I remember seeing a documentary on Nazi Germany in which Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, proudly announced that German culture was free of the detrimental influences of Jews and homosexuals.  What followed on the screen was a list of all such individuals expelled by the Nazis.  Scrolling by on the screen was name after name of some of the most outstanding figures in German science, music, cinema, theater, painting, sculpture, medicine, and academia.  It went on for so long that it produced growing roars of laughter in the audience.  What a loss these “detrimental influences” would prove for German culture.

Homophobia, like anti-Semitism, has its roots in religious dogma.  The anti-Semite ignores that Jesus and all his disciples were themselves Jews and focuses only on the Biblical account of a mob crying for his death as proof of Jewish culpability in that unpardonable crime of deicide.  That homosexuality is sinful goes unmentioned in the Christian Bible.  Jesus, or for that matter, all the Hebrew prophets, say nothing on the subject.  Homosexuality finds its clearest condemnation in Leviticus of the Hebrew Bible: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman both of them must be put to death.”  In the Hebrew Bible, homosexuality shares the same draconian punishment with many other sins enumerated in Deuteronomy: “Death to a bride who is not a virgin;” “Adulterers shall be put to death;” and, “Disobedient sons who do not repent shall be stoned to death.”  In Genesis, it’s masturbation that deserves death.  In Leviticus, once again, “Death for having sexual intercourse during a woman’s period.”  Such Biblical capital offenses are recognized as clearly ridiculous in the modern world and are now considered to be matters of private concern and personal morality.  Why, then, for some is homosexuality considered beyond the pale and gay marriage such a national controversy?

A major question in the early Twentieth Century that clearly exercised the Nazi mind was whether Jews should be allowed to marry non-Jews.  The Nazi answer was an unequivocal: no.  It was just forbidden but a crime punishable by death.  Today, we marry who we want, Jew and gentile, black and white, (also once banned) or in a growing number of states, gays marrying gays.  The comedian Chris Rock’s favorable opinion on gay marriage is, “They have the right to be as miserable as everybody else.”

In the past sixty or so years, we have become more tolerant, even perhaps appreciative, of the diversity found in the human race.  Nazi-like bigots have been reduced to playing the bad-guys in films and on television.  Rules like “Don’t ask don’t tell” will eventually become “Tell, for nobody gives a damn.” Evangelicals and social conservatives will have to rethink homosexuality, for it appears that God must have a fondness for them since he seems to have placed so many in the church and the right wing leadership.  Recently, after two thousand years, the infallible Vatican has forgiven Jews.  Surely homosexuals cannot be far behind.

The assault took place during a hearing for an appeal Axel W. had filed for a €750 fine for insulting el-Sherbini when she asked him to make room for her son on a playground swing.  He allegedly called her a “terrorist” and “islamicist whore” and mocked her headscarf.  Unsubstantiated claims allege that Axel W., a stock clerk from Russia, fought against Muslim rebels during the Russia-Chechnya wars of the 1990s.  His sympathies with the National Democratic Party (NDP), the ultra-right, crypto-Nazi outfit, are not in dispute, however.  “You got any right to be in Germany?  You got no business being here.  That’ll all be over soon as the NPD comes to power.  I voted for them,” declared Axel W., an immigrant himself, before stabbing el-Sherbini 18 times.

The German government was slow to react publicly to the murder, only condemning it nearly a week later.  The tardy response raised suspicions.  In Alexandria, Egypt, el-Sherbini’s hometown, thousands of mourners gathered, some chanting “Down with Germany” and “Germans are the enemies of God.”  Others clashed with police.  Egyptian newspapers fanned the flames, calling el-Sherbini a “martyr in a headscarf,” a reference to Germany’s ban on the attire in its civil service and possibly French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recent speech denouncing the burqa.  A promise by el-Sherbini’s brother to “revenge” her death also stoked tensions.  “Anger is high,” one Egyptian journalist wrote.  “Not since Egypt won the African [soccer] Cup have Egyptians come together under a common banner.”   

The tragic incident revealed security gaps, both for allowing Axel W. access to the courtroom without being searched, and for permitting him to stab el-Sherbini multiple times before police intervened, if ineptly.  It also highlighted the German government’s tin ear given that el-Sherbini’s murder was sure to garner international attention.  Chancellor Angela Merkel’s condolences, expressed publicly and to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek on the margins of the recent G-8 meetings in Italy, came too late. 

But the febrile atmosphere in Egypt says more about that country than Germany.  It demonstrates, once again, the counterproductive victim mentality afflicting the Arab world.  Though racism exists in Germany, there’s no reason to believe it’s rife.  A spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in Berlin said as much: “It was a criminal incident, and doesn’t mean that a popular persecution of Muslims is taking place.”  But too many on the so-called Arab Street see plots and conspiracies where none exist.  Autocratic governments in the region, happy to let their own people vent grievances that might otherwise be channeled their way, all too often play along.  Such demagoguery seems largely absent in this case, though some Egyptian politicians, eager to defray attention from their own many failures, have engaged in this type of shameless pandering.

The reaction in Egypt to el-Sherbini’s murder faintly echoes the firestorm created by the publication in 2005 in Denmark of an insulting cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist.  In both instances, slights by a marginal minority were seen as evidence supporting sweeping indictments of the non-Muslim world.  Such tilting at windmills serves no one.  Energies should be invested into countering real injustices closer to home rather than illusory ones abroad.  Indeed, since el-Sherbini’s murder, waves of bombings have killed scores in Iraq, a vicious crackdown by Iran’s clerical regime has continued, and a resurgent Taliban has murdered dozens in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  In every case, Muslims deaths have come at the hands of Muslims, yet a conspicuous silence pervades the Arab Street.  No demonstrators to be found there. 

Back in Germany, a country with a tortured history with racism, el-Sherbini’s murder has precipitated a national catharsis.  Uncomfortable questions are being asked about how widespread hate is there.  Such is the case in healthy societies that can look critically in the mirror.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be wise
And listen to those doctor’s lies?
Only eating what I should
All those things we’re told are good.

Low in cholesterol and sugar free
Rich in vitamins A, B, C, and E
Anti-oxidants, high fiber, soy
The heart-wise diet, cardiologists enjoy

But can one live for good health alone
Condemned for culinary joys one must atone?
No! My gourmand’s creed rejects such sham,
“I eat — therefore I am.”

We Americans have our own national myths, foremost among them that ours is a meritocracy.  It’s a long held view, dating to our plucky forefathers who saw their revolt against the Old World in part as a break with feudalism and its insuperable class divide that later inspired the revolutionary theories of Marx and Engels.  The fruit of their successful insurrection was a society that empowered white landowning males only, but improvements to the experiment have been made with time, enlargening the ranks of the enfranchised.

And what of our erstwhile colonial masters?  The sun may have finally set on the British Empire, that great colossus that once stretched from the East to West Indies, but it never did for the class system.  Accents and even postal codes can reveal, instantaneously, station and rank in the social pecking order in the same way that skin tone confers racial categorization.  A nuclear physicist with a cockney accent remains, above all, a cockney who happens to be a nuclear scientist.  But is it really that simple?  Are Brits and other continentals as incorrigible snobs as Americans are committed egalitarians?  Not quite.

Social mobility, it turns out, is actually greater is some European countries than in the US, where income inequality has grown to Gilded Age-like proportions at the same time that movement between classes has shrunk.  Even Scandinavian bogeymen Sweden and Finland, much maligned for their (gasp!) socialist proclivities that allegedly sucks dry all personal initiative, are home to more movement between economic strata.  Consider higher education, the supposed crown jewel of a merit-based system said to blunt the jagged edge of entrenched entitlement.  One recent study found that three-quarters of the students at America’s most prestigious 146 universities come from families in the richest socio-economic quartile.  Just three percent come from families in the poorest fourth.  As a result, a visitor to one of these campuses has 25 times the chance of crossing paths with a rich student as a poor one.  In light of such socio-economic homogeneity, higher education might be considered a sort of affirmative action for the rich. 

The story is also more complex than the prevailing myths suggest across the Atlantic.  The class system remains intact in Europe, but it’s subtler than ever.  It wouldn’t necessary seem so given David Cameron’s background.  Cameron, the leader of the Tories who polls indicate will be the next Prime Minister, is a blue blooded descendent of King William IV and graduate of Eton, that most posh of British boarding schools.  His wife is a baronet, his number two an heir to the baronetcy, and at least a dozen of his top advisors are also Etonians.  When asked to compare Cameron to an automobile, 80 percent of respondents named a Rolls Royce.

Cameron is working hard to “detoxify the brand,” or counter his party’s elitist image.  He rides a bicycle to work, talks reverently about the National Health Service, and downplays tax cuts.  Why is this important?  The elaborate pantomime indicates a public appetite for middle class authenticity, or at least perception thereof.  The point shouldn’t be belabored, though.  Brits still proudly trumpet their rarified lineage in the same way that Americans boast about their humble roots.  Therein lies a critical difference between Old World from New: Americans think class doesn’t exist and act accordingly while Brits and other Europeans know it does and strain to pretend otherwise against their better instincts. 

