June.

What is different about the New Deal and what Barack Obama faces is that today there is both an international as well as a domestic crisis. It’s as if FDR had to deal with World War II and the Depression at the same time. No President in history has faced the mess composed of domestic and international problems that George W. Bush left behind. It is as if Barack Obama walked through the door of the White House to find the previous occupant had trashed the place.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this remarkable first week is not merely that like FDR, this President hit the ground running, but that he was able to do it on two fronts. So let us analyze the highlights of this past week.

The International Front

The closing of Guantanamo has justly received the attention it deserves. It has already been analyzed from every conceivable angle but the obvious one: the impact on the prisoners themselves.

While Rush Limbaugh and company whine that closing Guantanamo may loose upon the world some of the perverts who had a role in 9/11, the real value of closing the prison lies with those other prisoners who had nothing to do with that heinous act but were caught in a wide net intended to catch larger fish.

Some of you may be familiar with the report on detainees published by Mark and Joshua Denbeaux and a team of assistants. Although several years old and sporting one author who was an attorney for two detainees, it still presents a fairly complete–and to this date largely undisputed picture of those prisoners. To those who have not read or forgotten its findings here are a few:

Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

A large majority – 60% — are detained merely because they are “associated with” a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations.

But the report’s most controversial finding was that only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.  In short, they were caught by vigilantes and bounty hunters (think of one of those old westerns and the sleazy characters who usually played these roles) who were paid by our government by the head for bringing in prisoners.

We forget that the fate of these prisoners is not merely an issue for their families and communities, but for the entire world. Symbolically they represent a superpower running wild and a democracy that had forgotten its own ideals and Constitution.

To hear that some of these people may finally be set free rippled through the world. When these prisoners finally stand before the camera lights–and believe me they will–they will serve as nothing else can to show that this new administration is serious about human rights and the rule of law.

The second international move less recognized than Guantanamo but perhaps equally significant was Obama’s decision to grant his first official interview to the Dubai-based al-Aribiya TV channel. For those not familiar with the network it has been termed Dubai’s attempt to create an Arab CNN and currently ranks as one of the largest English-speaking outlets that programs for an Arab audience. Its web site lists the Obama interview as its most-read article, which should give you an idea of its importance. You can read the entire transcript online.

Most tellingly the network titled the online article “Obama tells Al Arabiya peace talks should resume.” Here are some choice words from the transcript:

And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues –and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen.

Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.

I do think that it is impossible for us to think only in terms of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict and not think in terms of what’s happening with Syria or Iran or Lebanon or Afghanistan and Pakistan.

These things are interrelated.

And my job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives. My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy

Obama particularly rejected a term that came into favor with the Bush Administration and its allies–”Islamic Fascism.” The al-Arabiya interviewer was particularly concerned about the broad brush used to tar so-called terrorists. The interview is fairly short, so I would recommend everyone with concern about America’s relations with the Muslim world and about the foreign policy direction of this administration to read it in full.

The interview is especially significant because in its last days the Bush Administration squandered what little good will it had left by refusing to become involved in the Israeli-Hamas War. Perhaps they had no choice for how could they condemn Israel when we invaded Iraq?

The Domestic Crisis

The stimulus bill has drawn almost all the headlines, but since it has not yet been signed, I will comment on its details in a future essay. For now it is enough to say that again the media and most blogs have missed the point. Much as Franklin Roosevelt had the Emergency Banking Bill figuratively in his back pocket when he rode down Pennsylvania Avenue on his way to be sworn in as President, so too did Barack Obama have his stimulus package ready.

To me the crowning achievement of the stimulus bill will not be what it does, but that it exists at all. If you know anything about writing legislation–especially bills as far-reaching as the stimulus package–you have to be in awe that this administration should have such a complex bill ready to bring to the Hill in such a short time. Even more remarkable is the fact they obviously did their homework.

I had been preparing to write about how the neo-Republican Blue Dogs could serve as major blockers to any Obama legislation. Yet the stimulus package passed the House with scarcely a whimper from the Blue Dogs. That they were conspicuously absent from the press reports on the stimulus bill is in itself a major achievement for the new administration.

In addition to the stimulus bill we need to recognize Obama’s reaching out to GOP leaders and his willingness to compromise. I remember many years ago someone told me one key to leadership is to always leave something for the opposition to cut so they can claim victory.  Obama played that game to perfection with the stimulus bill in the House, showing a willingness to change details but not compromise on the big issues.  Inviting GOP leaders over to the White House for drinks was pure FDR, who used to play bartender for his opposition.

The second major domestic move made by Obama was his chiding of Wall Street. Not since JFK referred to several executives as a “bunch of bastards” and “sons of bitches,” has a sitting President so openly spanked business.

For two years now I have written about how the playing field tilted under the Bush-Cheney agenda. Obama’s denunciation of Wall Street executive bonuses signals that this President is concerned about tilting the playing field back.

Obama Week in Review

From a strategy perspective both the domestic and international fronts show some uncanny parallels. Each featured a major policy initiative and a major public statement.  Coming on the heels of a President who could not even issue a policy statement without mangling the grammar, this represents a major improvement.

More important, this first week signals the future direction of this administration.  There are five features worth noting:

First, Barack Obama intends to lead. To those who saw him as weak or even wimpy, he showed he is willing to stand up for what he believes.

Second, he does his homework. All the initiatives mentioned above had to have been in the pipeline before Obama assumed office and all of them demanded hard work and careful research.

Third, he recognizes the power of public relations like no President since Ronald Reagan.

Fourth, he reaches out to all.

Fifth, he believes in a level playing field both at home and around the world.

What also has not been acknowledged is that Barack Obama accomplished his remarkable first week without having to play his trump card–public support.  His network waits in reserve for the right moment. This is point number six–the man knows how to ration his resources.

As he himself has recognized it will be tough to maintain the pace and the good will of this first week, but if this week is any indication, the Obama Presidency could be a historic one.

I doubt anyone will ever again sing “My Country Tis of Thee” the way Aretha Franklin sang it at the Obama Inauguration, because not even she will sing it that way again. That’s because in gospel you sing what you feel. You testify. And if anyone testified on that singular day it was Aretha Franklin along with the man many term the father of the Civil Rights Movement, the Reverend Joseph Lowery.

As most people, know Franklin’s roots are in gospel, in part because she is the daughter of one of the most revered figures in the African American Church, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, who also was a close friend of another African American minister, Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.  Her first album, recorded when she was 14, was a gospel album which was produced for the same label whose recordings of her father’s sermons had made him a national figure.

One of my favorite Franklin albums is an all-gospel production that was recorded at her father’s church many years ago.  At one point in the recording, C. L. Franklin remarks, “she never left the church.” Like Ray Charles, Franklin brought the rhythms and sounds of gospel to popular music, earning her the title the “Queen of Soul.”

Those skills were showcased at the Obama inauguration where, like Charles, she took a patriotic song and endowed it with the soul of gospel. You knew this was going to be a performance for the ages when she gave the words “sweet” and “liberty” a particular cadence that reverberated with meaning.

Think for a minute of the task she faced as an African American celebrating the inauguration of America’s first African American President. Her “testimony” had to both acknowledge the struggles of the past and yet also the triumph of the present. By drawing out those two words the way she did, she made you pause and acknowledge those meanings.

This took on even more meaning when she reached the words “land where my fathers died.” Shortly after that she did an extraordinary thing I have not seen anyone acknowledge–she changed the words to the song, so that it directly referenced Dr. King’s immortal words. The original lyrics read “every mountain side” which Franklin changed to “mountain top” the words King used. In addition, to highlight the change she repeats the word “every” several times so it sinks in.

Franklin then went on to sing the song’s lesser-known final verse. By the time she reached the last two stanzas, I had lost it. The second-to-last stanza begins with the words “protect us by thy might.” Franklin repeats “protect” over and over, so it becomes a kind of prayer and, given circumstances which provoked an extraordinary amount of security, also a wish for both the new President and the country.

Listen to her sing that one line again and again, for she endows it with all the hopes Americans had that day and have for the incoming administration.  When she ends the song Franklin and her backup choir repeat again the desire to let freedom ring, in a way that she knew she was testifying. Had she sung it that way in her father’s church there is little doubt in my mind that the audience would have been spontaneously shouting their own reactions.

Unfortunately, Franklin’s singing became lost in the uproar over her hat.  It was Ellen de Generes who put her foot in her mouth by wearing a reproduction of Franklin’s hat, turning it into a joke.  Actually had de Generes known what she was poking fun at, she might have thought differently, for the wearing of special hats–especially unique ones with a bit of flash–is an old custom for African American church women.

Michael Cunningham and Craig Marberry celebrate this tradition in their book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. Deirdre Guion calls it:

hattitude…there’s a little more strut in your carriage when you wear a nice hat. There’s something special about you.

The man who sold Franklin the hat, Luke Son, said the clientele for Mr. Song Millinery is 90% African American church-going women.  So far from being a joke, Franklin’s hat was the perfect accessory to her gospel-tinged version of “My Country Tis of Thee” and brought a historic piece of African American culture to the Inauguration.

The other person who brought a historic piece was the Reverend Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Dr. King. It would take a space longer than this essay to detail Lowery’s achievements, so suffice it to say if anyone in America deserved to deliver the Benediction at Barack Obama’s Inauguration it was Lowery.

Lowery’s beard–or more properly it should be termed a goatee–reminded me of W.E.B. DuBois, whose book The Souls of Black Folk used verses from what he termed the “sorrow songs” to introduce each chapter and in a chapter titled “Faith of Our Fathers” wrote of the African American church.  He wrote:

The black and massive form of the preacher swayed and quivered as the words crowded to his lips and flew at us in singular eloquence. (p. 190)

The eighty-seven year old Lowery brought his own singular eloquence, proving a better poet than the official poet who preceded him.  The rhyme and rhythm of his first phrases brought a hush to the audience.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.

Now that is poetry whose rhythm directly echoes “My Country Tis of Thee.” Think of the phrase “land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride.” Lowery knew exactly what he was doing.  To bring together weary years and silent tears, to hear those words from a man who knew exactly what he was talking about made he and Franklin the perfect bookends for the Inaugural.  Ever the activist Lowery did not shy away from telling it like it is.

