3/22/10

As children we used to exult in the arrival spring, for cabin fever is an oppressive condition for young kids. Winter is more so now, what with global warming squeezing more moisture into the atmosphere to be let go in torrents and blizzards. My home region of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area saw snows the likes of which I vaguely remember from the snow belt in up-state New York. But, thankfully, spring is here and James Carroll has a fitting ode for this occasion.

We have not yet entered the light and dawn of a new era. The darkness still pervades the political landscape as drear old men fight off the coming of new perspectives with angry fear. Still "Springtime, The Chance to Leave Darkness Behind" is a good essay. Refreshing and codifying.

JB

2/17/10

My colleague in NYC sends me articles from the Times and occasionally from the Post that he wants to be sure that I have read, maybe to comment on them publically (as today) and almost always privately between us. Like myself, he is retired, but unlike me he spent a lifetime in and around politics and public health programs. He says he got through one page of this article before throwing up his hands in despair. Jobs, education, and serious mental health care, he wrote. And, I cannot disagree with him. The "Tea Party" people are a tragedy in the making.

First thing that always comes to mind about the "revolution" that these people think they want is that they will be the first and bloodiest victims of any revolution. In fact they already are: they are the urban and suburban and exurban/rural blue collar middle class, and their station in life is evaporating before their very eyes. The squeeze on the middle class, especially the less well educated (but highly skilled, mind you) middle class strata has been intense. The economic squeeze has been relentless with "sticker shock" on everything reducing aspiring people to wondering how they can possibly maintain a semblance of the lifestyle their parents struggled for and finally seemed to achieve. But the psychological squeeze is the vise into which their lives have slipped and the inexorable pressure on their self-esteem goes back a generation or more.

The first moments of the Tea Party were the racist-populist politics of George Corley Wallace. With Wallace we first heard the expression of anger at the lifting up of American Blacks at the palpable expense (jobs lost were the worst of it, but welfare queens the most iconic) of the white blue collar middle strata. The racism was not the racism of hatred, but of fear, fear that Black people would ... with the boost given them by the Great Society programs ... rise higher than any of the whites could hope to achieve, given that they were deficient in book learning and especially critical thinking skills.

No one knows how deficient their critical thinking skills really are. They assume that what befalls them in life is chance, luck, kismet, and a variety of other exogenously stimulated factors, not their own "fault." The pseudo-Christian ethos of the United States quickly hones in on good v. evil and the consequent states of guilt and being at fault. The overburden of this psychology drives multitudes either into the arms of evangelistas (whose message is that "believe THIS and I can assure you that all of this is NOT your fault") or out of religion and into a wasteland of consumerist, popcorn and beer bargain basement hedonism.

Critical thinking is the antidote to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But, critical thinking is in short supply and squeezed out of a society where economic pressures and white collar greed put a boot in the face of those struggling without a full toolbox of thinking skills. I have watched students in my classes struggle with concepts that are alien to them and their families and some—a precious few—break through, but most hold on with stubborn resistance to a schema that provides a "guarantee" of security of personality because it is familiar, if not exactly incisive and enabling. Americans in general do not know how to think very logically and intelligently, and so how can we expect them to have thoughts that make sense. The answer: Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh give them a vocabulary that through endless repetitions seems to become a coherent "philosophy" of life, politics, and society. But, it is not, it is emotional propaganda, full of anger and truly mindless seething rage at what befalls those who stumble at the threshold of life, formal schooling, and never quite get their balance again.

But, all this said, the Tea Party folks have a point, and that point is: "I am not sure what is wrong or why, but something is drastically wrong, and I am not going to put up with it any more."

Yes, indeedy, there is something wrong. Politics has been corrupted from top to bottom by money. Of course property interests should be heard in the din of human interests, but they should not have bought the system and should not be using it against the society in general. But they do. Corporations own Washington and everyone in that fetid place. And, education in America sucks. The reason is that the quanitity of students is the major concern, their huge numbers, their scores on measurement tests. The quality of education is dependent upon parents and teachers, but too few of either understand how critical their roles are ... and we pay them either nothing or very little to educate our successor generations. Well now, we have a successor generation and a large part of it believes that revolution will solve their problems. It will not.