A hard look at reality would reveal for Americans our national myth that merit and nothing else determines those who get ahead from those who don’t.  Class exists here despite our pretensions otherwise.  Europeans are similarly blinkered, believing that the rotten ways of the past are no more.  They’re not.  Classism is alive and well, if somewhat diminished.  One cynic said that history is the lies we all agree on.  The same might more accurately about national myths.

Historian John Lewis Gaddis said of the end of the Cold War, “Communism had promised a better life but failed to deliver.” The statement captures an essential truth: political systems that endure provide those living under them with the potential to improve their quality of life. It’s Darwinian logic.  What was true of the Soviet Union is also true of other repressive regimes.  Iran may be in the grips of a transition away from an unworkable system, but it is hardly the only state in the region teetering on a knife’s edge.

The Arab world is a backwater.  Repressive leadership holds back the region’s 325 million people.  The Arab Human Development Report issued by the UN Development Programme noted, “Caught between oppression at home and violation from abroad, Arabs are increasingly excluded from determining their own future.”  The signs of stagnation are many.  The non-fossil fuel exports of the entire region are less than those of Finland, which has a population roughly equal to Jordan.  Arabic was the scientific lingua franca for centuries, but today it lacks innovation: between 1980-2000, 370 industrial patents were issued to Arab nationals; South Korea alone issued 16,000 in the same period.  Spain translates as many books as do all Arab countries.

Bleak economic prospects are feeding discontent.  Annually, 700,000 Egyptian university graduates vie for just 200,000 jobs.  With that country’s population growing at two percent a year, a pace that, if unchecked, will push its total numbers to 139 million in 50 years, the gap between job applicants and available jobs is apt to increase dramatically.  It’s the same elsewhere.  Nearly 25 percent of Arabs aged 15 to 24 are unemployed, compared with a global average of 14 percent.  With its extraordinarily young population—32 percent of Arabs are between 15 and 29—the problem is acute.  If demography is destiny, trouble is brewing.

Yet for all their similarities, Iran and its Arab neighbors are different in at least one critical way.  While opposition to the Shah before Iran’s revolution in 1979 originated in the mosque, since few other outlets of dissent existed, the reverse is now true.  The mosque, largely co-opted by a discredited clergy, renders secular civil society alternatives, such as university campuses and Internet chat rooms, the only venues for dissent.  Mir-Hussein Mousavi’s supporters may wear green, the color of Islam, and chant from rooftops “God is Great,” but theirs is a struggle against religious absolutism.

The Arab world, by contrast, is largely governed by nominally secular authoritarian regimes.  Thus, absent public space to voice dissent, religion fills the breach.  Egypt is an example.  Hosni Mubarak, the sly Pharaoh of the Nile, has reigned for 28 years.  Political opposition, thwarted at every turn, must exist outside the public square, principally the mosque.  And it does: the Islamic Brotherhood is the only real opposition movement.  A fair vote in the country might even bring the group to power.  Even Saudi Arabia, whose ruling family is aligned with the Wahabi clergy from which its authority is legitimized, is home to an even more religiously radical opposition movement that gains currency in the absence of public space and/or political means to express dissent.

Thus, Iran and Arab states are analogues: a potential Persian revolution would depose the clerical oligarchy, rendering unto Mousavi the things which are Mousavi’s, and unto the Ayatollah the things that are Ayatollah’s, while upheaval in the Arab world will do the opposite, empowering a clerical elite in place of secular dictators.  The ability of theocracies to raise living standards, of course, is highly suspect.  Iran demonstrates that.  But it took that country more than a generation for dissatisfaction with the regime to reach a tipping point.  Similarly, the installation of theocratic regimes in the Arab world might take decades to run their course.  Such are the potential negative implications of the otherwise inspiring images coming from Iran today.

The Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960 may have ushered in the television age, but its apotheosis came during the 2000 presidential election when a demonstrable incompetent faced a wooden wonk.  Bush ran, above all, as a swell fellow, the kind of guy with whom you’d like to drink a beer.  His policy initiatives, aside from a massively irresponsible tax cut for the most affluent, were as anodyne as his self-described philosophy, compassionate conservatism.  That this vacuous late-bloomer became his party’s nominee shocked even his parents.  He had a secret weapon, though: Al Gore.  As whip smart and experienced as he was drab and dull, Gore resembled a patronizing college professor.  He offered competence, in contrast to the bumbling jester running against him, but with no sugar to help it go down.  That Gore won the popular vote doesn’t detract from the larger point, particularly since Bush prevailed four years later in a repeat of the same scenario.

Perhaps aware of the inadequacy of the criteria we rely so heavily on when making judgments about whom to place our trust in, we look to candidates’ private lives for clues.  It’s a fool’s errand.  There’s no evidence that virtuous leadership is better assured by picking leaders with virtuous private lives, as do-gooders at home aren’t necessary able to do the public’s good.  Were it otherwise, Richard Nixon might be on Mount Rushmore and the womanizing Martin Luther King wouldn’t be honored with a national holiday. 

Yet we persist.  A familiar charade ensues, on par with the tired cliché of a politician kissing a baby, where political candidates trot out their spouses and children to testify to their character.  But what good does it do know that Michelle Obama loves her husband or that all five of Mitt Romney’s sons think he’s a fabulous dad?  Does that impart any useful information?  Are we now better able to judge how either might handle a world crisis?  Worse is the hypocrisy of such theatre.

Running for office is unfathomably demanding.  A presidential campaign, for example, lasts over two years, during which time candidates make thousands of stops across the country in between media availabilities, fundraisers, and countless other events.  The bruising process may be the best way to select someone able to handle the rigors of the job, but it surely strains family life.  Therein lies the paradox: anyone who truly puts family first would never run, much less serve as president, prompting one former political insider to say that seeking the office requires almost pathological narcissism.

If parading spouses and children is a grotesque pretense, why, then, do we revel when it’s proven, typically during a sex scandal when the “family values” candidate fails to live up to billing?  The joke is on us, as we set the bogus standards that our political leaders must strive to achieve.  It’s our own misguided search for indicators about character that are to blame.  If we stuck with the one relevant measure of a candidate’s qualifications, their public record on matters of policy, then we’d avoid the whole mess.

The irony is that the personal foibles of our most storied leader’s are well known.  John Kennedy was a pathological philanderer and the great Supreme Court Justice William Douglas an egotistical loner.  Andrew Jackson had a volcanic temper and held grudges while many acquaintances considered Lincoln cold and brooding.  In the wholeness of time, we see our leaders as humans, with the many frailties that go along with the species.  But in the moment we are less forgiving, asking the impossible of them on matters that aren’t relevant while often overlooking the most important measures of those matters that are.  Such are the values in our “family values” tabloid age.

The settlement-monster is a bipartisan creation.  Parties of the left and right have abetted their proliferation since Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.  The last full year of Netanyahu’s first term as Prime Minister, 1998, saw the number of construction starts for settlements hit a post-Oslo high, but Ehud Barak’s Labor government in 2000 soon eclipsed that record.  Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, once unapologetically hawkish, came to appreciate the dangers presented by construction outside the pre-Six-Day War borders.  Israel, he said candidly, would have to withdraw from “nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories…without this, there will be no peace.”  Yet, even he could not stop the expansion of outposts, which, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, have maniacally taken on a life of their own.

It is in this historical context that Netanyahu’s riposte to Obama’s speech in Cairo, where the latter condemned the settlements, saying the US did not recognize their legitimacy, should be seen for what it is: an artful dodge.  All hinges on what is termed “natural growth,” or expansion said to accommodate the needs of growing families.  Netanyahu is holding firm that such growth should be permitted, but the Roadmap is clear on this point, requiring a freeze on all settlement activity.  Period. 

Key members of Netanyahu’s cabinet are similarly bullheaded.  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in a settlement himself, has said that a total freeze is unacceptable, while Minister for Housing and Construction Ariel Attias represents the settlement-friendly ultra-Orthodox Shas Party.  The ambiguous status of other developments being considered is equally ominous.  These include plans for 3,000 housing units in East Jerusalem that, according to Peace Now, would “deal a fatal blow to a political solution based on the principle of two states for two peoples,” and an additional 73,300 housing units in the West Bank, 15,000 of which already received an initial go-ahead.

Why do the settlements matter?  Writing in Ha’aretz, Aron Raskas, an American attorney, doesn’t think they should.  He characterizes the hardships imposed by Israeli settlements as “polished Palestinian propaganda.”  Updating the nineteenth century credo about Zionism—”A land without a people for a people without a land”—Raskas goes on to assert that the settlements occupy the large swaths of “unsettled expanses of the West Bank.”  In fact, the settlements’ area of municipal control encompasses 40 percent of the territory.  But at least Raskas tries to justify the unjustifiable logically.  Others don’t. 

Bradley Burston, also writing in Ha’aretz, quotes Arelah, an Israeli settler.  While watching Palestinian land burn from a fire he set, Arelah dismissed the possibility of being forcibly removed from his home.  “At most, [Israeli forces will] demolish one measly shack, so they’ll have something to show…that kushon [a Hebrew slur equivalent to ‘nigger’] in the United States,” he said, “in order to have an etnan [the biblical term for a fee paid to a prostitute] to give him.”