He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate.

For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

Lord knows what George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must have been thinking when they heard those words.

Having painted a picture of contemporary America, Lowery went on to preach of the hope that Obama’s Presidency has brought to the nation.

And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

Near the end, Lowery takes a cue from Franklin evoking the same word she used.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Finally Lowery concludes with paragraphs that cannot help but complete the tie to his old friend Dr. King, even evoking the spirit and rhythm of that long ago day in Washington when King gazed toward where Lowery was speaking even as four score years later Lowery looked out to the place King had spoken from.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

In the midst of Black History Month, a day after Martin Luther King Day, both Franklin and Lowery reminded us of the pivotal role the African American church has played in American history.  In a way,  the African American church elected Barack Obama.

When I say the African American church I mean the African American church, for it is not so much about ministers as about congregations, not so much about Biblical fundamentalism and thou-shalt-nots as about principles. The Lowerys and Kings have justifiably earned their place in American history, but we forget the fact that as transformational leaders, they would have accomplished little without their congregations.

Much has been written about the Obama campaign, but no one has thought to link it back to the traditions of the African American church. Civil Rights veterans like Lowery would recognize the Obama campaign’s tactics, as would anyone who has been a member of an African American congregation.

So when I say the African American Church elected Barack Obama I mean that in three ways. First, church leaders and congregations backed the candidate as they have backed no candidate in history. The huge African American turnout proved pivotal in this election. Without it Barack Obama would not have been standing behind Joseph Lowery waiting to take the oath of office.

The second way the church played a role in the campaign was to endow it with a sense of principle. The Civil Rights movement grew from the African American church’s insistence on principle. The Obama campaign came to symbolize a renewal of principles for many Americans who voted for him.

The third way the African American church elected Barack Obama lay in lending its tactics to the campaign. The image of the Civil Rights Movement many Southerners tried hard to reinforce was that it was a top-down movement, that if leaders like King and Lowery could be stopped then the Movement would whither away. But in the records of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission–a secret police force formed after the Brown decision–lies another story, one of thousands of people who put their lives on the line for freedom.

One moment in the Movement could have served as a blueprint for the Obama campaign.  Deprived of the right to vote for African American candidates by the State of Mississippi, the Freedom Democratic Party organized a shadow vote they called the Freedom Ballot. All across the state African Americans voted on Freedom ballots to show the segregationists that they would not be denied the right to express the franchise.

This grassroots effort, conducted with a major boost from African American churches, knit together people across the state. Nothing like it had ever been seen in Mississippi or in America. To minimize the violent segregationists that would be attracted like moths to a flame, organizers mailed the Freedom Ballot over a four-day period. The courage behind the effort remains difficult to imagine, for everyone involved in printing, distributing, filling out and counting the ballots literally put their lives on the line, testifying to a communal strength and resolve determined to rid the state of oppression. When the counting ended, over 50,000 African Americans had sent in ballots, a collective shout for freedom that reverberated across Mississippi to the very halls of Congress.

Nothing like the Obama campaign’s grassroots effort had been seen until this November. Even on election night commentators could not quite believe it, but like those who participated in the Freedom Ballot, the campaign organizers knew the strength of their grassroots work.

As we now move forward into the Obama Administration, we would be wise not to forget the African American church, for just as it lay behind the election of Barack Obama, its people, principles and tactics will be there for him to call on when the going gets tough. Aretha Franklin all but said so as she sang, Joseph Lowery all but said so as he preached.

This is going to be a administration the likes of which America has never seen before.

Blogging live on Inauguration Day, less than two hours before Barack Obama takes the oath of office.

The Backdrop: When the actor in Ronald Reagan moved the location of the presidential swearing-in from the front of the Capitol to the rear little could he have foreseen the consequences. Ever playing to the camera, Reagan chose to use the rear, which as millions of tourists know provides one of the most famous views in America as it looks down the mall towards the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial and now the World War II Memorial. Across the river lies Arlington National Cemetery. There seems little question Reagan personally stage-managed this setting which he would invoke in his Inaugural Address.

With his actor’s sense of symbolism  symbolism Reagan thought that if the ceremony took in that view his words would resonate with the nation’s past. The obelisk dedicated to the man known as the Father of Our Country would punctuate the event like a giant exclamation point while the stern visage of the Great Emancipator gazed on the scene. Across the river the dead at Arlington would lie like a Greek chorus silently overseeing it all. The Great Communicator worked the setting into his first Inaugural address, using it not at the beginning of his speech, as an ordinary speaker might have been tempted to do, but at the end:

This is the first time in history that this ceremony has been held, as you have been told, on this West Front of the Capitol. Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city’s special beauty and history. At the end of this open mall are those shrines to the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Directly in front of me, the monument to a monumental man: George Washington, Father of our country. A man of humility who came to greatness reluctantly. He led America out of revolutionary victory into infant nationhood. Off to one side, the stately memorial to Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration of Independence flames with his eloquence. And then beyond the Reflecting Pool the dignified columns of the Lincoln Memorial.

Whoever would understand in his heart the meaning of America will find it in the life of Abraham Lincoln. Beyond those monuments to heroism is the Potomac River, and on the far shore the sloping hills of Arlington National Cemetery with its row on row of simple white markers bearing crosses or Stars of David. They add up to only a tiny fraction of the price that has been paid for our freedom. Each one of those markers is a monument to the kinds of hero I spoke of earlier. Their lives ended in places called Belleau Wood, The Argonne, Omaha Beach, Salerno and halfway around the world on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Pork Chop Hill, the Chosin Reservoir, and in a hundred rice paddies and jungles of a place called Vietnam.

Today, a quarter century later, Reagan’s decision endows what is already a singular moment in our history with even more resonance. When Reagan moved the ceremony–and the decision was his–no one could have possibly predicted that a little more than two decades later an African American would stand where Reagan stood, his eloquence punctuated by a monument to a man who used slaves to labor at Mt. Vernon and presided over a Constitutional Convention that declared African Americans three-fifths of a person, not because the drafters believed they were persons but to better ascertain their value as property and to pad the electoral votes of the very slave-owners who brutalized them. Nor could Reagan have foreseen that as he spoke Barack Obama’s view would take in the monument to the man who set those slaves free but at the same time believed the best solution to what would become known as the “race problem” was for African Americans to return to Africa.

But what resonates even more is that the Lincoln Memorial provided the backdrop for Dr. Martin Luther King, jr.’s dream. In outlining that dream King did not even dare imagine that as he looked down the Reflecting Pool he would be looking at a place where a black man would stand to deliver an Inaugural Address.

Finally there is Arlington, a cemetery created to hold the dead from the nation’s Civil War, a spot purposely chosen because it was the grounds of the mansion of Confederate commander Robert E. Lee, whose residence now lies surrounded by tombstones and looks towards the eternal flame of John F. Kennedy.

It is said that great leaders make the impossible seem inevitable. Perhaps nothing about this singular moment is more remarkable than what now appears as its inevitability. A year ago the people of Iowa and New Hampshire had just made their Presidential choices and the idea of an African American President seemed anything but inevitable. As the issue of race surfaced again and again in both subtle and not-so-subtle contexts it seemed to grow larger, not smaller, as the nomination of Barack Obama became more inevitable. Even on election night the network talking heads spoke of a Bradley Effect even as the map behind them continued to turn blue.

Today, as millions of Americans sit glued to their television sets, it is to those graves in Arlington that my thoughts drift.  To anyone who has walked that hill and looked out over Washington, the experience cannot help but grab you by the throat, especially as you watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which takes place in an eerie silence punctuated only by the measured steps of the Marines as they execute their carefully choreographed walk.

Those dead in Arlington fought to free African Americans from the bonds of slavery. Later when African Americans fought for their own freedom, they were segregated in death as they had been in life until Harry Truman issued his order for “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed service” in 1948.  Cemetery historian Tom Sherlock comments on the special significance Arlington holds or people of color.

These soldiers knew what it was like to fight for their freedom perhaps more than any U.S. soldier before or since they were literally fighting for their existence.

The Speech

It must be strange to know what someone is going to say before they make a great speech, as so many in the press do because they have advance copies.  It takes all the spontaneity, all the emotion from the moment. They even know what they are going to write.

My eyes stayed dry only until Aretha Franklin began to sing and then I lost it. She turned “My Country Tis of Thee” into a gospel song whose roots lay back in the church of her father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin and the churches before his and those whose rhythms and harmonies lay behind what she sang. If you have ever heard Aretha’s gospel album or one of C.L.’s  recorded sermons, you know what I mean.  This was truly America transformed scarcely half a century after they would not let Marian Anderson sing on the Mall and Eleanor Roosevelt resigned form the Daughters of the American Revolution because of it.

Itzhak Perlman then follows Biden’s oath of office with the old Shaker hymn “A Gift to be Simple,” whose best-known incarnation is in Aaron Copeland’s “Appalachian Spring.” The Shakers received their name from their vigorous dancing which is described in the words to the song:

When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
‘Till by turning, turning we come round right.

That the Chief Justice cannot get the words to the Oath of Office right somehow seems both symbolic and has a certain element of premonition in it, for this President will undoubtedly tangle with Roberts and the Gang of Four. The outcome of that struggle will determine much about the next four years. He also seemed to unnecessarily draw out Obama’s middle name, the way right wingers did on the Internet.

That the Chief Justice should stumble over the word “faithfully” seems significant, for this is a Court whose defintion of faithfully has been the source of great consternation.

An analysis of Obama’s words will have to wait until they all sink in, but their tone still rings. There was something almost clarion-like in Obama’s voice today that I have never heard in previous speeches. His voice seemed to ring out with a sense of history and clarity that this nation has not heard for many a year.  The word I would use for it is conviction.  There was steel in the sound of that voice that perhaps only those lying in Arlington could understand.

The substance of that steel lay in values forged by history.  Perhaps no President since John F. Kennedy has done such a skillful job of evoking American history and placing it in the context of the present.  As with Kennedy that evocation of the past lent a strength and confidence to his words.

Random Observations

On CNN they kept showing the face of John Lewis. As Obama walked out Lewis whispered something to him. We may never know what Lewis said, but we can imagine that the old lion must have commented on a moment for which he had laid his life on the line. In whatever words Lewis spoke lay that moment when he lay bleeding near a bridge in Selma.