The only cure for todays problems is for common citizens to beseige their elected representatives on a 24/7 basis, physically, and to tell them that "devil take the hindmost" they will be thrown out of office if they do not end the corruption, starting with the corruption within politics and our Constitutional organizations, principally the Congress. The first place to start is to publically fund all elections and to put limits on the amount that can be spent. Free air time on our public media. That's where to start.

JB

2/13/10A Fatal Flaw Rooted in Naivete

Charles M. Blow is one of the newer columnists at the New York Times. He is astute, and in this case—today's column—he absolutely nails an essential feature of the ineptitude and paralysis that President Obama cannot blame ... or we cannot blame ... on anyone else but Barack Hussein Obama, himself.

Read the article and know that Obama brings a lot of "community organizing" baggage into the White House, luggage the efficacy of which is problematic at best and toxic, as we have seen. You just do not set up shop in the White House like it was a glib store-front operation designed to boost the self-confidence of neighborhood people. Yes, of course, if you treat semi-rational people as if they had the capability of understanding and emulating, they will respond. Some of them, even, will turn a corner, but many will not. In Washington the semi-rational are different from the ghettos of Chicago. Ideology is their main problem and no amount of kissy coddling will change that.

The year is moving along rapidly. The Olympics will drain attention to the fetes and feats and soon it will be March and then April Tax Time. By then Obama should have understood that, like Mr. Blow says, he must change to accomplish Change. I will give him until the Ides of March to get a new methodology out into view, and I will give him until the federal tax deadline to have accomplished something. No accomplishments and I go to Dr. Howard Dean with a public open letter and ask him to stand up and be counted. There are many like me.

JB

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1/21/10

About a week ago I got one of several calls I will get this year from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). I detest that organization, but I understand the party-political need for recruitment of good candidates, especially those (like Gavin Newsome of San Francisco) who without help from seasoned coaches and a fast course in how to take it on the chin and survive, ... would (like Gavin Newsome) not survive. But, the DSCC and its counterpart (equally corrupt) in the House have become "incumbency rackets" rather than recruitment organizations or miniature bootcamps for aspiring pols. I told the nice lady that I disagree almost all the time with what DSCC does, and lo! she admitted to me that they have made quite a few mistakes recently. The name Joe Lieberman came up. I told her I would never again contribute to the DSCC ... crossing my fingers ... and hoping that someone of the 65 Democrats begins to understand what the real purpose is. It is not prolonging incumbency!

So with that rolling around in mid-term memory in an exchange of emails with my colleague in Massachusetts I am told that the Coakley campaign was not Obama's fault. The Boston Globe says as much with quite a bit of detail, including Ms. Coakley's unfortunately timed Caribbean holiday.

I read the piece and noticed that there was a subtext. The White House is trying to get the burden of failure off Obama's back ... as you might easily suspect. And, there is the drift of the article to the conclusion that Coakley just was not ready for prime time, which the voters quickly understood, and so they acted accordingly. So much for running naked through the streets of Boston and the rest of a locked-down, stalwart Democratic state. Well, so much bullcrap!

The DSCC dropped the ball by not telling Coakley that she must win the election and that she should not take anything ... ANYTHING ... for granted. DSCC should have forwarded a copy of that message to DNC so that they could remind Coakley about the New Jersey and Virginia losses ... and that the public is angry ... very angry! They apparently did not, or if they made the effort they made very little impact. DNC needs help and quickly. Do not even think about Rahm as the leader of DNC!

The White House, being tacked toward the political center by Rahm, should have made it plain to DNC that Obama's agenda very much depends on the Senate being filibuster-proof. When the Massachusetts campaign began Rahm should have made double sure that DNC and DSCC were in cammies and conducting bootcamp for Coakley. Apparently, Mr. Emanuel did not see the underlying and obvious urgency. Mr. Emanuel is not the brightest guy in the White House, by the way. It is a shame that President Obama cannot see that everything that goes through Rahm's office becomes less. Obama knows that Emanuel is more conservative than himself, but with a good Chief of Staff, the message of the leader, not the stiff in the Chief of Staff's office, would be the message we hear. Apparently ... all too apparently ... this is not the case.