Such views are not representative of those of the half million Israeli settlers.  Most have made their home across the Green Line because of economic inducements, not religious conviction, and would willingly leave if fairly compensated.  Still, the Israeli Mullahs occupying what they see as land bequeathed to them by God are a threat.  Indeed, Arelah promises more preemptive strikes against Palestinians for actions taken by the Israeli government to remove him and his religiously inspired brethren.  But perhaps more difficult to overcome will be widespread views borne out in a recent poll that found 58 percent of Israelis opposed to the US demand to freeze all settlement construction.

Some claim that the settlements are a red herring, a convenient whipping boy.  While it’s true that Palestinians are typically as full of complaints as they are empty of proposals, the settlements, as Olmert realized, are a threat to Israel, not just the Palestinians, as each outpost puts a two-state solution farther out of reach.  Not that the likes of Arelah care.  Such is their dream of Eretz Israel.

It’s time to reassess the US mission in Afghanistan as the eighth anniversary approaches of the military campaign that removed the Taliban from power.  Progress is undeniable.  The country has a new constitution, elected president and parliament, and an independent judiciary.  Trucks laden with consumer goods transit new multilane highways that cross the rugged countryside and wares are hawked in crowded bizarres in Afghani cities.  The status of women has also dramatically improved.  The Afghan Constitution ensures women 25 percent of the seats in parliament— they currently hold 91 of the 361 seats in the body—and millions of girls are in school receiving an education.  But such change is set against a grim backdrop.

If Afghanistan is not a failed state then it’s failing.  The central government doesn’t have control over the territory within its own borders, as a Taliban insurgency is raging, particularly in southern Afghanistan.  Roadside bombings have surged by 80 percent this year.  Efforts to build an Afghani army and police force to provide security are fairing poorly.  The US has spent $15 billion building Afghan forces, which now number 90,000, but the country is years away from being able to provide its own security.  Building a viable police force is similarly stalled. 

Corruption in the country is endemic, undermining the legitimacy of the central government.  Fraud and abuse is ubiquitous, including at the highest levels.  One of President Hamid Karzai’s brothers, Ahmad Wali, head of the Kandahar Provincial Council, is widely rumored to be involved in drug trafficking.  He recently threatened to assault a journalist who questioned him about it.  Another Karzai brother acquired Afghanistan’s only concrete factory as well as ownership rights over significant tracts of state land.  Yet another brother recently drove away with impunity from a car accident he caused in Kabul that left five dead.

Then there’s the drug problem.  More than 90 percent of the world’s opium comes from Afghan poppies, which are being cultivated at record levels.  Last year, Afghani exports of the opiate exceeded $3.4 billion.  Monies from the illicit trade finances the Taliban, who reap over $300 million annually from it, and lines the pockets of crooked officials.  Indeed, many top ranking government ministers live in opulent “poppy palaces” with rents that top $10,000 a month.  The impact of the opiate trade on Afghanistan prompted Hillary Clinton to characterize the country as a “narco-state.”

Obama’s new Afghan policy seeks to stabilize the country ahead of presidential and provincial council election in August.  An additional 17,000 combat troops will be sent to the country, mostly to the restive southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, bringing total American forces to 68,000, its highest levels ever.  NATO will contribute another 30,000 more troops.  The plan also supposedly sets out benchmarks, but specifics have yet to be disclosed.  Congress is skeptical.

Representative James McGovern echoed sentiment shared by many of his colleagues when admitting, “I get this sinking feeling that we are getting sucked into a war [in Afghanistan] without end.”  House Appropriation Chariman David Obey was even more blunt.  “The president feels obligated to give it a shot [in Afghanistan],” he said in a recent hearing.  “So fine.  We’ll help him give it a shot for a year.”  Asked if he envisioned Congress cutting off funding for the war altogether if the situation didn’t improve, Obey responded, “If it becomes a fool’s errand, I would hope so.”

Obey and others are questioning whether the $2 billion a month the US spends in Afghanistan is throwing good money after bad.  Rampant corruption, a robust drug trade, and impossibly tangled relations between ethnic tribes in the country feed the disquiet.  Afghanistan may be a better place than it was under the Taliban, but such a yardstick says nothing about whether such gains are sustainable.  Would Afghanistan soon fall to the Taliban if NATO departed?  Probably.  Can NATO prevent Afghanistan from falling to the Taliban if its government is hopelessly corrupt and its tribes so at odds?  Probably not.  It’s a riddle with no easy answer eight years on.

Still with that new car smell, I took it on my next business trip to New York City.  On a city highway, seeing the traffic ahead backing up, I gently applied the brakes.  Through the windshield all was a blur of rushing buildings and when the car came to a stop the Citation had done a 180-degree turn and before me the oncoming cars were swerving to avoid me.  Shaken, I turned the car around and drove immediately to the nearest Chevrolet dealer.  After thoroughly examining the car, the mechanic assured me it was in perfect condition.  “That skid must have been just an oil slick on the road,” he said.  I was not convinced.  Not long after, approaching a crossroad on a country road, I gently applied the brakes.  The car once again began to swerve but this time I was able to wrestle it back on to the road.  Immediately, I drove to my local Chevrolet dealer and was again assured that the brakes were fine and the problem most likely was a pothole.

A friend asked to borrow the Citation.  With some hesitation, I lent it to him with a warning about the brake problems.   An hour later he returned to tell his story.  Seeing a fire engine entering an intersection, he gently applied the brakes. “If the fire engine driver had not seen me spinning down the road and gotten out of my way, I could have been killed,” he reported.  I took the car back to the garage only to again be assured the brakes were fine.  I knew that there was something seriously wrong and made a phone call directly to the General Motors Headquarters in Detroit.  They were very sympathetic and had me speak to the head of customer relations, who insisted that they had never heard of Citations having such problems.  Perhaps, he suggested, I didn’t know how to handle a front-wheel drive car.

 The vehicle was a potential deathtrap but how could I sell it in good conscience to anyone else?  Besides, it was our only car and we could not afford to junk it.  It was decided that only I would drive it, very carefully, and prepared for the worst when the brakes had to be applied.

A year later a friend sent me an article from a well-known car magazine. Under the dramatic headline, “The Citation’s Atomic-Death Skids,” the author described how even before the car was shipped to dealers GM knew that there was a serious problem with the front brakes on the standard shift models.  Having done a careful cost analysis, GM decided it would be cheaper to fight any liability claims than to retrofit the car’s brakes.  The article reported that to date 16 had died as a result of such brake related accidents.
 Soon after I received a recall notice from GM with instructions to bring my car to the dealer immediately.  It was not for any brake repair they insisted, but for some minor engine adjustments.   When I picked up the car it was clear that something more had been done.  After this recall the car never again went into a “Atomic-Death Skid” though braking remained erratic. 

I hated driving that Citation but was even angrier with GM and their dealers for lying to me.  My life and that of my wife and children had been nothing more than a business calculation.  It was a company morally bankrupt long before its problems became economic.

Barkley isn’t running but Roy Moore is.  You might remember Moore, the former State Supreme Court Chief Justice who gained national attention in 2003 for refusing a federal court order to remove a 2.6-ton monument depicting the Ten Commandments from a state judicial building’s rotunda.  Moore is also known for his opinion in a 2002 case in which he justified punishing homosexuality, calling it “detestable and abominable” and an “inherent evil.”  He went on to write that those who engage in homosexual acts should be subject to “confinement and even execution.”  If Moore seems slightly unhinged that’s because he is.  In his autobiography, he recalled sleeping between sandbags in Vietnam for protection against hand grenades tossed under his cot by his own men.

Moore lost his previous bid for high office to Bob Riley.  Riley, an evangelical Christian who hosts Bible classes at the state Capitol in Montgomery, energized conservatives when first elected in 2002, but soon earned their ire by proposing a sweeping overhaul of the state’s regressive tax code: Alabama’s lowest-earning one-fifth of taxpayers pay approximately 10 percent of their incomes in state and local levies.  The richest one percent of residents, however, contributes just 3.7 percent because personal income tax is levied at just two, four, or five percent, depending on income and filing status.

Alabama instead relies on sales and excise taxes, which account for 51 percent of all state and local revenue.  The national average is roughly 36 percent.  Thus, the state’s coffers rely on consumer spending, which swings wildly depending on economic conditions.  A related problem is the state’s underinvestment in social programs.  Expenditures on education per student, for example, is almost a quarter below national levels.  Access to healthcare is also poor.  Only one in four new mothers in Alabama has adequate prenatal care, contributing to the state’s high infant mortality rate, which is higher than that of Latvia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Riley’s plan would have cut taxes on lower income brackets while raising taxes on property and income from those in higher brackets, producing a more equatable system.  This would also have generated $1.2 billion in additional revenues, primarily earmarked for education.  Riley justified the sweeping move on religious grounds and even won the backing of some of the evangelical congregations, but the initiative failed overwhelmingly.  Riley recovered from the setback but his term-limited tenure ends in 2010. 

When announcing last Monday his second bid for governor, Judge Moore glossed over some of the state’s glaring problems like its under-funded educational system before delving into meatier matters, such as the country’s Christian character and the perils of gay marriage.  He also told supporters that the state’s economy “will do just fine if the federal government gets out of the way and lets the free market work,” conveniently ignoring that Alabama gets $1.71 from Washington for every $1 it pays, the sixth highest rate in the nation.  In front of other audiences, Moore has channeled George Wallace by promising to defend states’ rights.