There could not have been a more appropriate person to deliver the final prayer than Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King. His poetry surpassed that of the designated poet, but it was his ending that said it all. Lowery said “Amen,” and paused. Then he said “Amen” again and paused. At this point you thought he was probably finished because he paused even longer. Then with a tone that was both triumphant and defiant he said one final “Amen.”

Much is already being made of Obama’s walking the Bush’s to the Presidential helicopter. Throughout the ceremony Bush did not evidence the grumpiness of Herbert Hoover, but rather a smiling relief in being rid of burdens he proved unable to handle.  Nothing more need be said about Dick Cheney leaving the Capitol in a wheel chair.

The sea of faces on the Mall may have been the most inspirational sight of the day so far. When the cameras closed in on their faces, some in tears, you had to believe these people were here not merely because the moment was historic but because they believed in the promise of Barack Obama.

Final Report

I have spoken several times with my son and daughter in law who live in DC and were on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument during the Inauguration.  Being locals they took all sorts of routes to get there but still ended up walking quite a ways.  Their comment was there were more troops in DC than any time since the Civil War. They apparently put Humvees at major intersections and had Army troops doing crowd control. The problem was the troops did not know DC.

They left their place at six in the morning and got to the Mall a couple of hours before the swearing in. My son watched the Mall preparations yesterday. He said the Mall was lined with Jumbtrons so people could watch. The Army troops told them they had to choose between watching the parade or the Inauguration, but that there would be no way they could do both.  They ended up on the Mall in front of the Washington Monument.

The biggest problem was when people went to leave all at once. The Army troops directed them one way, which my son and daughter said was the wrong way. They bailed out and were able to catch a bus home but others got shuttled from Metro stop to Metro stop.

The real story, though, is that despite the huge crowds everyone was quite civil, the police and Army tried to be helpful. Had it not been so festive, they say, it could have become ugly. I have to believe there is a message in that also.

There may be no more perplexing nation than our own, but then maybe everyone thinks that about their home country. America can inspire and infuriate. It can move you to tears and fits of anger and then, when you least expect it, it can produce a moment that makes shivers run up and down your spine.

Even the sight of our flag can induce contrary emotions. Some people have wanted to burn it or fly it upside down. Others have turned it into a tacky trinket, a public relations figleaf or an advertising gimmick whose disrespect may be as despicable as spitting on the flag. Perhaps it is fitting our national anthem should be about the flag and that that very flag should be enshrined in a special case at the Museum of American History as if it were the holiest of icons.

Perhaps nothing inspires these contradictory emotions more than American history itself. As schoolchildren we are taught about our past as if it were a long march of names and dates always moving forward with a Biblical sense of purpose. But even before we graduate from high school we know there is more to it than that causing some of us to react like that storied kid who asked of a worshiped athlete who suddenly became enveloped in scandal, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

In recent years we cannot even agree on what should be in those history schoolbooks so a somewhat dutiful formula has set in that dictates various groups each receive their allotted pages. The formula is under constant readjustment as events cause yet another calibration which brings a formerly forgotten figure back from obscurity to be placed on the pedestal from which it fell. Sometimes the pieces are too shattered, too scattered for even horses and men to put them together again.

In yet another American irony many of those shattered pieces involve people who never even made it on to the pedestal. We will never really know even a tiny fragment about slavery from the perspective of the enslaved. Literally millions of stolen sacred Native American objects lie in obscure museum drawers severed from their context and traditions, treated by their keepers as curiosities or artifacts while those for whom they have the most meaning regard them as living not corpses to be dissected. For yet others who may have carefully written their inner thoughts during moments stolen from oppressive drudgery that weighed them down like the uncomfortable garments they were forced to wear, their past was often discarded as if it were little more than another piece of garbage which had the potential to make people feel uncomfortable.

To be a first generation American in such a nation only heightens all the contradictions precisely because your family came not because this country represented a city on a hill, but both more and less than that. My grandparents didn’t even stay and my father always retained an accent my friends could detect but I could not.

To be the child of an immigrant–especially a political one–is to find yourself personally subjected to the best and worst of this country in ways only others in your position can truly understand.  Your past is neither here nor there, but converges like two torrents into rapids that threaten to upset your equilibrium.  But those torrents also pulse with creative energy that you find difficult to hold back even when you wish it would go away. In that creative energy is also a unique perspective for we know we would not be alive today were it not for America.

That is why for several decades now I have experienced considerable frustration at people, some of them friends, who have allowed their frustrations to occasionally slide into cynicism that becomes expressed as contempt for the American people. Yet to lose faith in the American people is to lose faith in our nation, for at the heart of this singular democratic experiment lies an extraordinary gamble where even all the machinations of the nation’s founders could not cut the odds.

They feared what James Madison in one of the most extraordinary political documents ever written–Federalist #10–called the issue of faction. Yet in the end despite all the safeguards they put in place, safeguards any fifth-grader can recite, it is the people on which they wagered their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.

Perhaps that is why America senses how important tomorrow has become.  First of all, it is testimony to the talents of one man, Barack Obama, who made that bet, but did so in a truly singular fashion against some pretty long odds. When I think of Obama and the moment he will place his hand on the Bible to become our first African American President, I can’t help but think of buses.

It was a woman on a bus who symbolized the beginning of the path that pointed to this moment. She precipitated a bus boycott that brought forth a man whose holiday we celebrate today to the greatness that lay within him waiting to be awakened. It was buses that carried a delegation of Mississippi Freedom Democrats to Atlantic City in 1964 to remind America of what it stood for even as some sitting uncomfortably in their seats were not sure they would make it home alive.

It was from a bus that one of them, Fannie Lou Hamer, was pulled, placed in jail and beaten to near death. It was buses that carried the idealists of Freedom Summer and those participants of the march that ended in Lincoln’s granite shadow where the man whose crusade had started with that bus boycott inspired this nation to its very soul.

Now again people are taking to the buses, only this time not in anger or protest but in celebration. I saw a picture of a woman climbing the steps to one of those buses and in her face was written the larger script of someone who had climbed on to one of those buses almost four score and seven years ago.

Buses are converging on Washington in a way they never have in America before for such an event. This is different than Coxey’s Army or the Bonus March or any of dozens of other marches, for it is an expression of faith and hope. America has again confounded us. People like that woman perhaps understand perhaps best of all. The look on her face said that this is a moment to be there, to bear witness, to for once just be.

When those buses pull away from Washington in a few days carrying their loads of sated travelers they will again be enveloped in the fog that is America. No one can say where the visions they bear with them will travel, but all of us in America who are not on those buses should this time pledge to make sure they reach their destinations safely.

NOTE: WHERE HAVE I BEEN

As some of you noticed this blog was shut down for “abuse” shortly after I published the previous essay calling George Bush bizarre.  It looks like I will be looking for a new home. More on that in the future.

In addition I suffered yet another setback in my disability that has made it difficult to write. It also has forced some serious considerations about future blogging on me. I am considering cutting back on the number of essays and perhaps making this a weekly. We shall see.

There may be no more perplexing nation than our own, but then maybe everyone thinks that about their home country. America can inspire and infuriate. It can move you to tears and fits of anger and then, when you least expect it, it can produce a moment that makes shivers run up and down your spine.

Even the sight of our flag can induce contrary emotions. Some people have wanted to burn it or fly it upside down. Others have turned it into a tacky trinket, a public relations figleaf or an advertising gimmick whose disrespect may be as despicable as spitting on the flag. Perhaps it is fitting our national anthem should be about the flag and that that very flag should be enshrined in a special case at the Museum of American History as if it were the holiest of icons.

Perhaps nothing inspires these contradictory emotions more than American history itself. As schoolchildren we are taught about our past as if it were a long march of names and dates always moving forward with a Biblical sense of purpose. But even before we graduate from high school we know there is more to it than that causing some of us to react like that storied kid who asked of a worshiped athlete who suddenly became enveloped in scandal, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

In recent years we cannot even agree on what should be in those history schoolbooks so a somewhat dutiful formula has set in that dictates various groups each receive their allotted pages. The formula is under constant readjustment as events cause yet another calibration which brings a formerly forgotten figure back from obscurity to be placed on the pedestal from which it fell. Sometimes the pieces are too shattered, too scattered for even horses and men to put them together again.

In yet another American irony many of those shattered pieces involve people who never even made it on to the pedestal. We will never really know even a tiny fragment about slavery from the perspective of the enslaved. Literally millions of stolen sacred Native American objects lie in obscure museum drawers severed from their context and traditions, treated by their keepers as curiosities or artifacts while those for whom they have the most meaning regard them as living not corpses to be dissected. For yet others who may have carefully written their inner thoughts during moments stolen from oppressive drudgery that weighed them down like the uncomfortable garments they were forced to wear, their past was often discarded as if it were little more than another piece of garbage which had the potential to make people feel uncomfortable.

To be a first generation American in such a nation only heightens all the contradictions precisely because your family came not because this country represented a city on a hill, but both more and less than that. My grandparents didn’t even stay and my father always retained an accent my friends could detect but I could not.

To be the child of an immigrant–especially a political one–is to find yourself personally subjected to the best and worst of this country in ways only others in your position can truly understand. Your past is neither here nor there, but converges like two torrents into rapids that threaten to upset your equilibrium. But those torrents also pulse with creative energy that you find difficult to hold back even when you wish it would go away. In that creative energy is also a unique perspective for we know we would not be alive today were it not for America.

That is why for several decades now I have experienced considerable frustration at people, some of them friends, who have allowed their frustrations to occasionally slide into cynicism that becomes expressed as contempt for the American people. Yet to lose faith in the American people is to lose faith in our nation, for at the heart of this singular democratic experiment lies an extraordinary gamble where even all the machinations of the nation’s founders could not cut the odds.

They feared what James Madison in one of the most extraordinary political documents ever written–Federalist #10–called the issue of faction. Yet in the end despite all the safeguards they put in place, safeguards any fifth-grader can recite, it is the people on which they wagered their lives, fortunes and sacred honor.

Perhaps that is why America senses how important tomorrow has become. First of all, it is testimony to the talents of one man, Barack Obama, who made that bet, but did so in a truly singular fashion against some pretty long odds. When I think of Obama and the moment he will place his hand on the Bible to become our first African American President, I can’t help but think of buses.