This is not to let Axelrod off the hook, either. He is a politically savvy guy and should have a reflexive interest in anything that threatens or threatens to threaten the power structure in Washington vis-à-vis his charge as chief political advisor. Apparently he does not see it that way or cannot get his voice heard.

The up-shot of the Massachusetts debacle is not that Coakley was arrogantly and publically advertising that she thought herself to be a "shoe in." The real conclusion is that the top leadership of the Democratic Party——beginning at the very top ... in the White House——is failing, flailing, and inept. President Obama should make changes to his staff, not his ... and our ... agenda!

JB

1/20/10

It is impossible not to write something about the loss of a U.S. Senate seat to a Republican in ... of all places ... Massachusetts. Everyone is writing something and most of it makes sense, except that all the reasons posed seem to contradict one another in the end. Coakley ran a lazy and "I've been chosen" campaign, and Brown—another pinhead from the teaparty branch—ran an aggressive, if sophomoronic, campaign. The White House assumed wrongly that Coakley could not lose. The DSCC continues its path of wandering in the desert. Etc. Etc. The truth is that the voters are fed up with Washington and particularly the failure of the Democrats to be Democrats ... and believe me Massachusetts understands what a Democrat is supposed to be and do.

My thesis is that voters absolutely hate Congress ... both sides of the aisle. They are faced with the paralyzing prospect of a binary choice among candidates who become immediately sold out to special interests ... most recently the heath care and pharmaceutical industries, both of which are fabulously wealthy and without conscience when it comes to purchasing a few key legislators. The paralysis is relieved by shoving it up the butt of bi-partisan demagogues. Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama, please take notice. You're next.

There is a strong sense abroad in the land these days that the federal government is beyond redemption. The parade of assinine pontificating during endless months of Health Care Reform legislating, the ugly display of whorish Senators cavorting with their sugar-daddy lobbyists, the lies and the lame excuses, they all add up to a revulsion that the Massachusetts voters displayed. They (and we, I maintain) are sick to death of this crap, and if it takes a complete transformation of the House and Senate ... a complete up-ending ... a term-by-term kicking of legislative asses both sides of the aisle, then that's what we are going to do.

The Senate has rules of procedure that are anti-democratic and they must change. The House is a little better, but jackasses like Murtha are much too burdensome to defend anymore. The White House has Rahm Emanuel and a clique of financier-ass-kissers, and they must all go too. Obama really needs to understand that the first Black American president is very likely to be the last for a good long time, if he doesn't get is own butt straightened out and f*****g remember who elected him—a coaltion of progressives and independents.

Yeah, I am mad. Let the morons in the Democratic Party understand this: January 19th, 2010 the Progressive movement becomes the Progressive Party ... and devil take the corrupt and feckless and heave them into the dustbin of history!

JB

1/19/10

At OpEdNews Rob Kall, the proprietor there, posted an article from CNN's "Politics Ticker" about Progressives digging in to unseat Rahm Emanuel from his job as Chief of Staff in the Obama White House. This is the best news I have heard in months! How long does it take Democrats to understand that the Obama we see is the result of heavy-handed manipulations by a person whose qualities of character are so negligible as to call into question the character of those who associate with him. Rahm Emanuel is bad for Obama, bad for Democrats, bad for America because he is an arrogant, slithering, cockroach of a politician, one whose chief claim to fame is that he can brow beat members of Congress both sides of the aisle.

Rahm works through fear. He is supposedly a centrist in an era where the center is where the media says it is, but not where the hearts and minds of the public are. The center is functionally sterile. This suits Rahm because he actually has no program or values other than himself.

Rahm demands obedience from everyone, cabinet secretaries included, and one wonders how he gets away with this. So, wonder. When you are finished wondering, you have to understand that Obama lets him.