Moore’s chances are good, not least because the Democrats may well put up four-term congressman Artur Davis.  Davis is competent but black, and many experts think that even though the US is ready for a black President, Alabama isn’t prepared for a black governor.  Indeed, just ten percent of the state’s eligible white population voted for Obama.  There’s no need to despair, though.  Moore can’t make a hash of things should he win.  Alabama, as Charles Barkley pointed out, is already 48th.

According to one critic, Walls’ memoir reads like a modern-day fairly tale, featuring a plucky child overcoming the machinations of an evil elder.  It’s an apt analogy, as Walls’ upbringing is a catalogue of horrors.  Her parents fancy themselves free spirits unwilling to bow down before the alter of bourgeois values, a pretense that serves as a convenient excuse to shirk responsibility, including parenting.  This leaves many scars, some literally.  At the age of three, Jeannette mistakenly sets herself afire when left alone to boil hotdogs, a horrific accident that requires skin grafts and six-weeks of hospitalization.  Soon after her release, she returns to her culinary adventures, as her parents subscribe to the view that children’s development is best served by leaving them to their own devices, regardless of the consequences.

Rex Walls, Jeannette’s father, is a charismatic rogue afflicted with debilitating alcoholism that precludes his holding down a job.  When sober, he’s deeply caring, particularly to Jeannette, his favorite child, but when liquored up he’s terrifyingly violent and, most often, absent.  Walls’ mother, Mary, is a trained teacher, but she refuses to work lest it sap her creative energy that is dedicated, if sparingly, to artistic endeavors.

The tale of woe begins in the southwestern desert where the Walls live an itinerant lifestyle, hopping from one town to the next when creditors come calling.  Lecherous neighbors, sexual deviants, and bullying classmates haunt Jeannette and her three siblings, but more threatening still are her parents.  Rex and Mary Walls do not so much as neglect their children, but almost willfully undermine them with calculated nonchalance. 

From the sun baked mining towns in the west, the family moves on a whim to a town in Appalachia that, according to Rex Walls, has a river with the highest level of fecal matter in North America.  The family moves into a decrepit house occupied by rats.  The reader can almost hear the dueling banjos as Walls’ describes the place.  It is a milieu more Dickensian than Dickens.  Here again, the children must navigate the ghoulish characters seeking to devour them, from stone-throwing toughs to sexually molesting grandparents.  Yet, as ever, Walls’ parents remain aloof.  Or worse.  A fund the resourceful children set up to escape the place is plundered by Rex Walls, who wastes it on booze.

Jeannette’s smarts ultimately see her through.  She’s a precocious student and is able, amazingly, to gain acceptance to Barnard.  Her siblings, unified in their struggle, also escape to New York City, where their parents ultimately join them.  The story, which ends with a stunning revelation, is told in minimalist fashion with little reflection or analysis.  It was what it was.  The same attitude is shown towards Rex and Mary Walls, whose behavior is so shockingly reprehensible.  When asked in an interview whether she had forgiven her parents, Walls replied, “It’s not a matter of forgiveness because that implies that [my parents] hurt me, and if you accept that, then that means that you’re a victim.  It’s not a matter of me being a kind, benevolent person, but more being a pragmatist.  You move on, you accept it for what it was and you make the most of it.”

What Walls’ calls “pragmatism” is hard to digest, but she might have a point.  Forgiveness, for the lack of a better word, is a well-rooted principle.  In Christianity, it features prominently.  Paul says, “Forgive anyone who does you wrong, just as Christ has forgiven you.”  The sentiment has practical application, as anger is often counterproductive, undermining those who harbor it.  Indeed, Walls’ acceptance of that which she couldn’t change might explain her ability to overcome such hardship.  Still, for most, forgiveness remains an elusive aspiration.  Readers of The Glass Castle may well find it more so.

Advocates of “traditional” marriage argue that such unions have always brought together only males and females.  “God’s authentic plan,” Pope John Paul said about the family unit, entails “the stable and faithful union of a man and a woman.”  Really?  The Biblical blueprint on marriage appears muddled at best and medieval at worst.  Solomon practiced polygamy, taking 700 wives of royal birth; Sarah, being infertile, gave her husband Abraham her female slave as a sort of spouse; and David kept many concubines.  In Deuteronomy, the ancient Israelites killed every adult male Midianite and made captive virgins their wives.  Are these “family values” worth cherishing? 

Selective interpretation of sacred texts is the hallmark of religious fundamentalists.  Ironically, the same people often accuse their ideological foes of self-serving extemporizing when it comes to matters of morality.  It’s a common refrain, variations of which are manifested in other areas of public life.  Self-identified judicial originalists who decry interpretations of law that stray from the Constitution’s original intent as understood by them represent a secular analogue to the religious absolutists.  Such is the authoritarian mindset.  Which brings us back to gay marriage. 

Bogus nostalgia that sees the ancients as paragons of virtue dovetails with a willful ignorance about the here and now.  If, as is often claimed, marriage is a bedrock institution underpinning civilization, then we’re in deep trouble, as half of all unions end in divorce.  We’ve seen the enemy and it’s us.  The miserable track record begs the question how could gay marriage possibly undermine an institution already so undermined by heterosexuals?

The answer, of course, is that gay marriage represents no threat to the supposedly sacred institution.  Gays do represent a convenient whipping boy in an era when manifestations of intolerance are increasingly frowned upon, however.  Racism once worked electoral wonders—the Southern Strategy leveraging white resentment over desegregation being the most notorious example—but these days it’s passé.  Homophobia is an exception.  Such hate is both socially acceptable and legally sanctioned.  The loophole in an otherwise tolerant society provides an opportunity for mischief. 

Karl Rove, like his mentor Lee Atwater, the brains behind the Willy Horton ad, understands the power of wedge issues.  His strategy during President Bush’s successful 2004-reelection campaign entailed turning out the evangelical vote in key swing states by ensuring that each one had ballot initiatives banning gay marriage.  Interestingly, Rove’s stepfather, who raised him and with whom he was very close, came out of the closet late in life.  Politics, apparently, is strictly business for Rove. 

A Rove-like strategy exploiting homophobia may be deployed to beat back the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.  “Abortion is in some sense a stale issue that has been fought over many times, but gay marriages is very much up for grabs,” said Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal group.  “Gay marriage will be bigger than abortion.”  Whether the issue features prominently in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings remains to be seen; nevertheless, it will surely serve as a potent backdrop, not least because of the recent decision by the California Supreme Court upholding a voter-approved law restoring a ban on same-sex marriages and recent legislation and legal opinions allowing the practice in Iowa and several New England states.

Levey and his like may win the occasional battle by whipping up hate but the war is lost.  Gay acceptance is growing.  According to Gallup, 75 percent of those between 18-34 years of age support “homosexuality as an acceptable alternative lifestyle.”  A similar trend exists for acceptance of gay marriage.  While this is good news for those favoring pluralism, reactionary elements won’t welcome it.  Still, there are always new minorities to be maligned, as the specter of the “other” remains potent.  Such grim realities suggest that even though gays may have won this fight, those who would deny them their rights have reason to be gay.

I have just finished reading Martin Goodman’s Rome and Jerusalem, another book relating another difficult history, that between the Jews and the Roman Empire in both Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora.  Goodman points out that the Jews also had problems living with the previous Hellenistic Empires, and if one wants to delve into the Biblical stories, the ancient Jews were certainly unloved in the Egypt of the pharaohs, or by their various neighbors in Canaan. Why does it appear that what is now called anti-Semitism seems to predate Christianity and perhaps stretches far back into pre-history?  Might we some day stumble upon an ancient cave painting with graffiti showing stick figures aiming their arrows at fleeing bearded Jews instead of wild buffalos?  Probably not.  The examples reveal what might be the fundamental cause of anti-Semitism, monotheism.

In the polytheistic world, the laws of fate and nature, much of good and bad, were explained as originating in the actions of the gods.  Such deities were easily understood, very human, and though they might each have their own personality problems, they at least generally tolerated one another. This is not to say that wars and brutality did not exist; on the contrary, such conflicts were often recorded as of epic proportions.   But they were carried out in keeping with the universal laws of human nature: straightforward conquest and greed.

In the ancient world, one tribe—others probably existed but have disappeared—insisted that there was just one god and that they were his chosen people.  Not just that, but all those other gods were branded as inferior and then relegated to figments of ignorant superstition.  Such beliefs did not ingratiate this tribe to its neighbors.  To make matters worse, this tribe was not content to settle in some far off backwater, but rather claimed as its Holy Land a spot right at a major cross road of commerce.  From this Holy Land large numbers of the more adventurous went off to live among the multi-god believers, carrying with them this potentially offensive one-god concept.  Such a belief came with many rules and specific customs that even in far off lands required its believers to stand apart from their neighbors.  At home, the one god, all powerful, jealous, and intolerant, justified conquest not for traditional selfish ends, but in his name condemned to the sword those who stood in his way, the warrior and the innocent alike.