It was a woman on a bus who symbolized the beginning of the path that pointed to this moment. She precipitated a bus boycott that brought forth a man whose holiday we celebrate today to the greatness that lay within him waiting to be awakened. It was buses that carried a delegation of Mississippi Freedom Democrats to Atlantic City in 1964 to remind America of what it stood for even as some sitting uncomfortably in their seats were not sure they would make it home alive.

It was from a bus that one of them, Fannie Lou Hamer, was pulled, placed in jail and beaten to near death. It was buses that carried the idealists of Freedom Summer and those participants of the march that ended in Lincoln’s granite shadow where the man whose crusade had started with that bus boycott inspired this nation to its very soul.

Now again people are taking to the buses, only this time not in anger or protest but in celebration. I saw a picture of a woman climbing the steps to one of those buses and in her face was written the larger script of someone who had climbed on to one of those buses almost four score and seven years ago.

Buses are converging on Washington in a way they never have in America before for such an event. This is different than Coxey’s Army or the Bonus March or any of dozens of other marches, for it is an expression of faith and hope. America has again confounded us. People like that woman perhaps understand perhaps best of all. The look on her face said that this is a moment to be there, to bear witness, to for once just be.

When those buses pull away from Washington in a few days carrying their loads of sated travelers they will again be enveloped in the fog that is America. No one can say where the visions they bear with them will travel, but all of us in America who are not on those buses should this time pledge to make sure they reach their destinations safely.

NOTE: WHERE HAVE I BEEN

As some of you noticed this blog was shut down for “abuse” shortly after I published the previous essay calling George Bush bizarre. It looks like I will be looking for a new home. More on that in the future.

In addition I suffered yet another setback in my disability that has made it difficult to write. It also has forced some serious considerations about future blogging on me. I am considering cutting back on the number of essays and perhaps making this a weekly. We shall see.

Predictably, the final press conference of the man who is bucking to be ranked among America’s worse Presidents was an interesting affair. If we think back to Ronald Reagan’s famous, “Are you better off…” quotation, George Bush ranks right at the top of Presidents who made messes rather than cleaned them up.

It can be argued even the much-maligned Herbert Hoover in part was victimized by circumstances beyond his control. His sins were in how he played the hand he was dealt. Bush, on the other hand, has created so many crises you don’t know where to start as you run through the list. There is the economy and our record deficit brought on by carrying Lyndon Johnson’s “guns and butter” to an absurd extreme. Bush even went Johnson one better by starting his war and then persisting in giving money back to the tycoons who have been the heart of the GOP for over a century.

I was reading an account of Franklin Roosevelt’s tour of World War I battlefields yesterday and it struck me that what Roosevelt observed serves as a metaphor for what George Bush has done to this country.  The land FDR walked over had been completely transformed as if a giant plow has been pulled through it and churned up everything in its path, leaving the earth looking like a perverse landfill in which human remains, trees, vehicles, weaponry were all mixed together.

What stood out for me in reading the transcript of the Bush press conference were not the pathetic attempts to justify actions that bankrupted this nation both domestically and internationally, both fiscally and morally, but a comment he made in answer to a question about the incoming administration [transcript here].

And the other thing is, when I get out of here, I’m getting off the stage. I believe there ought to be, you know, one person in the klieg lights at a time. I’ve had my time in the klieg lights.

This has to be one of the most bizarre views of the American Presidency ever advanced by a sitting President. Bush is likening serving in the White House with Hollywood or Broadway. The President is an actor playing a role, not a leader. If Ronald Reagan had made this remark if would have been a bit understandable, but coming from Bush it is far more bizarre and therefor far more interesting.

The Presidency as Makeover

Hollywood, of course, is all about artifice and nothing symbolizes artifice as much as America’s penchant for makeovers. How George W. Bush became president is certainly THE greatest make over story of our times and you must understand, as I think most Americans do, that the make over is the key.

Make overs have been the stock-in-trade of television reality shows, women’s and men’s magazines and innumerable local newspaper contests.  The antecedents lie in yellowing old comic strip ads of 98 pound weaklings having sand kicked in their face and faded black-and-white video tapes of you-can-look-like-a-movie-star hair permanent commercials.

The contemporary make over artist is a modern necromancer who mutters some psychobabble mixed with just enough common sense and pseudo science that a wave of the magic product exacts a miraculous transformation worthy of the most venerated medieval saint.

What makes the script sizzle is the object of the make over.  This cannot just be some ordinary citizen any more than a saint bothers himself or herself with healing some victim of the common cold.   The object must be truly abject, someone deformed by humpbacked irregularities and sporting the equivalent of odiferous, leprosy-like sores that turn away everyone’s gaze.

The object must undergo an ordeal, a trial by fire to portray the make over as truly miraculous.  You don’t lose 50 pounds just by being a couch potato and taking a little yellow pill.  Those pitches are reserved for the back of matchbook covers or cheap magazines buried at the bottom of the rack by the supermarket checkout counter.  The audience knows you can’t get something for nothing, although enough of them figure that for a few bucks, what the heck, it’s like a lottery ticket and just maybe it will work.

But for the Real Deal . . . This requires some work.   This is where “Dubya” comes in.  That this self-admitted drunk who partied his way through Yale and sat out the Vietnam War doing something that is still a bit vague but definitely not heroic should be made over into a President, well now, THERE was a make over!

That we should want our presidents to be miraculous make overs is a new and alarmingly perverse twist on an old theme.  We have always wanted our presidents, even when they have been rich and well-connected, to have a Horatio Alger theme in their bios.  Think Abe, TR, FDR, Old Hickory.  While their campaign propaganda delighted in exaggerating the story, it did not diminish its power.  Lincoln did largely school himself, split rails, and ride a flatboat.  FDR did almost die of polio.  TR did ride up San Juan Hill.

Today we admire not the real thing but the make over.  Perhaps it is because we don’t believe anything any more after two decades of muckraking JFK-like exposures of this and that celebrity.   If everything is the creation of some advertising copywriter then we would at least pick the best copy.   Ronald Reagan may have had a genuine Horatio Alger story of his own, but even his bio is a curious amalgam of make over and truth linked forever by his years as a GE pitch man.  After him the make over became all.

As we watched Dubya, there was something contrived, stiff, almost mechanical about him, so that when he turned around we half expect to find a large windup key or radio control antenna sticking out of his neatly-pressed suit jacket.   In so many moments he seemed as engineered as one of those cyborgs in a Star Trek script, only Data seems the lesser android.   In a washroom somewhere on the interstate I once saw some scribble just above a bunch of names, phone numbers, and sexual wants that read, “Bush is really an android.”

That Bush should see himself as acting out a role explains many of the incidents in his Presidency, the most germane being his infamous landing on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit as if he had just flown a sortie himself and proclaiming “mission accomplished.”

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

If you have forgotten, that was in 2003. Today the mission has not only not been accomplished but totally screwed up.

The press appeared to have understood this part of the Bush Presidency. One fascinating question at the press conference begins:

Mr. President, on New Orleans, you basically talked about — a moment ago about the photo opportunity.

The comment the questioner had zeroed in on was yet another strange statement Bush made in answer to a question about what mistakes he made. Here is Bush’s answer:

I’ve thought long and hard about Katrina; you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge.

So the only regret this President has about what may be the worst domestic debacle ever is that he did not give the right performance under the Klieg lights. There is no thought here about the lives lost, the surreal scenes of people waiting to be rescued, the contaminated trailers in what amounted to detention centers, only the missed photo opportunity.

Turning it Upside Down

Yet for Bush, the Klieg lights phrase suggests something more. Klieg lights also distort and in Bush’s eyes those lights are the media. I once termed this the era of the double vision because media distortion has so screwed up our sense of what is real and what is not that we have long ago ceased to be able to distinguish between the two, so we both tacitly accept what we see and at the same time cynically reject it.

Bush’s invocation of a media metaphor to describe the Presidency has that double edged quality to it. On the one hand he seems to be saying that once the lights are off the public will see his term in office for the triumph it really was, not the disaster it seems. Yet on the other hand, by acknowledging that he played to the media Bush seems to also admit the artificiality of his own role.

Think of Oliver Stone, whose movie about Bush emerges even as it subject leaves the White House. Stone has directed films about Nixon, Kennedy, 9/11, Vietnam which we know are movies–that is they aren’t true. Yet Stone deconstructs and reconstructs history to build a new reality which he insists is true, even if the facts behind it are bent or flat-out false.  What is that line they used to read at the beginning of the old Dragnet television series:

Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Believing is All

The Bush line about Klieg lights also hits another aspect of his Presidency that has puzzled people and that is the apparent lack of boundary between truth and fantasy that has characterized this administration.

We still don’t really know if this administration really believed in the reasons it advanced for going to war with Iraq. The more evidence that piles up, however, the more doubts we have. At his final press conference Bush even alluded to this.

You know, not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment.
I don’t know if you want to call those mistakes or not, but they were — things didn’t go according to plan, let’s put it that way.

You could say the same thing about tax cuts that were supposed to stimulate the economy, not cause a recession/depression or “bailouts” for Wall Street that were supposed to resolve this crisis, but appear now to have only allowed Wall Street to continue to its unrepentant ways.

The Bush people behaved as though their script was reality and when reality deviated from the script it was reality’s fault– “things didn’t go according to plan.” And so like all good script writers they revised the script but not the version of reality behind it.

So we didn’t find WMDs, but the Iraq War was still necessary. So the tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, the crisis was the fault of those stupid people who signed on to subprime mortgages.  One of Bush’s more mangled explanations describes this mindset:

And, anyway, I think historians will look back and they’ll be able to have a better look at mistakes, after some time has passed. I — one of Jake’s questions — there is no such thing as short-term history. I don’t think you can possibly get the full breadth of an administration until time has passed.

You know, where does a president’s — did a president’s decisions have the impact that he thought they would — or he thought they would, over time?

This is not merely more tortured Bush grammar; it is tortured Bush reasoning, reasoning that continues to insist his reality is the right one. This is apparent in another bizarre Bush explanation during the press conference:

I tell people that, you know, some days happy, some days not so happy; every day has been joyous.