Obama did not have control of his own government on day one. He still doesn't. He has a mighty rival in the military industrial apparatus, much of which is represented directly in Congress in both parties. He has Bush-era appointees still in office sprinkled "liberally" throughout the departments and agencies. He has appointments stalled in the U.S. Senate by Republicans whose game is simply to resist anything whatsoever that Obama might do. He has a press corps that cannot be trusted by him or public. And so, Obama, fully aware that his administration would be one of the most nitpicked in the history of human government, chose Emanuel to be his "whip." It was an awful decision, and it will surely spell the end of Obama politically if he does not do something about it and soon.

The issue is not actually or only a "progressive" one. It is an issue of attempting to come close to the Obama of the campaign, a persona that evaporated the moment Emanuel took office. There is no reason for this to have happened, except that Emanuel is totally unscrupulous and, in addition to being a foul-mouth of the first order, is a martinet. My personal feeling is that Obama is slightly afraid of Emanuel and has been "blackmailed" by references to "losing control" from Rahm. He is as one commenter on the CNN article said of his crooked character, '... should not be within 100 miles of Washington.'

We have all been trying to understand why President Obama is so different from Candidate Obama. Rahm Emanuel is the reason. He is the bottleneck and filter for everything that happens in the WestWing. He likes it that way, but Democrats inside and outside of Washington need to say otherwise. We do not like it that way!

What, I ask you people inside the beltway, do you know about Emanuel and why are you so afraid to speak up? Do you not understand that not only the fate of the Democratic Party, but clearly the fate of the nation hangs on you telling the truth about your fear of Emanuel?

It is time, waaay past time, to remove this cockroach from the White House. Speak up, join the chorus, understand that Rahm Emanuel is a cancer on this administration and must be removed.

JB

1/14/10

Among progressives there is a fair amount of angst these days. Rahm Emanuel has convinced Barack Obama that the left progressive wing of the Democratic Party can be essentially ignored ... mostly because they have no place to go. Rahm is wrong ... again ... of course. Obama announced this before the inauguration, by saying that he would "govern from the center."

We all understand that governing a diverse nation should take into account the dispositions of the many, but it is pure hogwash to believe that the center is any one place, especially in routine politics in Washington, and moreover, with Republicans taking a trenchant and often mindless approach to the Obama administration that results in 100% non-cooperation on any detail whatsoever, politically "center" is meaningless. Obama still does not think so, so we have a problem Houston!

Here is the essential agenda for 2010 for progressives and classical liberals, you know, the educated elite from universities and the left media and literary circles and so forth. The agenda is to quietly pick a successor to Obama and being to place this person (say, Howard Dean, for instance) into conversations where Dean looks and sounds like he knows what is going on by comparison to the current White House. I say that this must be done quietly and deftly so as not to tip off the far right, which will begin to hurl insults, lies, crap of all descriptions at the successor. We don't want that, of course. Campaigns are long enough as it is without shifting the successor's moves toward a campaign in second, third, or high too soon.

But it can ... and must ... be done. We need to be able in November if the news is really bad to tell Obama straight out that he must fire Rahm and Summers and Geithner immediately or else. Believe me, it will be "or else" because Rahm has Obama captive and Obama wouldn't believe it if you rubbed his arrogant face in it. Meanwhile as we are selecting several and then one standard-bearer who is a realistic candidate for 2012, we are waiting and listening intently to the White House for signs of their magical cure for plummeting popularity polls. Democrats in the House and Senate are going to demand that ... and Rahm knows it.

What Rahm's idea of a magic potion to save the election and come close to satisfying progressives and liberals will, probably, not be enough. He is a moderate along the lines of a foul-mouth, Capone-era lawyer with some Evan Bayh in there for the ladies. Obama will fail to turn the election the way of the Democrats and, I believe, only a disaster of some sort that galvanizes the imagination of voters in the fall ... that is well-handled by the White House ... will do the trick. I think they will not handle it any better than they handled the Christmas terror incident, i.e., there will be off-hand things said and done that the rightpress will blow out of proportion and, yet, dominate the coverage.

This is a very disturbing situation. Rahm is the root of it and the proof is that Obama was considerable a different personality and presence before Rahm became his chief of staff. The "before" and "after" pictures are starkly different. Yes, of course, he became President, too, but you don't see this kind of change very often. It is the image of a powerful and malign personality at work.