Despite the Jews’ tumultuous history, this monotheism caught on—it is seductive, if not comforting, being a member of a chosen people.  With the rise of Christianity over multi-god paganism, followed later by Islam, one might have felt that there would be some toleration among these one-god believers.  After all, they all agreed that while he might have different names in different nations, he was basically the same deity.  But matters got far worse.  As fights within families, intolerance and bitterness only increased and have led to persecutions and slaughters to the present day.

Does either of these two books offer an answer to the historical animosity?  No, but after reading them I would make a suggestion: a return to polytheism. Not that of the Greek or Romans, as colorful and convenient as their gods were, but an Allah, Jehovah, Christ, and others, all accepted as valid gods.  Each god will be modest in the demands he makes on his particular chosen, promoting a live and let live outlook, and perhaps even living up to his Biblical billing as a loving god.

Chávez knows the power of media.  Before being sent to prison after attempting a military coup in 1992, Chávez went before the cameras, calling an end to the uprising “por ahora” - for now.  The appearance caused a sensation, laying the foundation for his eventual election after his release from jail.  To prevent his opposition from using the airwaves to similar effect, he has gone after various outlets.  The Venezuelan government recently declined to renew the license for a large media concern because it allegedly represented an enemy of the state, leaving Globovisión as the last outlet in the hands of the opposition.  It’s also being targeted.  “I recommend you take a tranquilizer and get into gear,” Chávez warned its operators, “because if not, I am going to do what is necessary.”  It was not an idle threat.  Yesterday, agents from the country’s intelligence service raided the offices of Globovisión’s president. 

Other “pitiyanquis” face a similar fate.  Last month, Manuel Rosales, a former mayor who ran unsuccessfully against Chávez in 2006, received political asylum in Peru after Venezuelan authorities brought corruption charges against him.  Various prominent opposition leaders also face similar accusations, as does a former defense Minister who fell out of favor with Chávez.  The new opposition mayor of Caracas is in no such legal jeopardy, but instead has had his budget taken away from him by Venezuela’s rubberstamp parliament.

Further examples of Chávez’s power grab abound.  The strongman now controls PDVSA, the state oil company, after firing more than eighteen thousand striking employees and replacing them with loyalists.  More recently, he signed legislation allowing the state to “seize any goods/estate” for the national interest, giving legal authority to ongoing expropriations.  “There are no private lands, only occupants and producers,” Chávez told his sycophantic studio audience on Aló Presidente.

The poor deserve their fair share, Chávez reminds, as if to justify his tyranny, not just the rich, who he likens to “animals in man-like form.”  Social programs funded with oil revenues are one of his pet projects.  The so-called missions provide medical care, education services, and food for the country’s poor.  But like so much in the country, the missions are riddled with corruption.  One study found an inverse relationship between the price of oil and the scope and quality of the programs, suggesting systematic skimming of funds.  The missions tell a larger story.  Ten years after Chávez assumed power, Venezuela remains desperately poor.

Domestic setbacks have not deterred Chávez from scheming abroad.  A raid by Colombian forces into Ecuador uncovered apparent links between the Venezuelan government and the FARC, a guerilla movement that the US and EU views as a terrorist organization, and the seizure of $800,000 being carried by a Venezuelan-American on route to Buenos Aires implicated Chávez in a covert plan to aid the presidential campaign of then-Argentinean presidential candidate Christina Kirchner.   All the while, he’s snuggled up to Vladimir Putin, Iran’s unhinged president, and his Cuban idol whom he bizarrely asks in broken English on Aló Presidente , “How are you, Fidel?”

Chávez’s march towards absolute power continues.  But his triumphs at beating down his domestic opponents are not translating abroad.  Plunging oil prices have clipped his wings, leaving him with less baksheesh to divvy out.  While Venezuela once outspent the US in foreign aid in Latin America by a factor of five, this year it will spend only $8 billion on financial assistance, down from $79 billion in 2008.  Chávez is undeterred, though.  Approval of a recent referendum will allow him to reach his goal of staying in power until 2050, when he’ll be 96.  So, even though times may be difficult for the Caudillo of Caracus, his machinations have been quieted, but only por ahora.

We play with this bare-flesh mound
Not humans – just photos in this place
To shame them so they will talk
Talk from the pain of this disgrace.

If shame won’t work there’s always dogs
Or wires fixed to groin and hand
Fear of shock, the threat of jaws
This isn’t torture, for torture’s banned.

We’re free to terrorize the terrorist
Real or innocent how can we tell
We now play by their cruel rules
So in degrading them we degrade 
           ourselves as well.

Directed by James Toback, Tyson chronicles the fighter’s life, from his trying upbringing in the tough Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant though his climb up the heavyweight ranks to his ultimate downfall.  The film distills 30 hours of interviews with the ex-champ, interspersing it with clips from the ring, yet it’s still lacking.  Relying on Tyson’s own words alone—there is no narration—leaves many glaring holes.  But more problematic is the film’s subject matter.  Tyson’s profoundly disturbed.  Watching him is a lurid spectacle not unlike watching a brutal boxing match.  It’s grotesque, if transfixing.

Tyson’s early life was a catalog of horrors.  His father abandoned the family when he was two, leaving his mother to rear her three children alone.  He witnessed her being beaten by multiple boyfriends and, when he was sixteen, she died.  By then he had already accumulated an extensive rap sheet, having been arrested 38 times by the age of 13.  He might have never emerged from a life of crime but for a serendipitous encounter at a juvenile detention center in upstate New York.  There he met a counselor, a former boxer, who introduced the troubled teen to the sport.

The rest of the story is well-trod.  Tyson, under the tutelage of the famous trainer Cus D’Amato, who taught him how to ply his trade, tore through the ranks.  At under 6’-0”, Tyson typically was physically overmatched in the ring, but the accuracy of his punches, his defensive skills, and, above all else, frightening tenacity, made short shrift of his opponents; he won 26 of his first 28 fights by knockout, 16 in the first round.  In 1986, three and a half years after turning pro, Tyson knocked out Trever Berbick, becoming at 20 the youngest heavyweight champ ever.

Tyson dominated the ring for several years, becoming an icon in the process, a corporate spokesman pitching Pepsi, Nintendo, and, ironically, given his later troubles, the New York Police Department, FBI, and DEA.  But his life soon unraveled.  His downfall, a cliché of sorts for boxers, involved duplicitous managers, opportunistic groupies, and hard drugs.  A marriage to actress Robin Givens collapsed not long after the she accused him of abuse while sitting at his side during a nationally aired interview with Barbara Walters.  In 1992, an Indiana court convicted Tyson of raping a beauty contestant and was sent to prison for three years.  By that time, he had already lost his title, as his skills in the ring declined in parallel with troubles in his personal life. 

Tyson managed to regain the heavyweight title in March 1996, but promptly lost it in November of that year to Evander Holyfield.  A rematch ended in Tyson’s disqualification after he famously bit Holyfield’s ears.  Tyson’s career finally ended in 2005 after he lost two straight bouts to journeymen opponents. 

Tyson today, as ever, is lost, confused, and, alternatively, self-critical and accusatory.  In Toback’s documentary, the fighter, in his high-pitched voice, claims that he has lost $300 million over the last few decades, much of that because of his dissolute habits.  Framed in tight headshots that accentuate his self-loathing tattoo of a Maori warrior symbol over his left eye, he also claims the mantle of victimhood, lashing out at former trainers, managers, and a litany of others who wronged him.  He wants to be loved in one instance and to “ravish” women the next.  It’s a pathological display of someone in great need of medical treatment for more than just drug abuse.

In another interview several years back, Tyson said, “ “I’ll never be happy.  I believe I’ll die alone.  I would want it that way.  I’ve been a loner all my life with my secrets and my pain.  I’m really lost, but I’m trying to find myself.  I’m really a sad, pathetic case.”  The candid statement goes to the heart of the fighter’s longstanding appeal: the promise of witnessing his spectacular self-immolation.  In this regard, Toback has captured his subject to his audience’s delight.  His film has received critical acclaim and even won standing ovations at the Cannes film festival.  The reception proves once again that a freak show can delight, but as is asked in a different context, is it art?

That some politicians are homosexual is hardly news.  Nor is it surprising that some are socially conservative office holders, but it does raise the question whether those who champion limiting the rights of gays and who themselves are gay forfeit the right to privacy regarding their own sexual orientation.  The question is raised in Outrage, a documentary directed by Kirby Dick that premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival.  Dick’s answer is clear.  He thinks that such hypocrisy, which he equates to pro-lifers having abortions, strips gay politicians of their privileged access to heterosexual cover, particularly because their advocacy is so dangerous.

 The mainstream media has a different view by altogether avoiding stories about the private lives of possibly gay anti-gay politicians even though no such restrictions exist for straight lawmakers.  It’s a pernicious double standard.  According to Dick, the “closet distorts the political system.”  He’s got a point.  Closeted gays in positions of power support discriminatory legislation.  It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of hate, ensuring that more gays, confronting hostility, will keep their true sexual orientation hidden.  In Outrage, openly-gay Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank is typically blunt.  “There’s a right to privacy, not a right to hypocrisy,” he says.  “People who are not subject to laws will make harsh laws. . . .It is very important that people who make law are subject to law—it is a safeguard against unfairness. That’s a fundamental principle that our democracy is built on. . . .And [closeted] gay people who support homophobia are violating that [principle].”