And people, you know, they say, “I just don’t believe that to be the case.” Well, it is the case.

Even in the darkest moments of Iraq, you know, there was — and every day, when I was reading the reports about soldiers losing their lives, no question there was a lot of emotion, but also there was times where we could be lighthearted and support each other.

In that first sentence you can see him slipping in and out of script before the Klieg lights. He begins by admitting that reality, as all of us know, is made up of good days and bad days, then he pauses and says, “Every day has been joyous.”

It can’t be both, you say. Were this some patient lying on a couch in a psychiatrist’s office and you would wonder about his sanity. But this is a President for whom the script says reality has to be joyous.

This is followed by a paragraph that could have come straight from Dr. Strangelove or Charlie Chaplin cavorting with a globe in The Great Dictator. Not even Oliver Stone could top the scene Bush lays our of the White House staff being “lighthearted” in the middle of a war.

One pictures them giggling and cracking jokes as they read the latest figures on Iraq War suicides or sent a National Guard unit on its third deployment.

President vs. Presidency

In the end, the final press conference revealed George Bush as a man who profoundly misunderstood the Presidency. His Klieg lights image speaks of not merely of a Hollywood-like vision of life in the White House, but what can only be described as a boyish idea of life in the Oval Office.  This is a man who saw the office as playing the role of President but not as a Presidency.

There is a marked difference between the two. In one you are an actor; in the other you are a shaper of events. In one you follow a script; in the other you write it. In one you play to the lights; in the other you play to destiny.

That George W. Bush should have so misunderstood the role of the office is especially disconcerting given that he is only the second son of a President in our history. But George W. Bush is no John Quincy Adams. In fact the entire Bush dynasty seems a perversion of the Adams family. The former focused on intellect, the latter on money. The former dedicated their lives to service; the latter dedicated their lives to power and prestige.

One has trouble envisioning what role George W. Bush will play after he leaves office.  He does not have the makings of an elder statesman along the lines of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, who it can be argued have contributed as much or more as ex-Presidents than they did in office. He will not retire gracefully like Ronald Reagan or Dwight Eisenhower.  My guess is that he will end up being paid to play the ex-President, hired by governments and corporations who want to lend whatever they are up to some of the prestige of the White House.

One thing I do know, it will be a tough landing when the Klieg lights turn off.  One can imagine Bush rubbing his eyes and squinting as he asks, “Where am I?” Meanwhile the country will wake up after eight years under Bush and realize that without the Klieg lights those years rank among the darkest in our history.

As we grapple with the new unemployment data, what they don’t tell us is about how this crisis is rippling through America, leaving devastation in its wake.

In researching my next book I have again been reading some of the accounts of the Great Depression. The symbol that keeps coming back to me is of the Dust Storms that swept through the plains during some of the hottest summers on record (check the highest temperature ever recorded for your state and it is quite likely it will be in the 1930s, especially if you live in the Midwest). With the mercury climbing into the 100s day after day–before air conditioning, before rural homes even had electric fans–people hauled mattresses outside at night just to stay cool.

Then they would awaken to an eerie, dark sky as the dust storm swept down on them like an avenging angel. Fine particles crept through the tiniest cracks and the towels and sheets people stuffed in doors and windows.  Venturing outside required tying something over your mouth, but still the dust slithered into your body and every fold of your clothes. Children violently choked to death from what Guthrie called the “dust pneumony,” their coughs a kind of economic and social flu epidemic.

On the farms the dust piled like blizzard drifts, covering machinery, outbuildings, and the crops people had hoped would pull them through the year. In “Dust Bowl Blues,” Guthrie sings of “dust so black that I couldn’t see a thing,” “wind so high that it blowed my fences down,” and “buried my tractor six feet underground.”

As writers about the Depression have recognized, although those dust storms only infected part of the country, they became metaphors for what hit the rest of America, where ill winds also blew with abandon and the horizon became so dark people wondered if they would ever see the stars and sun again.

Fragments of doubt, like those fine particles of dust, swept through the land insinuating themselves into people’s lives just as the storms had done to the farmers, making their way through windows and doors, then working their way into people’s minds. As households failed along with the farms the country became a vast, aimless and dangerous army. Some rode the rails, making the tops of boxcars look like passenger cars with the roofs blown off, while others took to the roads.

New Fragments of Doubt

Today, new fragments of doubt have crept from the dark corners of our minds out into the open where they threaten to boil into a symbolic repeat of those days in the 1930s when the clouds of doubt blotted out the sun.  I have termed this the “Pull Tab Depression” because there seems to be little explanation for why one person is laid off and not another.

It reminds me of that scene in John Ford’s “Grapes of Wrath” where the tenant farmer Muley squats in the dirt after a bulldozer has flattened his house. Figuratively, the man driving the bulldozer wears goggles so you cannot see his eyes. As Muley ponders it all he lets the dust slip through his hands.

Muley’s first impulse was to shoot the man, but then man says even if he did another one would come along to do the same thing. When Muley asks who he should shoot, the man has no answer.

To someone who has just lost a job or worries about losing one, explanations by people like me about such things as the repeal of Glass-Steagall matter little.  The New York Times recently published a symposium on the crisis, “Fear Factor in the Workplace,” which found that many workers are confused and scared by the seeming irrationality of the layoffs.

Mitchell Lee Marks, who teaches at the College of Business at San Francisco State University, captures the felling well:

What really disturbs surviving employees about downsizings is that they cannot control or rationalize the events. If I have a co-worker who frequently arrives late and does low quality work, I can rationalize her layoff by saying to myself, “She didn’t carry her weight and deserved to be let go.” If, instead, my co-worker seems to work as hard and as well as I do and then, through no fault of her own, happens to be the victim of a “reduction in force,” I cannot rationalize that. More important, I fear that I cannot control my situation: in the first scenario, I have a sense of control over my fate by continuing to do high-quality work. In the second scenario, working hard or working well doesn’t seem to help me retain my job.

The Vanishing Safety Net–Health Care

Behind the fears lies the new reality of our times–the old safety nets don’t work.  I was talking to a friend last week about the crisis, she said that one difference between now and the Great Depression is that we at least have some safety nets in place like unemployment insurance.  Plus there are programs such as Social Security and disability that did not exist in the 1930s.

But what is becoming clear about this crisis is that for today’s workers we need to revise our thinking about safety nets. The first devastating impact of unemployment is loss of health care. True there are COBRA plans and layoff settlements that permit some workers to retain their benefits for a limited period of time, but once these run out, people are on their own.

In my area of the country hospitals are laying off nurses–let me repeat that–laying off nurses–because people are postponing elective procedures and even postponing necessary procedures because they cannot afford them. When I went to the doctor’s office yesterday it was the quietest I had seen it. The parking lot looked almost deserted. The good news is there was no wait. The bad news is that the reason for the quiet is that people are not going to the clinic.

There is currently nothing in place to protect laid off workers who have lost their health care. They can go to emergency rooms for care, but that is about it.  After some period of time, in some states, they may be eligible for special health care plans for low income people, but many states are cutting back on these. Congress still has yet to renew the children’s health insurance bill, so the most vulnerable among us are without a safety net.

The Vanishing Safety Net–Food and Shelter

The mortgage foreclosure crisis is not merely about people who have found themselves holding questionable mortgages, it is also about people who have lost their jobs or seen a sudden drop in income so they can no longer afford to live in their homes.

Where does a suburban family go when they lose their home? If they are lucky they might find somewhere to rent. If they are even luckier that somewhere will not gauge them and the place will not be full of cockroaches. Some may also be lucky enough to live with relatives, or have friends or family to pick up those missed mortgage payments.

One city that has admirably attempted to deal with homelessness is Portland, Oregon. For several years it has reported a drop in the number of people sleeping on the streets, but a report released just before Christmas showed:

According to the city auditor’s annual government performance report, released last week, homelessness in Portland is up 33 percent over four years ago, when the plan to end homelessness was initiated.

That same Portland report also noted a rise in the number of people using what in the Depression people termed “soup kitchens”:

Patrick Nolen, community organizer for Sisters of the Road Cafe says that five years ago, Sisters was serving about 250 meals a day, and now they are serving about 425 a day, almost all to homeless people.

Portland is known as a relatively progressive city which also has not seen some of the more devastating impacts of this depression, but other parts of the country are finding dramatic increases in homelessness.

Just about the same time that Portland was releasing its data, the United States Conference of Mayors issued a report on hunger and homelessness in 25 major cities.

We forget that in the past year the cost of cereals increased 12.3 percent and the cost of fruits and vegetables increased 10.3 percent.  So while each of us struggles to deal with our grocery bills, imagine what these increases are doing to food shelves and others who feed the homeless or those unable to make ends meet.

All the cities in the mayors’ study reported an increase in the number of people seeking food assistance, but most telling was that they noted an increase in middle class and suburban families requesting assistance. As usual a graph tells the story:

Note the gaps between the red line and the blue one for most cities. Behind those gaps are real people struggling to survive.

What I have seen in few comparisons of the Great Depression and the current one is that during the 1930s there were soup kitchens maintained by a variety of organizations, but today many of those functions are performed by government and when government funds are cut back it has a impact on the lives of people served by programs dealing with hunger and homelessness.

The mayors’ study reported that 18 of 20 cities reported having to cut back the level of assistance provided at food pantries and emergency kitchens, with eighty percent reporting a reduction in the quantity of food persons can receive at each food pantry visit; sixty percent reporting having to turn people away due to lack of resources, and forty percent reporting setting limits on the number of times persons could visit food pantries each month.

As a systems person it comes as no surprise to me that hunger and homeless are related. However what did surprise me were the data from the mayors’ study showing that people themselves saw the connection. When asked what three things would be most helpful in addressing the hunger problem, 77 percent of cities cited a need for more affordable housing, 55 percent requested an increase in food stamp payments, and 45 percent cited a need for more utility assistance.

As for homelessness, again a graph tells the story:

According to the study the only two cities who reported a decline attributed it to policy initiatives along with “methodological changes,” a nice way of saying they changed their way of counting the data so it did not look so bad. Not unexpectedly the leading cause of homelessness is “lack of affordable housing.”