Our agenda is flexible and based on evidence and keen observation. It is a workable plan to keep the GOP out of the Executive as long as possible. There are some keys to observation that I will detail in coming essays.

JB

12/20/09

Two op-ed columns on Sunday morning struck home the idea that President Obama has lost perhaps irrecoverable ground with his "base" in just one short year. The first one I read was by Neal Gabbler in the Boston Globe decrying the lack of passion in Obama (as compared to candidate Obama) and his staff. It is, as Gabbler sees it, not listless, but rather seemingly afraid to rock the boat too much, to be seen as an angry Black, to unnecessarily jostle some vote in the gray middle of political opportunists. Gabbler's is not quite an indictment. But if you are looking for causes for these effects, you really need go no further than the Chief of Staff, whose martinet style and gushing profanity has effectively subdued his boss and the rest of the staff. It sounds preposterous, but every organization run by a martinet soon learns to avoid the pain and becomes insensitive to the pain of others.

The second and perhaps more profound of the columns is by our favorite columnist in the New York Times, Frank Rich. I had to pause and go about my morning business before I realized that Rich's use of Tiger Woods as stalking horse for a fundamental problem in American culture is, in fact, a long-awaited statement of a problem we as a culture and as individuals have with the news and information media: we trust it too much, too broadly and too deeply. We allow ourselves to be deceived and it is frankly having more consequences than we are able to deal with.

There is no question that Americans are not well-educated when it comes to discerning pepper from fly-specks. We tend to take things on hopeful face value and sort the world into categories that are comfortable for us. We have categories for crime and faithlessness, but these are bound categories with sharper edges than really exist in real life. We are hood-winked, as Rich says, all too often, and we accept spin as having a strength of truth in it, despite much evidence to the contrary. We don't like disagreement and the feeling of being talked into or being talked down to. In defense of what self-conscious awareness we have of our limitations, we prefer to accept a web of deceit than to challenge the messenger and risk being defeated in argument.

Frank Rich ends his essay with what I think is a memorable sentence, memorable because of its utterance as much as its content. It represents a departure that the White House had better begin to understand soon.

... Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam designed to camouflage either his covert anti-American radicalism (as the right sees it) or spineless timidity (as the left sees it)....

JB

11/13/09

The following essay/diatribe, complete with foul language (which I have "bleeped,") appeared the other day in Salon. It is the sort of thing that echoes around in certain precincts, but contains, in my opinion, the seeds of a nasty surprise for Liberals and Progressives, especially those who think that Marty has recovered his senses and will be a companion in the coming struggles. Not so much, I think. But, it is good to see the radical right buckling and imploding. JB

Hi, I'm Marty, and I'm a recovering Republican

I was a feminazi-hating, liberal-bashing loudmouth who tried to befriend Bill O'Reilly. Man, I was such a (bleep)

By Marty Beckerman

Every day I wake up with the same thought: "I used to be such a (bleeping) idiot."

I am a former Republican. And I wasn't merely the libertarian, live-and-let-live, fun-at-parties kind of conservative whose primary concern is balancing the budget; I was a spiteful, narrow-minded, fire-breathing paranoid lunatic who questioned the patriotism and morality of my liberal fellow citizens. Recognizing the error of my ways has done wonders for my mental health but left me with constant, unremitting remorse; I really want to go back in time and kick my own (bleep).

Surely I am not alone: Earlier this year independents sympathized with Democrats two-to-one over Republicans, whereas they were evenly split five years ago; a slim majority of young voters voted for Sen. John Kerry in 2004, but nearly 70 percent chose Barack Obama in 2008, the widest margin in electoral history. Traditionally people shift rightward as their bank accounts expand and their flesh wrinkles, but my generation is seemingly the first to move leftward with age.

Actually, I was a passionate liberal when I entered college in September 2001, and I initially resisted the GOP's post-9/11 fury and propaganda. I decried the suspension of habeas corpus and the 2003 Iraq invasion and feared for our country when dissent was equated with treason in the popular imagination. And then a few things happened:

• A handful of my friends joined the College Republicans. As our drunken nights accumulated -- with Fox News always in the background and a stack of vitriolic books cracked open -- I found myself questioning my assumptions. Craving the acceptance of my peers like any other insecure college kid, I gradually accepted their self-reinforcing groupthink, slowly but surely inching toward the Dark Side.