The film argues that outing gay politicians can lead to their shifting positions on matters related to gay rights.  Former Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe of Arizona is one example.  Kolbe supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition of same sex marriage, even if individual states endorsed it, but his views moderated when he came out after gay groups tried outing him because of his voting record.  But more typical are cases like Ed Schrock, a former conservative congressman from Virginia with strongly anti-gay views.  Once he got caught soliciting sex with men using an interactive phone service he simply bowed out of politics.  The same goes for former Senator Larry Craig.

By Kirby Dick’s standards, Charlie Crist is ripe for outing.  His record on gay issues is both vile and extensive: he called marriage a “sacred relationship between a man and a woman” during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign, supported the ban on gay adoption in Florida, one of the only states to take such action, and as Governor appointed two anti-gay justices to the State Supreme Court.  All the while suspicions have existed about his sexuality.  Allegedly, he carried on an affair for some time with an aide to then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.  Although Crist entered office a bachelor—a purported girlfriend of his declined to comment when reached for comment by Dick, adding, “Contact me in ten years and I’ll give you a story”—he recently married when his name began circulating as a potential vice-presidential nominee for John McCain.

However invidious such hypocrisy may be, is it grounds for upending people’s lives by outing them?  The answer may well be yes, justified by the discrimination they endorse.  Regardless, most homophobes aren’t gay; therefore, revealing anti-gay gay public figures as phonies is but a sideshow, and one that comes at great personal cost to those dragged out of the closet against their will.  This seems to be the prevailing view, if not that of Kirby Dick.  That’s good news for Charlie Crist.  Despite the rumors swirling about his being gay and the efforts by some to sort out the truth, his political future is bright.  Still, it’s unlikely that he’ll one day occupy the White House, and more unlikely still that any gay partner of his would openly join him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Consider recent highlights of the Republican machine.  There was Tom DeLay’s K Street Project that so effectively monetized corporate connections, Jack Abramoff’s golfing junkets for conservative members of Congress, and a flurry of no-bed contracts in Iraq for well-heeled Republican donors.  The list goes on.  This sort of malfeasance is the logical consequence of a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.  It’s a different story across the aisle.  Democrats keep it real for the regular folk—the blue-collar laborer, the policeman, and the mid-level manager struggling to make ends meet one paycheck to the next.  Or so they say.

Behold John Murtha.  The 19-term congressman, an intimidating 6’-3” former Marine colonel, is chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, a position that gives him considerable sway over how and where military monies are spent.  The opportunity is not lost on the Democratic lawmaker.  It’s not for nothing that Citizens Against Government Waste recently named Murtha “Porker of the Year.” 

Murtha doles out goodies with abandon.  Companies in his hardscrabble Pennsylvania district, often campaign contributors, have benefited from his largesse.  The generosity has earned him badges of honor, literally.  There’s a Murtha highway and a Murtha health center.  There’s even John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport located in Cambria County, Pennsylvania, which has received $150 million over the past decade.  Not bad for a facility that serves 20 passengers a day.  Although the airport received in 2004 an $8 million air traffic radar system that has never been used, it neverless just won another $800,000 in federal stimulus monies to repave an alternate runway in case its current one is overburdened by the six planes that use it daily.

Murtha’s wealth is spread around.  Clients of PMA Group, a prominent defense lobbying firm founded by one of the congresman’s top aides, recently received $100 million in defense-related work in a single appropriations bill.  As it happens, PMA employees and clients contributed $1.3 million to Murtha’s campaigns over the last two election cycles, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by the FBI.  But the stars have truly aligned for Murtha’s family.

The congressman’s brother Robert worked as a lobbyist for one firm, KSA Consulting, whose clients received multimillion dollar earmarks from you know who.  One of Robert’s sons runs Murtech Inc. (Read the name carefully.  Sound familier?), a company offering warehousing and engineering services.  Last year, it received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it through no-bid contracts.  The company also received substantial business from a client of the PMA Group.

Murtha has also given a gilded nod to academia.  St. Vincent College, a small school in Murtha’s district, reciveved millions of dollars in funds earmarked by the congressman.  Why St. Vincent’s?  Could it be because its head at the time, Reverend John Murtha, is a cousin of the congressman?  The Marines think so.  They just hired Brian Murtha, Reverend Murtha’s son and Congressman Murtha’s nephew, to be a legislative liason officer, a job where he will lobby Congress for money.

Representative Murtha may be bad apple, but the whole orchard is rotten.  Curruption is the mother’s milk of politics.  Lawmakers’ dependence on campaign contributions from wealthy contributors makes them apt to prostitute themselves to high bidders.  Democrat or Republican, it makes no difference.  The game is the same.  But Republicans are less coy about their motives; they’re the party of the rich and make few bones about it.  The Democrats, on the other hand, trot out tired paeans to the working man while supplicating themselves to the same monied interests as their supposed ideological foes.  Call it the Murtha way.

The Pennsyvlania congressman knows how to cover his tracks, though.  He shamelessly touts his patriotism, having co-sponsored the Flag Desecration Amendment that would amend the Constitution to ban the practice.  The clever ploy is seemingly cursed.  Not only has it failed to pass Congress, but Murtha’s co-sponsor, Duke Cunningham, is now in jail, having pled guilty to accepting over $2.4 million in bribes.  With the FBI investigation closing in on Murtha—the agency recently raided two companies closesly tied to the congressman as well as the PMA Group—Murtha may well meet a similar fate.  If the prison he’s sent to is in his district, it may even bear his name.

A small list of China’s scientific discoveries would include those already well known like gunpowder, papermaking, moveable type, and the first use of printed money.  But during that time, off its coast could be found ocean-going junks with maneuverable stern rudders and compasses for long distance navigation.  Such ships could have crossed the Pacific and changed American history with a colonization led by Asians from west to east.  There was the invention of the potter’s wheel, the wheelbarrow, the iron plow that would revolutionize agriculture, and breakthroughs that gave birth to the noodle, to tea, and even to toilet paper.  The adoption of the stirrup would make the horse and rider a formidable weapon of war; the suspension bridge the conqueror of rivers; and a well-organized bureaucracy, with civil service exams to choose the best and brightest, which insured a well-controlled country. 

For millennia China was the center of the scientific world.  What happened?  Why, when Europe was giving birth to its Renaissance, did China begin such a precipitous decline?  Called “The Needham Question,” the search for answers has so far filled 27 volumes.  A project started by Needham in 1954 continues by others to this day.

Clearly, the question requires 27 volumes to answer but I will attempt a very simple distillation.  China in the Sixteenth Century was a success.  It was a unified nation made up of ethnically similar people, the Han.  Under a strong monarchy with an efficient bureaucracy there was peace in the country and relative peace at its borders.  The previous advances in science and agriculture provided sustenance for the masses and luxuries for the few.  What need was there to advance further?

Such was not the world in far off Sixteenth Century Europe.  It was a continent culturally diverse with newly forming and antagonistic nation states, a land where advances in science, technology, and agriculture would bring conquest, power, and reward.  Building a better crossbow, learning to drain a bog, efficiently spanning a river could all bring wealth.  Learn to invest such wealth to make more wealth and one had invented the businessman.  While China was sleeping in its stability, the rambunctious West quickly grew from Feudalism, to Mercantilism, into a Renaissance, on to Capitalism and Imperialism.  It was not pretty but it produced a potent science and culture. Armed and able, Westerners landed on China’s shores and proceeded to tear it to shreds.

Towards the end of his life, Joseph Needham had an encounter with a Chinese official.  He asked him “The Needham Question.”  The official’s answer went something like this: “When you have a culture that is 4,000 years old, to take a nap for 500 years is as but for a moment.  The Communist Revolution woke us up and Capitalism will again make us the center of the world.  That was and remains our destiny.”

Getting ahead requires, above all else, conquering the appraisal process that separates the wheat from the chaff.  It’s so rigorous that most fail to make the grade, sometimes repeatedly.  The appraisal is not one test, but rather many that take place over the course of a weekend at a rented cottage.  During the appraisal, various tests, which can involve professional actors playing the parts of disgruntled colleagues, belligerent clients, and so on and which supposedly call on a range of skills to successfully navigate, are played out in front of an assessment board.  More traditional written exams, done under strict time constraints, are also administered, as are other tests gauging a range of abilities and skills.

Mercifully, as part of support staff, I am exempt from such rigorous assessments.  My peripheral status also means that my contact with the organization’s top brass is minimal.  But there are exceptions.  Recently, I had a meeting with the organization’s head, its effective CEO.  In the span of fifteen minutes, he belittled, intimidated, and bullied, turning what should have been an informal gathering after-hours on a relatively trivial matter into a tense and stressful episode.  After the meeting, my immediate boss, who was also in attendance, brushed it off.  “That’s nothing,” he said, indicating that he’d seen far worse.

How is it that a man who has reached the top of his profession engages in such counterproductive behavior that alienates those on whom he depends?   Shouldn’t the meticulous appraisal process filter out such disagreeable deviants?  Stories of tyrannical bosses are clichés, so clearly their like can and do rise.  But there may be something more at work than meets the eye.  Fleshing out what requires going on a tangent.