The report’s outlook for this year should give us all pause and certainly supply food for thought in the Obama Administration:

Cities continue to develop aggressive strategies to prevent homelessness and to move persons quickly from shelter into permanent housing, but city budgets for housing and services could be adversely affected by the economic slowdown.

The Need for New Systemic Safety Nets

This is the first time since the 1930s that America has faced such a deep and broad-ranged economic crisis. A majority of existing safety nets are predicated on outmoded ideas.   Health care is the most conspicuous example of this. The existing safety nets either cover short-term unemployment our those already living in poverty. The gap between the two is a huge hole in the safety net.

The same goes for hunger and homelessness, although in a slightly different way.  Food shelves and homeless shelters largely provide for temporary relief for individuals and families, but we have not had to cope with such a large number of people losing their homes since the 1930s. We have no policy in place to deal with a housing crisis of this magnitude.

As the mayors’ study implied, all these factors are interrelated. People without adequate health care become more vulnerable to illness or injury, which forces them to use what meager funds they have left to deal with the crisis.  People will cut back on food or even not pay their mortgages if it means making sure their children receive adequate health care.

For half a century we have seen these problems and the programs designed to address them as separate, but this crisis is teaching us that they are not and that efforts to deal with unemployment need to be systemic, incorporating all three areas.

What America Is Learning

This crisis has become a lesson for America, because white, middle class Americans are learning and experiencing what the poor, the elderly, the disabled have known for years. They, too, fell through those same holes in the safety net, only few people noticed or cared. Like much else in America, now that poverty has moved from rural and inner city America to the suburbs, suddenly we are noticing the holes in the safety net.

As the Times symposium noted, the impact of this depression also does not merely involve health care, food and shelter; it involves people’s sense of self-worth. In a larger sense it also has a major impact on how they view the world. If we see the world as a “Pull Tab Depression” in which chance rules everything, it means rational actions count for nothing.

That provides a fertile breeding ground for irrational actions or outbursts of anger and resentment. People may become fatalistic or decide to take matters into their own hands.

The Need

At the very end of his life Franklin Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that was never passed by Congress and since has become a footnote to history. Very few people have even heard of it. Yet it is precisely what we need in this current crisis.

Here is what FDR said in his last State of the Union message:

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however-as our industrial economy expanded-these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all-regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

People have been asking what Barack Obama should say in his Inaugural Address. FDR’s words would not be a bad place to start.

I am going to raise a question no one seems to want to ask: did Israel and Hamas pick this time to engage in their current war because they knew the United States was between administrations and would make no major moves to resolve things?

As I read through accounts of the crisis the United States is notably absent. For example, Time world news reports:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been touring the region, and plans to take Hamas’ cease-fire demands to the U.N. Security Council this week.

The article goes on to surmise that Turkey could play a major role in settling the conflict.

Just after New Year’s there were several reports that France was seeking to push for a cease fire. French President President Nicolas Sarkozy is the first major leader to actually journey to the Middle East since the conflict started. As I write this a report has come over the wire that Sarkozy has claimed that Israel and Hamas have accepted a truce plan for Gaza.

The Associated Press states Sarkozy issued the following statement on his return form the Middle East:

[He} strongly welcomes the acceptance by Israel and the Palestinian Authority of the French-Egyptian plan presented yesterday by (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak.

Skeptics note that missing from the statement is any mention of Hamas or acceptance of the plan by them.

Is the Timing of this Conflict Deliberate?

You cannot help but ask whether both sides chose to escalate this conflict at a moment of strategic weakness on the part of the United States. Israel and Hamas know that this country is in a time of transition where it is doubtful the United States would take any bold actions.

Some Middle East experts believe this is the case. The New York Times reports:

Many Middle East experts say Israel timed its move against Hamas, which began with airstrikes on Dec. 27, 24 days before Mr. Bush leaves office, with the expectation of such backing in Washington. Israeli officials could not be certain that President-elect Barack Obama, despite past statements of sympathy for Israel’s right of self-defense, would match the Bush administration’s unconditional endorsement.

One should not put the onus only on Israel. We forget this began on December 19 when Hamas declared an end to an Egyptian-mediated truce with Israel and began stepping up its rocket attacks.

Where is the US?

The point of all the reports about attempts to mediate the crisis is that the United States seems largely to be sitting on the sidelines while others struggle to resolve the crisis. Yesterday’s Security Council meeting is prime evidence of this. None other than Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported:

During a high-level meeting of the UN Security Council on January 6, foreign ministers from several European countries and Arab states called for an immediate Israeli cease-fire.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, presiding over the council meeting, also urged an end to Hamas’s rocket attacks against southern Israel and the smuggling of weapons from Egypt into Gaza.

Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, expressed the deepening frustration over the inability of the Security Council to stop the bloodshed in Gaza, or at least to censure it.

What this country apparently has been doing is to do nothing. The AP reports that the United States has been the major roadblock to the issuing of a Security Council resolution calling for a cease fire.

Several other council members, speaking on condition of anonymity because negotiations were closed, also said the U.S. was responsible for the council’s failure to issue a statement.

Asked what kind of resolution would be acceptable to the United States, U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said:

The important point to focus on here is establishing the understanding of what type of cease-fire we’re talking about and to ensure that it’s lasting, and to ensure that we don’t return to a situation that led to the current situation.

To me this is a sign of administrative paralysis. That a deputy ambassador should be issuing a public statement about this serious crisis speaks words about the Bush Administration’s lack of positive action. Where is the voice our UN ambassador? Where is the voice of the State Department and Condoleeza Rice? Most of all, where is the voice of George Bush?

Bush’s first public statement about the crisis came on Monday when he said:

I understand Israel’s desire to protect itself, and that the situation now taking place in Gaza was caused by Hamas.

This sounds like one of those waffling answers candidates give during Presidential debates, not a constructive contribution to ending the crisis. With less than two weeks left in office, the current administration appears to have decided to punt on this one.

As for Barack Obama he has stated he is not President until after the inauguration and so has no business making foreign policy while George Bush still sits in the Oval Office.  Obama told reporters:

When it comes to foreign affairs, it is particularly important to adhere to the principle of one president at a time, because there are delicate negotiations taking place right now, and we can’t have two voices coming out of the United States when you have so much at stake.

Are Two Voices Better Than No Voices?

Frankly, two voices would be better than no voices. Right now the conflict continues with Israeli and Palestinian civilians caught in the middle.  One Gaza resident told MSNBC:

There is no water, no electricity, no medicine. It’s hard to survive. Gaza is destroyed.

Included in that destruction have been a Gaza mosque, a UN-run school, an unoccupied Israeli kindergarten, homes and buildings of both Palestinians and Israelis, and a death toll of over 500, half of whom the United Nations estimates are civilians.

Maxwell Gaylard, United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator said that the conflict was:

By any measure is a humanitarian crisis.

Yet this humanitarian crisis has the current administration and the incoming administration apparently hamstrung by the issue of Presidential transition.

The Issue of Presidential Transitions

This crisis has brought to a head a long-standing issue and little-discussed problem in our current electoral system. The so-called transition period threatens to become a time of inaction, a time when neither incoming or outgoing administration wishes to make waves.

The reality is in practical terms neither has any real power. As the Bush countdown meter continues to register the number of seconds left in the President’s term he has become not merely a lame duck but a crippled one with little ability to influence even his own Party let alone the opposition.

Meanwhile the Obama team is scrambling to fill vacancies so it can hit the ground running after the inauguration. It still has many important posts to fill including that of FCC Commissioner. The Bush people have left such a mess that I can imagine the Obama team staring at the equivalent of a devastated house asking, “Where do we start?”

Obviously two major issues will need to occupy their immediate attention: the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should Osama bin Laden seek to welcome the new President with some nasty surprise you can add that to the list.  So although it sounds cruel, the reality is that the Obama team has a lot on its plate.

It’s not just the conflict in Gaza that is on hold, but issues such as the economic crisis. The Bush Administration appears to have taken the same perspective Herbert Hoover did in 1932, when he refused to seriously work with the incoming Roosevelt Administration on the Great Depression.  That famous photograph of a grumpy-looking Herbert Hoover riding in a car with Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day symbolizes the predicament. A similar photo exists of Woodrow Wilson riding with a glum William Howard Taft.

In December, the Guardian headlined, “Bush sneaks through host of laws to undermine Obama,” noting it would take months to undo the damage which ranges from coal waste dumping to power stations in National Parks. In fact this outgoing administration will probably set a record for s–called “midnight regulations.”

So rather than collaborate, the Bush people appear to be trashing the house before they leave it. This, of course, means the Obama plate gets heaped even higher, which I’m sure is exactly what the Bush Administration has in mind. With issues such as Iraq and the economy demanding immediate responses, who is going to have time to focus on coal waste dumping?

Is the Bush Administration Deliberately Undermining Obama?

This administration appears to be playing the role of sour losers. Instead of graciously admitting they lost, George Bush and his team (this has all the earmarks of one Dick Cheney) are rushing through regulations designed to hamstring Barack Obama as well as reward the corporations that have supported Bush.

The Guardian runs down a list of some of these:

There is a long list of other new regulations that have gone onto the books. One lengthens the number of hours that truck drivers can drive without rest. Another surrenders government control of rerouting the rail transport of hazardous materials around densely populated areas and gives it to the rail companies.

One more chips away at the protection of endangered species. Gun control is also weakened by allowing loaded and concealed guns to be carried in national parks. Abortion rights are hit by allowing healthcare workers to cite religious or moral grounds for opting out of carrying out certain medical procedures.

There are so many changes that the media cannot even keep track of them. It would not surprise me that some of the time and energy of the incoming Obama team is focused on just keeping track of these changes and then pondering how to deal with them.

What it means is that this new President is going to have a heck of a time just undoing the damage these “midnight regulations” have done.  Time spent on this will draw away from time that could be spent more constructively, especially in the middle of a crisis. In my last essay I wrote about the theme of blowing things up. Well, this administration’s last minute regulations are a great example of that. Instead of walking into a smooth transition, Barack Obama will be walking into a minefield.

There Has to Be a Better Way

Now we can add the Israel-Hamas conflict to the list. All you can do is to shake your head and wonder whether there has to be a better way to manage Presidential transitions. In this world with its global interconnections and hyperdrive speed, to leave this country leaderless from November to January is far too long. Throw into that the stubborn vindictiveness that has characterized the Bush Administration and you have a recipe for disaster.