• A handful of my fellow campus left-wingers appeared to excessively sympathize with right-wing Islamists, rationalizing the violence of suicide bombers, for example, but refusing to criticize (on multicultural grounds) heinous civil rights abuses across the globe. The starry-eyed George W. Bush acolytes who called for the expansion-by-explosion of worldwide freedom -- despite opposing countless domestic liberties -- seemed righteous in comparison.

• A handful of my professors injected their utopian and hypersensitive politics into the classroom, calling for a "socialist revolution" and grading me poorly for using "heteronormative" language. Rebelling against their authority, as they had rebelled against conservative professorial authority in their student days, felt as natural as doing a keg stand at a fraternity party.

• A super liberal girlfriend dumped me, sparking my testosterone-fueled bitterness toward everything that reminded me of her, such as left-wing politics and basically all human females.

Very few people in their late teens and early twenties seek justice in moderation. The hormone-soaked college years are a time of extremes, our changing identities often defined by dissent-quashing affiliations, leaving us to later cringe at our frenzied "Goldfish Liberation phase," "Castrate the Phallusocracy phase," "Noam Chomsky phase" or "Ayn Rand phase." (Yes, I spent a summer vacation trying to finish reading "Atlas Shrugged," ultimately throwing in the towel around page 75,000.)

Much like our previous chief executive, I should have seen the danger of sealing myself in an echo chamber to prevent contamination from outside viewpoints; I began only hanging out with conservative true believers, only reading conservative books, only getting my news from conservative media outlets. In order to avoid journalistic "left-wing bias," I embraced right-wing bias, foolishly confusing sensationalist entertainment with debate and truth-telling. Outrage became my drug of choice.

There was no single moment when I transformed into an unhinged, raving authoritarian; propaganda works in repetition -- in accumulation -- and worldviews rarely change overnight. However, as your skepticism weakens, a new understanding of history develops. Whereas Liberal Me viewed America improving over time with the progression of civil rights and sexual liberation, Conservative Me viewed history as an unfolding catastrophe: In my mind, "socialist" handouts threatened our laissez-faire way of life, as if public roads/schools/libraries were no different than Stalin's gulags, and hedonistic decadence -- facilitated and encouraged by scheming left-wing nihilists -- threatened individual self-control. I mistakenly came to believe that America had not progressed toward justice but fallen from grace.

I railed in conversation and on my website against "freedom-hating hippies," "activist judges who overturn the will of the people," "pro-abortion feminazis," "Marxist Democrats," "elitist, so-called intellectuals," "greedy welfare queens," "environmental whack jobs" and other perceived bogeymen. I lost sight of grayscale and instead saw the world in black and white; I labeled Terri Schiavo's husband a money-hungry murderer for pulling the plug on his comatose wife, lumped all Palestinians together with the few terrorists among their population, uttered racial/sexual/ethnic slurs with a little too much enthusiasm for simple prurience and approvingly repeated Michael Savage's book title "Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder." I even argued that women belong in the home, not the workplace! (Now a self-employed author, I cook dinner for my girlfriend nightly and perform household chores -- groceries, laundry, dishes -- when she heads to the office. Truly I am a domestic goddess.)

My sudden transformation mystified my friends and family, many of whom tried to talk sense into me when they didn't outright disown me. Even my conservative father said I was going overboard. For example: wondering if my 90-year-old grandmother was a Commie for cashing her Social Security checks. In order to heed your inner Joe McCarthy, you must first squelch your inner conscience.

Strangest of all, I developed a finger-wagging puritan bent, which made absolutely no sense for a 20-year-old guy who was getting laid and intoxicated on a steady basis. I blamed "the anti-family Left" for encouraging couples to divorce and youngsters to fornicate, as if liberals were all conspiring together to destroy the traditional family, as if liberal states do not have lower rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than their conservative counterparts. My hypocrisy is mystifying in retrospect -- why would I bash sexual liberation while having sloppy drunken unmarried sex whenever possible? -- but perhaps conservative politicians such as John Ensign, Mark Sanford, David Vitter, Larry Craig and Newt Gingrich can explain.