Few ethnic or racial groups should be more united than Jews, that unlucky lot cast into the Diaspora for millennia where they suffered discrimination and annihilation in between fleeting periods of acceptance.  The formation of the State of Israel brought a good portion of the world’s Jewry home to their ancestral land, where, it stood to reason, their history of persecution and the ever-present threat from hostile neighbors would create an extraordinary sense of solidarity.  That has not happened.

Israel is a fractured place.  The divisions are many: secular-religious, Ashkenazi-Mizrahim, Russian-non-Russian, settler-non-settler, etc. (not to mention Arab-Jew).  Not one Israeli Prime Minster has been of Mizrahi descent and their ranks are not included in the country’s economic and cultural elite.  The one million immigrants from Russia are only slowly integrating into the mainstream.  Gideon Levy, writing in the pages of Ha’aretz on the occasion of Israel’s Impendence Day, observed: “Alongside integration, many processes of segregation and separation prevail, and the lofty words about unity are no more than hollow clichés.  Let’s recognize that, for better or worse…One nation?  That’s a far cry from reality.  Perhaps not yet lost, but still 10 tribes.”

The point is not that Israel is somehow different.  Precisely the opposite.  Its stratification is commonplace, prosaic.  That’s the point.  If even Jews, who, despite their historical persecution, exhibit sharp societal divisions when brought together in their own land, it stands to reason that such categorizing is intrinsic.  That’s what humans do.  It’s innate.  Evolutionary psychologists argue as much.  Which brings me back to my organization’s head.

Simply chalking up his behavior to arrogance doesn’t explain much.  There’s likely much more to it.  His condescension may well reflect an us vs. them assessment, which is arrived at using pedigree and class, amongst other measures, to determine which category his audience falls into.  He’s not unusual.  Like all of us, he categorizes, only it’s more glaring and more galling given his position of power.  Isn’t that, after all, what condescension is, i.e., the conveying of an assessment of lesser stature and/or worth?

And what about that rigorous appraisal process that supposedly tests for merit?  That too is largely bogus.  The test, like so many tests, is biased.  Those with the same educational and class profile as those it assesses administer it.  In other words, the process for determining who gets ahead is self-selecting in the same way that the game is rigged in favor for Ashkenazis in Israel and that in the US, for many years, was rigged for white males.  As ever, it’s about categorization, or more simply, tribalism.  Such knowledge, of course, is useful only to a certain point.  It doesn’t make a meeting with a nasty boss any easier.

The GOP suffered a knockout last November.  The numbers tell the story.  In addition to having lost the White House, Republicans got a drubbing in Congress: the House is solidly Democratic and the Senate, with Arlen Specter’s defection and the likely seating of Al Franken, will have a 60-seat filibuster-proof Democratic majority.  Not since Jimmy Carter’s term in 1977-1978 has either party enjoyed such a wide margin in that chamber.  The setback is all the more important because it reflects a rejection of a right-wing ideology that has prevailed for over three decades, encapsulated by Ronald Reagan’s famous quip that government is the problem, not the solution.  Polls reveal the scope of the GOP’s woes.  Republicans are at or near record levels for unpopularity, with just 28 percent of respondents identifying themselves as such, a number equal to the lowest ever recorded by Gallup.

If Republicans are the victims of their own decades of success, what can be done to rebuild the party?  What principles will define the GOP for the next generation?  The answer, not surprisingly, is that conservatives must rediscover their roots.  Conservatism must become more reliably conservative.  Let me explain.

Three key constituencies traditionally have united under the Republican banner: social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and hawkish foreign policy conservatives.  The three often care little about what’s near and dear to the others, but that has mattered little.  Nor has it mattered that their respective conceptions of the role of government, while theoretically the same, is quite different in practice.  How so?

Conservatism’s organizing principle is limited government.  It inspires the fiscal conservative, whose belief in the market reflects Adam’s Smith’s insight about the invisible hand, which makes a virtue of self-interest, and the foreign policy conservative, whose skepticism about government breeds a cautious prudence when looking abroad.  Wariness of government also leads the religious conservative to jealously guard freedom of faith.  At least that’s how it works in theory.  The reality is far messier.

Small government may be a conservative article of faith, but between 1959-2007 average federal spending has been slightly less under Democratic administrations than Republican ones (19.6 percent versus 20.67 percent).  The past eight years in particular saw a massive growth in the size of government.  Sure, tax rates fell, but public expenditures skyrocketed, resulting in exploding deficits.  Likewise, messianic Neocons and their designs to remake the world have trumped conservative’s traditionally prudential policies.  And what have we got to show for it?  A world in chaos.  For their part, religious conservatives have long abandoned principles of government restraint and instead seek to use the levers of power to achieve their own ends.  Think Terry Schiavo.  With such a track record can conservatives be called conservative? 

Ironically, if conservatives are not conservative, polls indicate that Americans are, as they consistently express skepticism about government. In one recent poll, half the respondents said that individual responsibility could best enhance income security.  Only 19 percent cited government regulation and a paltry 15 percent pointed to government programs.  The numbers are remarkably consistent over time.  They vary little even in periods of great economic tumult such as those we’re experiencing now, reflecting a deep-seated ethos that dates to the country’s founding.

Conservatives would seem to have the wind at their back if they could only rediscover their roots.  It won’t be easy.  Ignoring ideological inconsistencies allowed conservatives to dominate government for decades, so there will be much resistance to abandoning what worked so well for so long.  But a new consensus will eventually emerge that puts together a winning platform truer to right wing principles.  It may take time, though.  Remember those Tories thrown out of office in 1997?  They’re still out of power.

Some cynics—spawn of the depraved 1960s, mostly—said that lying under oath about sex didn’t warrant Congress’ attention.  They even argued against allowing the civil suit against the President to proceed during his term, lest it became a distraction.  In its infinite wisdom, the Supreme Court disagreed, finding in a unanimous decision that, “[the suit] appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner’s time.”  So the court got it slightly wrong, but who could deny the stakes?  Our most sacred principles were under siege. 

The details are hardly worth rehashing.  We all know how the drama ended.  The House voted for impeachment, but the Senate didn’t share its opposite chamber’s fortitude, and so the Forty-Second President, despite his high crimes and misdemeanors, served out his term.  Did politics triumph over principle?  So it seemed.  But just as some victories are Pyrrhic, so too are some defeats galvanizing.  The nation heard the pleas of those whose trust in laws, not men, compelled them to stand firm.  We owe them our gratitude.  There was Representative John Boehner, now House Minority Leader, who summoned the wisdom of history’s great minds, telling colleagues: “John Locke once wrote, ‘Where the law ends, tyranny begins’…if we believe in our Constitution, then the law does not stop at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  In our constitutional democracy, no one, not even the president, is above the law.”

Congressman James Sensenbrenner—yes, that James Sensenbrenner, lauded by one Republican colleague for his principled equanimity: “He treats us all equally.  He treats us all like dogs”—minced no words.  “What is on trial here,” Sensenbrenner said, “is the truth and the rule of law.  Our failure to hold President Clinton to account for his lying under oath and preventing the courts from administering equal justice under law, will cause a cancer to be present in our society for generations.”  And let’s not forget former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan.  Two days after the House voted to impeach Clinton, Noonan bravely hailed the action, saying, “The Democrats had long labeled the impeachment debate a distraction from the urgent business of a great nation.  But the Republicans argued that the pursuit of justice is the business of a great nation.  In winning this point, they caught the falling flag, producing a triumph for the rule of law, a reassertion of the belief that no man is above it, and a rebuke for an arrogance that had grown imperial.”

Our country has come a long way since those days when perfidious liberals sought to put men above laws.  The principles fought for, despite Clinton’s apparent vindication, have prevailed.  Al Gore’s repudiation indicated an electorate tired by his predecessor’s endless prevarications.  Even Obama talks about personal responsibility and leadership guided by principle.  It is precisely because conservative values have triumphed that we should have the courage to abandon them temporarily.  Let us not examine the divisive past that is muddying the partisan waters during this time of war and recession.  Let us move on from this debate over torture as fast as Moveon.org urged during the impeachment saga.

Conservatives, from arch right-wingers to moderates, are one on this point.  Take New York Times columnist David Brooks.  “I think, at that moment in time, [torture] was a wrong but defensible, or at least not illegal position, and I don’t think we should be going around criminalizing those kinds of decisions,” Brooks said, sounding no way the temporizing political hack that some accuse him of being.  Opponents may call us out for rank hypocrisy—demanding that the rule of law prevail in one instance and not in another—but conservatives, unlike starry-eyed liberals, are guided, above all else, by realism.  We know that principles, when not tempered by pragmatism, are rendered meaningless.  In these times, when conservative values are preeminent in this conservative country, and when our nation faces so many difficult challenges, we need to remember that lesson.  As Peggy Noonan so eloquently said when referring to the debate over torture, “Sometimes in life you want to keep walking…Some of life has to be mysterious.”