What if instead of the Israel-Hamas conflict we had the equivalent of the 9/11 attack or the economy took a sudden nose dive? We currently have nothing in place that would allow for both the incoming and outgoing administrations to work out a common solution.

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University who studies presidential transitions, told the Times Mr. Obama’s predicament exemplified the treacherous weeks between election and inauguration, and the way inspiring visions inevitably give way before unexpected events.

She added:

On a campaign, you control what you talk about and when you talk about it. When you begin governing, you have to respond to what happens in the world.

Kumar currently heads the White House Transition Project, whose web site is a treasure trove of transition information.  In one paper, Kumar notes:

An effective transition buys a new presidential administration the chance to take advantage of the opportunities that exist at the beginning of an administration and reduce the hazards that inevitably lie in wait.

Kumar and her colleagues have done an admirable job of documenting past transitions and drafting recommendations to make future ones more effective, but they still have few answers for situations that arise suddenly, such as the current conflict in the Middle East, and for administrations such as the current one that are determined to force an agenda through at the last minute even if it hamstrings the incoming President. Kumar all but admits this:

Even though there is a demonstrated difference that some things work and others do not, it is still difficult for administrations to do the kind of preelection and preinauguration work that pays off in the early months.

Solutions?

First, it is time we closed the loophole in the law that allows for “midnight regulations.” As it has with so much else, the Bush Administration has taken what previous administrations enacted to absurd levels. Maybe, in a perverse way, some good will come of that, forcing a change in the law so these shenanigans do not occur in the future.

Second, there needs to be a serious consideration of enlarging the functions of the so-called transition team from the incoming and outgoing administrations. Currently these teams try to ease such roadblocks as security clearances for new officials, but perhaps the transition needs to be extended to policy matters.

While it is wrong for the transition team to micro-manage policy during the transition period, there should be some consideration given to serious crises. We cannot have a repeat of the stand-off between Hoover and FDR nor can we have a repeat of the current Israeli-Hamas conflict.  Most of all, we need to be proactive, anticipating future crises.

If, in fact, both Hamas and Israel timed this crisis because of the transition period, then that should be both a warning and a stimulus to preventative action.  When faced with such crises the team needs to put partisan and ideological differences aside and work for the good of the nation.

I leave it to the experts to work out the details, but the Hamas-Israeli conflict may have done us a favor if we are smart enough to take advantage of it.  Dr. Kumar and her associates need to devote their energies to some concrete proposals that will prevent the possibility of a future train wreck.

The future of this republic depends on it. We have been made painfully aware of a major fault in our democratic process. Now is the time to fix it.

Photo: The Dark Knight

Over the holidays as I worked my way through bowl games with a few hoops contests thrown in for variety, I found myself inundated with commercials for upcoming movies. Maybe it’s just that football games attract a particular demographic, but after awhile the ads and the movies all seemed the same.

They all seemed to be about explosions. Each trailer would feature several scenes of assorted objects being blown up; each sequence designed to see which could acoustically challenge my subwoofer and make the house shake as if my neighbors were setting off propane canisters instead of fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Now I have to admit that special effects and making my walls shake does have a certain appeal.  My guess is that explosion movies have helped to sell home theater and vice versa. Yet after awhile the explosions all seem the same because there are only so many ways to blow things up.

For several years I have harbored the suspicion that somewhere in Hollywood there exists a secret vault full of digitally-enhanced mayhem that you can rent for use in your next blockbuster. Find yourself another mutant or outsider hero, rent a few hours of explosions and you have a movie.

What is it in the current atmosphere that is generating these films and what does it mean for the present and the future? Hortense Powdermaker once called Hollywood the “dream factory,” but after viewing trailer after trailer I began to wonder if it was the “nightmare factory.”  Why have we gone from dreams to nightmares?

Let us begin by eliminating the conspiracy theory. Hollywood would not make these movies if audiences did not come to see them. The problem is that sometimes it seems Hollywood thinks the only people who go to movies are adolescent males or those with the mind of an adolescent.

This circular argument has been going on for at least four decades. Hollywood claims one of its main audiences is adolescent males so it makes lots of movies for them–many of which they go see–so Hollywood continues to make more of them. It has taken Hollywood awhile to realize that a sizable female audience existed so now we have a “gender gap” in the movies and on TV with products being aimed mainly at one sex or another.

One has only to visit a video store or multiplex to view that wedge. On one screen flickers a genre men derisively refer to as chick flicks–movies aimed mainly at a female audience. A standard plot consists of a woman with a caring husband, a saintly figure with no nasty habits–why he even does the dishes and cooks–but the woman must leave him for a fling with someone more like Clint Eastwood or Robert Redford. Another traces the tale of a single woman or group of women who must pass through a series of trials, each symbolizing a particularly thorny modern dilemma.

On the other side of the multiplex wall, a room full of guys turns into a platoon of Incredible Hulks, bursting out of their polo shirts as they take in one car crash and gun barrage after another. The theme of these macho flicks is as telling as those in movies made for their partners. They usually feature one steroid-enhanced hero matched against six thousand evil doers whom he proceeds to conquer with an assortment of karate moves and fearful weaponry that would be the envy of Soldier of Fortune readers.

Curiously, underlying both chick flicks and macho mayhem is a common theme of beleaguered individuals facing overwhelming odds. In these movies, society seems out to get you, making it hard for you to become “all you can be”-a sentiment used by advertisements for the military and personal makeovers.

Something more is at work, though, something that says a great deal about our times. First, is the plot line that runs through most of these movies which essentially views what people in the 1960s termed “the establishment” as the enemy. Both government and business are corrupt and incompetent. They care little for average people, instead delighting in ripping them off.

Note some visual scenes from explosion movies that reinforce this. The main one is the ubiquitous crowd shot where hundreds or thousands of anonymous people try to flee some menace. All you can do is run, these scenes shout. Then there is the scene where some average citizen runs into a callous bureaucrat or corporate stooge who refuses to help them.  In so many of these films the average citizen is wimpy, faceless, powerless–in short a victim.

The villain is usually some monomaniacal tycoon out to take over the world or some rogue government official who has gone off the deep end. What they all have in common is a desire for power. But in the world of explosion flicks power is largely measured as if the world were one big cage fight where anything goes. (As an aside the rise of dog fighting paralleling the rise of cage fighting and explosion movies is fascinating.)

The big picture behind this–pun intended–is that the world has become dominated by giants, big corporations and big government that are beyond the abilities of ordinary citizens to control. These huge beasts feast on us like tyrannosaurs used to feast on whatever they wanted.

It doesn’t take a lot to see that this subliminally reflects the reality we all experience every day. When was the last time you suffered some indignity on the part of one of these megacorporations, one you had no power to do anything about? Maybe you called in about a bill or to get your furnace fixed and found yourself caught in one of those infamous “press six for the next idiot” telephone answering machines or trying to talk to someone in Borneo who insisted the blue screen of death was not Bill Gates’ fault but your own incompetence.

Which is where the explosions come in. Who when faced with one of these indignities does not count to ten or even twenty to keep from blowing up? I remember standing in a long line at Logan Airport in Boston waiting for a rental car from a company that clearly was not trying harder. As usual someone in management had screwed up and the employees managing the desk were left with an impossible situation. A gray business-suited woman in the middle of the line was becoming visibly agitated until she finally snapped, screaming at the people at the desk. The police finally took her away.

The explosions both symbolize this scene and provide an outlet for it. They are the inner Hulk and Hellboys that we sometimes keep barely suppressed. Blowing things up is a sign of people who don’t know what else to do–that whatever is blown up is beyond caring about or fixing. How many of you have had the fantasy of destroying a lemon of a car, refrigerator, or computer? We can’t fix things, the explosion movies seem to be saying, so blow them up.

There is a certain apocalyptic revenge about all these explosions. Megapower can only be brought down by magatons. Things are falling apart and like some building with a rotting foundation the only way to fix it is to blow it up.

It is one thing to want to wreck mayhem on your malfunctioning computer, but another to make that a political or policy solution. That this outgoing administration at times seemed to have watched too many of these movies suggests how deeply ingrained this mindset has become.  Saddam Hussein is a problem so blow him up. Terrorism is a problem so arrest people and commit the human equivalent of blowing them up by torturing them.

The problem is that what may work for Rambo is exactly a model for how to conduct foreign policy. As we have found out in Iraq, blowing things up only makes people angry at you. It also leaves quite a mess to clean up.

There is also a more troubling subtext to these explosions–a souped-up, Dark Knight vigilantism that will exact its revenge in dramatic fashion. The worrisome undertone of many explosion movies is that a lot of people seem to be fed up with things and ready to embrace someone who will blow things up.

Barack Obama is not someone inclined to blow things up, so one of the interesting subtexts of his administration will be the by-play between the impulses behind the explosion genre and Obama’s pledges to bring us together. If you want to keep track of the impact of this new administration keep track of the number of explosion movies and how they fare at the box office. A year from now will we again be watching explosions during commercial breaks for the bowl games?

There is one appointment Barack Obama has yet to make that has all but escaped the attention of the media and virtually all the blogs. Yet it ranks as one of the more important positions in his administration, for that person will determine the shape of our democracy for the next four years. The position is head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Democracy or Mediacracy?

If the future of the American economy is hanging in the balance, the future of what the Supreme Court in the Red Lion decision termed “the marketplace of ideas”: also is at stake. The next FCC commissioner and new Democratic commission majority will decide the fate of information in our democratic society.

Free and open access to information is as critical to the democratic process as the air we breathe is to our lives. If the information we receive is polluted by bias, by lack of diversity, by a squelching of the values of fairness, truth and objectivity, then our democracy will succumb to that foul atmosphere producing the equivalent of those monsters and deformed creatures who populate the contaminated atmospheres of science fiction movies and novels.

Red Lion

The Red Lion decision still ranks as one of the most important in Supreme Court history. As we enter into this new millennium it is instructive to recall that decision as we ponder the future of the American media. There is something about great cases that periodically calls forth from the bench some memorable language and Red Lion is no exception.

The case began when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a Communist. The author sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor.  In its decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to

Enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speech and press protected by the First Amendment.