You might imagine my moralizing stemmed from our cultural anxiety about sexuality, but it actually came from a longstanding need to position myself as superior to others; I got off on presenting my fellow millennials as pleasure-seeking, unthinking/unfeeling animals while my life had Truth and Meaning. It was incredibly self-righteous and self-congratulatory, and it was only about 50 percent accurate.

None of this would haunt me so deeply if I did not have a national platform to air my histrionic, uninformed opinions. However, I was uncommonly lucky for my age. In 2004 MTV/Pocket Books published my book "Generation S.L.U.T.," which described the anonymous hook-up culture among contemporary American youth and unleashed a storm of publicity. Although I am proud of the book's emotional nakedness (apart from its amateurish didacticism), the book's promotion is another story: In Salon, the New York Times, and countless other interviews (newspaper, radio, TV, blogs) I blamed the psychological turbulence of modern teenagers -- from wrist-cutting to school shootings -- on the 1960s feminist revolution. I sounded like a bitter middle-aged man; I even flattered the ultimate bitter middle-aged man, Bill O'Reilly, whom I asked to "be my friend" during a Fox News Channel appearance. (O'Reilly appeared confused by the request. For the record: I am friends with every Irish person, minus the nondrinkers, who do not exist.)

I completely understand why conservatives-turned-liberals such as Arianna Huffington and David Brock and liberals-turned-conservatives such as P.J. O'Rourke and David Horowitz spend decades walking back their youthful ramblings. When millions upon millions of people remember you for something that you no longer represent -- if you think they remember you anyway, which they probably do not -- the shame is unbearable, the desire for a time machine pathological. The temptation is to become an extremist in the opposite direction -- LOOK how much I've changed, everybody! -- which is hardly an act of maturity. The dilemma remains: You have evolved, yet the perception of you remains stuck in a misguided past. (At a recent literary event someone asked me, "Aren't you the guy who thinks women shouldn't have sex?" I'm misanthropic, yes, but willing to concede that humanity should probably reproduce.)

However, I might have never recovered from my right-wing fever if not for the controversy I caused. Readers sent me hate mail following a Salon interview with Rebecca Traister, in which I bashed feminism and articulated such thoughts as: "Men don't see women as clean and pure but as a means to an end, a nice little (bleep)-hole." One Salon reader even threatened my physical safety.

But middle-aged liberal psychologist Steve Edgell took another approach: calmly and gently talking me back to earth. Over the course of many e-mails and phone conversations, Dr. Edgell -- who had been an Ayn Rand junkie at my age -- explained the reasons for his own political evolution and guided me through the myriad inconsistencies of my rabid philosophy. Just as I was beginning to understand how unbalanced I had become, Edgell died of a heart attack. He did not live to see me completely return to planet Earth but must have known he had planted the seeds of doubt. I never met the man, and I don't necessarily agree with everything he believed, but I owe him my sanity. (He was an atheist, but I hope he is looking down from the cosmic void with amused satisfaction.)

Just as morphing into an extremist took a couple years, un-becoming an extremist happened over time. One by one I saw the flaws in conservative orthodoxy: attempting to fight terrorism with torture, which only aided our enemies' propaganda efforts and thus created more terrorists; seeking to liberalize the Muslim world while curtailing rights for gay people at home; criticizing public schools for lackluster results and therefore cutting funds further; disdaining the weak while never analyzing why they are weak; always seeing the effect but never the cause, which on a mass scale perpetuates the effect.

The 2008 financial crash further proved to me the necessity of an economic safety net within the market system; tying health insurance to employment suddenly made no sense, for example, when millions of people lost their jobs due to conditions beyond their control. Capitalism with a few safety pads -- or a condom, I suppose, since the recession has fucked us all -- is a far cry from a Marxian worker's paradise.