It also noted:

When a personal attack has been made on a figure involved in a public issue {the Doctrine requires that} the individual attacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond.

But the most memorable and important part of the decision came with the phrase “the marketplace of ideas.”

It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the Government itself or a private licensee.

It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, esthetic, moral, and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.

This past summer in a little-noticed move, a group of six organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court that asked that it retain Red Lion. Part of that brief quoted the decision:

[T]he people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by radio and their collective right to have the medium function consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

The New Playing Field

What the Academy and others worried about is that there has been a growing movement to essentially toss out all federal regulation of the media in the light of the growth of the Internet.  As the Academy pointed out in a footnote in the brief, that argument holds that the increasing use of the Net and the growth of alternative outlets such as blogs, YouTube, and podcasting have so diversified the media that there no longer is a need for Red Lion or any government oversight.

Turning Red Lion upside down, these advocates argue that the market has become so diverse that that in and of itself is enough to insure the Court’s “marketplace of ideas.” Unfortunately, there are some misguided souls who are part of the netroots who support that position because they are afraid that were the FCC to become more involved in policing the Internet it would impinge on what some term “net neutrality.”

You will hear a great deal about Red Lion, “net neutrality” and the role of the FCC in the Internet over the coming years. In short, just as the incoming administration will redefine the economic marketplace in light of the current recession, it also will redefine the media marketplace in light of the growth of the Internet. That will lay the foundation for the American media for the foreseeable future.

At the center of that redefinition lie several key issues that will need to be resolved by the FCC.

Media Ownership

The first is media ownership. There has been a great written about the growing concentration of the American media, some of it quite scary. As usual, a graph tells the story.

Graph Courtesy of Media Reform Information Center

Ben Bagdikian, who deserves a lion’s share of the credit for publicizing this issue (pun intended) pointed out in 2004:

Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS) — now control most of the media industry in the U.S.

Current FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has commented on the changes this concentration has wrought in the American media marketplace:

The largest company owned less than 75 stations before deregulation. Today one company, Clear Channel, owns more than 1,200 stations…The number of radio station owners has decreased by an incredible 34 percent since 1996. The number of minority owners has dropped by a shocking, and nationally embarrassing, 14 percent…In our hearings around the country, Commissioner Adelstein and I have talked to many capable young musicians and creative artists who are simply unable to secure air time in the new consolidated radio environment. Real news radio is dying outside the largest cities, and viewpoint diversity has given way to a constant drumbeat of one-sided talk shows. [The Source for this is no longer accessible on the Net]

What has been especially disturbing have been moves on the part of the Republican FCC under George Bush to relax the rules on media ownership so that a single company could control multiple media outlets in a city.  In 2003 the FCC proposed liberalizing the rules included increasing the 35% limit for TV ownership to 45%, meaning a single company could control almost half of all broadcasting stations and, more important, two companies could control 90%. It also raised the caps on how many local stations could be controlled by a single company and widened the ability of companies to engage in cross-media ownership within a single market. Fortunately the FCC was thwarted by both Congress and the Courts, but the measure is being kept alive by the media conglomerates who stand to benefit from it.

A corollary to this issue concerns the diversity of media ownership.  Reclaim the Media observes:

According to a study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group Free Press, people of color own just three percent of all local TV stations and eight percent of all local radio stations, even though they make up 35 percent of the U.S. population. In another study, we find that women comprise 51 percent of the entire U.S. population, but only own approximately five percent of all full power broadcast stations.

The most depressing aspect of these figures is that ownership by people of color has declined as the media have become more concentrated. A study by FreePress.net found:

From October 2006 to October 2007 the number of minority-owned full power commercial TV stations decreased by 8.5 percent, from 47 to 43 stations, or from 3.45 percent to 3.15 percent of all stations.

From October 2006 to October 2007 the number of African American-owned full power commercial TV stations decreased by nearly 60 percent, from 19 to 8, or from 1.4 percent to 0.6 percent of all stations.

In a sense this decline in media ownership by people of color under the Bush Administration is yet another example of the racism that again rose its ugly head in this country over the past eight years. All Americans should hope that Barack Obama will reverse this trend–which cannot get much worse.

The new FCC Commissioner will have to decide whether to allow this media concentration to continue or to move towards diversifying the market. The question is will we be Rupurt Murdoch’s America or the nation envisioned by the founders?

Media Fairness

Red Lion came about because of what was then known as the Fairness Doctrine. Adopted as an FCC rule in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine contained two key provisions. As if to argue that the Internet is not the diverse environment many hold it to be, I was unable after an hour and a half of searching to find the primary source. That is a travesty! Instead, I quote one of the best online pieces on the doctrine by Steve Rendall:

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

The doctrine was repealed by an FCC staffed with Reagan appointees. The result has been a media landscape inundated with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter.

Recently there has been talk about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine in some form. Rendell states the case about as well as anyone:

What has not changed since 1987 is that over-the-air broadcasting remains the most powerful force affecting public opinion, especially on local issues; as public trustees, broadcasters ought to be insuring that they inform the public, not inflame them. That’s why we need a Fairness Doctrine. It’s not a universal solution. It’s not a substitute for reform or for diversity of ownership. It’s simply a mechanism to address the most extreme kinds of broadcast abuse.

A month ago in an interview on Faux News New York Senator Charles Schumer stated:

I think we should all be fair and balanced, don’t you? The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another. That’s not consistent.

This past June a spokesman for Barack Obama took a slightly different view:

Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters. He considers this debate to be a distraction from the conversation we should be having about opening up the airwaves and modern communications to as many diverse viewpoints as possible. That is why Sen. Obama supports media-ownership caps, network neutrality, public broadcasting, as well as increasing minority ownership of broadcasting and print outlets.

This seems to indicate an Obama FCC Chair nominee will not touch the fairness issue, but it is clear that the media have gotten out of control. What Obama’s spokesperson and others against bringing back the doctrine fail to acknowledge is that we live in a changed media environment in which digital trickery is becoming commonplace.

The 2004 Presidential election featured a glaring example of political media manipulation-an altered photograph supposedly showing John Kerry standing next to Jane Fonda at an anti-Vietnam War rally. The fake attracted so much attention that Ken Light, one of the photographers whose photos were stolen to make the image, felt compelled to write an editorial condemning the act. He said the digital trickery:

It tells us more about the troublesome combination of Photoshop and the Internet than it does about the prospective Democratic candidate for president. Who could have predicted that my Ethical Problems in Photography presentation would be showing young journalists how National Geographic moved one of the Egyptian pyramids to make it fit on a cover better, or the way colleges seeking a more diverse image edit African American faces into sports crowds that look too white?

It is one thing when a Rush Limbaugh plays games with the truth, but digital trickery takes this to another level.  That is why we need a return of something like the Fairness Doctrine.  As I wrote in Strange Death:

In this world it becomes easy for people to dismiss all sources or trust only those that share their prejudices. Economic justice can become an illusion, educational equity becomes useless except for those knowledgeable about the magician’s tricks, and voting freedom becomes as valid as throwing darts at a ballot. Figuring out whether the playing field is level becomes the equivalent of floating weightlessly in space where up and down, left and right, lose meaning.

Net Neutrality

There may be no volatile issue on the net than net neutrality. Pushed by both internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers such as blogs, in its most basic form net neutrality says that there should be no restrictions on what flows through the “pipe.” Right away, of course, you can see there is a basic conflict between this and the Fairness Doctrine. In fact in its simplest terms, net neutrality is about whether fairness should also apply in the ether.

Those who favor net neutrality raise the specter of “big brother” controlling net content. Others raise the more practical issue of how it would be enforced in this world where a server can be anywhere. Recently when I went to download a popular spyware program I found that some shady characters had appropriated the name of the program and set up shop in the Caribbean, far away from any lawsuit by the real spyware providers. What is more Google gives that site a higher page rank than the real one, further contributing to the confusion.

Google is my argument against net neutrality. Search engines now control your access to Internet content whether you like it or not. I was not happy, for example, to find plagiarized versions of my Glass-Steagall piece appearing on Google and Google refusing to police them unless I hired a team of lawyers.

Take a controversial issue such as the Fairness Doctrine. Most people will go to a search engine for information on it. Page rankings–for which none of the search engines will reveal their secret formulas–determine which pieces of information you will see first. What we do know about page rankings is that they are quantity-driven, not quality driven, so you may have to scroll down through as many as ten pages of sources to find a decent one.

When what amounts to crap and even misleading and flat-out false information appears with a higher page ranking than decent sources, it totally pollutes the basic definition of information. In this new environment information is anything Google says it is.

Predictably Google has been accused of having a liberal bias. In a 2006 article on the blog American Thinker, Noel and Marc Sheppard charged:

Five months ago, the Internet’s top search engine Google was accused of banning conservative websites from its news crawl. Last week, the e—behemoth offered to purchase YouTube, the preeminent provider of videos over the Web that has recently been implicated in censorship of its own. With their pending merger, serious questions arise about the future of the most powerful telecommunications medium on the landscape, and who if anyone is trying to control its content.

Accusing the media of liberal bias is nothing new in conservative circles, but the number of blogs accusing Google of conservative bias does raise questions for me.

More troubling is Google’s mixing of advertising and content, so each search is accompanied by paid ads on the right side that try to seduce you into acessing those sites. In essence if you can pay for it, you can influence people’s access to information.

Clearly just as with digital manipulation, the FCC will have to deal with the power of search engines. I have no answers for this, but I must admit that the power of Google scares not only me but many others as well.

Obama in the Hot Seat

The issues facing the new FCC Chair are difficult and volatile. They will call for a personality that has knowledge of this new playing field and the intelligence to navigate its minefields. Most of all, it will call for someone with values, a moral compass to guife them through these stormy issues.

In the 2003 hearings over media concentration Commissioner Kenneth Adelstein stated what was at stake:

Without a diverse, independent media, citizen access to information crumbles, along with political and social participation.  For the sake of our democracy, we should encourage the widest possible dissemination of free expression through the public airwaves.

In the FCC seal shown above, the American eagle appears to be walking a tightrope between two communications towers. That tightrope has become even more difficult to walk in this new era of digital manipulation and Internet search engines. Let us hope that the eagle does not fall.