I am not an extreme leftist by any means -- I still dream of swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck, I would die to protect the First Amendment from censorial progressive overreach (the same goes for theocratic conservative overreach), and I would consider voting for moderate Republicans if any still existed -- but I've learned to see the big picture. It doesn't matter whether you are liberal or conservative, but it's dangerous to always think with exclamation points instead of question marks. Your stance on any particular issue is far less important than whether your worldview is a product of inquiry or incuriosity, whether you feel more comfortable questioning the crowd or blindly marching with it. No ideology has a monopoly on reality -- including my rediscovered left-wing politics.

No longer drunk on jingoism and bloodlust, I feel like a German in 1946, wondering what the hell happened to me, what the hell I supported when I harbored no doubt that we should "nuke 'em all" and measured people by standards other than their character. The years pass, but I cannot reconcile my former and present selves; in my early 20s I made the worst mistake of my life --injecting poison into a world that desperately needed the antidote -- and while it's impossible to undo that error, perhaps my penance is remembering and therefore not repeating it. Just as Dr. Edgell steered me back to the shores of lucidity, I can encourage mellowness in others -- no matter their cause -- and discourage the inevitable craziness that resentment and overgeneralization breed.

Paul of Tarsus, the most famous convert in history, commented long ago: "Even though I was once … a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief." I don't know if anyone, deity or human, will show mercy on me, but I will try to have mercy on myself, and -- even if I continue to fail -- maybe that's enough.

8/6/09

I was going to entitle this essay "The Wrong Guy at the Right Time," but reconsidered. Bromwich quickly provides alternative titles and at one point says,

... Obama's two opposing traits, the caution and the presumption, have joined with results that are deeply unhappy. He arrogates. He does not indicate. And when the argument is well underway, he starts his major explanation as an afterthought.

Obama cherishes the ideal of a frictionless transformation of society. It is a wish for aesthetic harmony, which he mistakes for a political goal. Its attainment would be a beautiful thing. But no matter how much he appeals for comity, Obama is certain to give offense to some. Better to choose your times and targets than allow others to force that choice.

In plainer language this means that Barack Obama is failing at being President ... because he is, apparently, constitutionally unprepared to go into the fray and break a few knee caps if necessary. He continues to believe his fantasy about bipartisan solutions. As Bromwich puts it Pragmatic justifications have been offered to explain his aversion to any contest that implies a clash of opposing interests. Thus Rahm Emanuel said of the disastrously time-wasting courtship of Republican support for the stimulus package: "The public wants bipartisanship. We just have to try. We don't have to succeed." But try every time and you will waste your life. And when did the public say it wanted bipartisanship? The last fair measure was the election of 2008; and the public then gave a convincing majority to one party. (emphasis added)

Barack Obama wants to please everyone. That's his fantasy, but it is our cross. As my colleague in New York City put it the other day when we were discussing the Bromwich essay, particularly the part regarding Obama's fixation with bipartisan solutions ...

One additional point that Obama does not understand is that there is no functioning Republican Party to have bipartisanship with. There are no statesmen in the shell that passes for a political party. There are no intellectual thinkers with any ideas in the empty shell party. But most of all, there are no American patriots in the party. Their patriotism is only to their excessive wealth while using the vast numbers of uninformed voters like the "birthers," gun-nuts, and varieties of sociopaths to demonstrate for them.

I might not have been as kind to the Republicans as Tony, but his points are well taken. Republicans are in a tail-spin of psychological and political withdrawal from the horrendous lies and bullying of the Bush/Cheney administration, still believing that racism is a reasonable core position for a 21st century political party, and rudderless and virtually hopeless and clueless. The yelling and screaming of their minions at public meetings show the Party reduced to a frothing tantrum ... AND YET Barack Obama is helpless to take advantage of it ... or even extricate our country from the pollution from it suffered for the past ten years and now on into his own administration.

Bromwich ends with the hope that Barack Obama can reverse himself and wise up. He says that if he does not this Presidency will be a failure and all semblance of his leadership foreclosed. We can survive that domestically, with pain, but with a world-wide recession still in progress, with Putin's shirt off on horseback in Siberia and his submarines eerily patrolling our coasts, with Israel hovering over its own little red button, with fanatics in Muslim countries afraid to bring their own cultures into the 21st century, continuation of Obama's failure could be fatal. In any case it will be ugly!

JB