There are limits to power, even for the most powerful, a lesson lost on the last administration.  The hubristic invasion of Iraq, the least threatening and least consequential of the “Axis of Evil,” imperiled efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, a veritable narco-state.  That Saddam, emasculated after one military defeat after the next, never presented a threat created the necessity to justify his removal retroactively.  Thus, the Iraqis’ deliverance from tyranny became the motif de jour, replacing hyperbolic talk of mushroom clouds.  The bait and switch might have worked if Iraq worked.  It doesn’t.  After six years and $694 billion slated for the war by year’s end, a figure that exceeds in inflation-adjusted terms the outlay for Vietnam, the country is still a powder keg.  Violence may have waned but underlying tensions haven’t.  Sunnis who joined the Awakening Councils have not been integrated into the government, decisions on how to split oil revenues are undecided, and questions about the future of the Kurdish region go unanswered.  Whether Iraq can remain whole remains as unknown today as it was before. 

Chaos is the order of the day.  If focusing on Iraq at the cost of neglecting Afghanistan has imperiled both, the US has dithered in the face of a crumbling Pakistan.  News out of the country grows starker by the day.  With the Pakistani Taliban now in control of Bunar, just 70 miles from Islamabad, in addition to the Swat Valley and other tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, the country faces imminent collapse.  The prospect is frightening.  Secretary Clinton said on Wednesday that the deteriorating situation in nuclear-armed Pakistan “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world.”

Here, too, the US is hamstrung.  For years, the Bush Administration funneled billions of dollars to then-President Pervez Musharraf only to see the monies go to countering the perceived threat from India, not the real one from the Taliban.  Does the Obama Administration have a better plan?  House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey doesn’t think so.  “We have got to look at reality,” he told Secretary Clinton. “I don’t want to see all of the other goals of this administration, both foreign and domestic, be devoured by this insoluble problem [in Afghanistan and Pakistan].”  But even with an effective government in Islamabad, it’s unclear whether the US, battling quagmires left and right and crippled by the credit crunch, can do much to help.

The Middle East may be going up south, but ironically the Freedom Agenda, which is partially responsible for the mayhem, contains some truth.  A freedom deficit, to use Neocon nomenclature, does breed discontent easily exploited by reactionary elements.  Egypt is one example.  Its tyrannical, if secular, government allows only one avenue for dissent: political Islam.  Thus, the Muslim Brotherhood’s stature grows in parallel with the country’s problems.  Pakistan also suffers from another lack of freedom: a monied elite has squandered the country’s wealth since its inception, empowering religious fundamentalists in the process.

The UN’s Arab Human Development Report reached a similar conclusion, saying that Arab societies must guarantee “key freedoms” of opinion, speech, and assembly through good governance bound by the rule of law.  None of the above are achieved instantaneously, though.  Nor can they be imposed by violent means from outside.  They must grow organically over time.  Unfortunately, time is a luxury in the troubled region.  It’s a triage situation now.  Staving off disaster in Afghanistan, Iraq, and, most critically, Pakistan, may be, above all, a question of luck.  Such is the grim reality that, at present, the Middle East needs a Fingers’ Crossed Agenda more than a genuine Freedom Agenda.

Car makers are readying an array of impressive second-generation hybrids.  GM, though on the cusp of bankruptcy, will nevertheless launch later this year its much-anticipated Volt.  The car’s propulsion derives exclusively from a lithium-ion battery with an impressive range of 40 miles.  A traditional gas engine recharges the battery.  The Volt’s gas mileage, once its initial battery life is exhausted, ranges from 50 to 150 mpg, depending on driving conditions and other factors.  Honda, Toyota, Ford and other car manufacturers are also investing heavily in hybrid technology.  So is China.  The country recently unveiled an ambitious plan to make it the global leader in electric vehicles by raising its annual production capacity from 2,100 hybrid or all-electric cars and buses last year to 500,000 by the end of 2011.  All-electric vehicles and charging stations are being built in major urban areas around China.  Other countries are following suit.

The United States, though the Department of Energy, maintains a $25 billion program to develop electric-powered cars and improve battery technology.  The stimulus package added another $2 billion for battery development, and, if Obama gets his way, billions more will be plunked down to create a “smart” national grid capable of increasing energy efficiency.  The UK is not standing idle either.  Last week, Transport Minister Geoff Hoon announced subsidies of £2,000 - £5,000 for the purchase of electric or plug-in hybrid electric cars.  “The scale of incentives we’re announcing today,” Hoon said, “will mean that an electric car is a real option for motorists as well as helping to make the UK a world leader in low carbon transport.”

The hoopla surrounding electric vehicles begs the question of what sources of energy they will use.  It turns out that one-half of the electricity generated in the US for all those marvelous 21st century technologies like hybrid vehicles comes from that most dirty of 18th century energy sources: coal.  The percentage is even higher in China.  There fully three-quarters of all energy is derived from the sooty stuff.  With a burgeoning middle class that is quickly developing a love affair with cars, however energy efficient they may be, it’s no wonder that China is building one coal-fired plant a week.  

Hopes, it seems, are pinned on technological breakthroughs that will square the electricity-generating circle, providing ample energy with minimal environmental impact.  Chief among those is carbon capture and storage (CCS).  As it names suggests, CCS seeks to corral the carbon from coal-fired plants and then bury it somewhere very, very secure where it won’t get out, ever - fingers crossed.  It has the makings of a nightmarish Michael Crichton novel.  Indeed, the technology is unproven.  A plant off of Norway has successfully buried carbon dioxide for over a decade but it’s a small operation.  A dozen other projects worldwide are underway, which will help determine if CCS is economically viable and, more critically, whether CO2 remains sequestered.  One expert from Shell, when discussing a major CCS project being considered that would bury carbon in the seabed 70 miles off New Jersey, offered the reassurance of a used car salesman.  “The worst thing that could happen,” he said without irony, “is a little bit of CO2 escaping into the atmosphere.”

The hype surrounding CCS echoes that for biofuels.  Recent research found that, when the destruction of ecosystems to grow biofuel crops is factored in, some of them might actually emit more carbon than petroleum.  But advocates of electrifying the transport sector are not easily deterred.  They point out that renewable sources of energy will also figure in the mix.  One can always hope.  More sober assessments indicate that renewable sources of energy, while promising, are apt to remain relatively marginal.  As such, electric vehicles, short of some breakthrough regarding their source of energy, won’t be a panacea.  Consider that when next behind the wheel of a Prius

A three-judge panel overseeing Minnesota’s election dispute, after a seven-week trial, declared on Monday Franken the winner by a margin of just 312 votes out of roughly three million cast, saying he “is entitled to receive the certificate of election.”  Not so said Coleman’s camp, which promised an appeal.  The case could even go all the way to the US Supreme Court.   Contemplating the possibility, Coleman said, “I’m not ruling out anything.”  The foot-dragging has even annoyed some of Coleman’s onetime supporters.  The Worthington Daily Globe, which endorsed Coleman, wrote that the candidate and his surrogates “claim they want to ensure no Minnesota voter gets left behind.  Instead, they’re trying their best to leave Minnesota behind.”

The Republican establishment cares little about a quick resolution.  Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, warned of “World War III” if Democrats deigned to seat Franken before Coleman exhausted his legal options.  That sounds reasonable until one considers that exhaustive judicial review could take years.  Justice delayed may be justice denied, and in this case it would deny Democrats a crucial vote in the Senate during congressional consideration of a series of ambitious and hotly contested initiatives on health care, climate change, and energy policy.  That’s precisely the point.  For some Republicans, all is fair in love and war and politics.

Kirsten Gillibrand is learning the same lesson.  The former congresswoman was appointed by New York’s Governor to fill the Senate vacancy created by Hillary Clinton’s departure.  As a result, Gillibrand’s former district recently held a special election to fill her seat.  As in Minnesota, the tally proved mind bogglingly close: 86 votes out of more than 150,000 votes cast.  The Republican candidate apparently came up short, even after state officials tallied absentee ballots from his own stronghold of Saratoga County.  The GOP won’t concede, however.  Instead, they’re shamelessly trying to disqualify those absentee ballots filed by Democrats who own second homes outside the district.  Republican officials are even challenging Gillibrand’s absentee ballot on grounds that the Senator was, in fact, in the district on Election Day.

Conservatives wax lyrical about freedom, that gift from the creator, as George W. Bush liked to say, personal liberties, and most of all, Democracy, but such sentiment is hollow for the right wing of the right wing.  Authoritarianism is more their speed; it’s their way or no way.  As such, judges with views that differ from their own are branded “activists” who distort the “original intent” of the Constitution, as if they alone are privy to it, while media outlets attempting to present news impartially are branded “liberal” and therefore illegitimate.  All the while the highbrow rhetoric never wavers, with freedom-soaked pablum cloaking a decidedly illiberal agenda.

The falsity also extends to foreign policy.  The self-identified freedom lovers may dip their fingers in purple ink to demonstrate solidarity with the Iraqis, a costless display of phony camaraderie, but few, if any, raised the same ink-stained finger when chaos engulfed the country, causing the displacement of millions of Iraqis.  And few, if any, protested when their own government presented a bogus case for the war in the first place or spied on its own citizens.  So much for the wet-eyed paeans to freedom and the American way.

Thomas Jefferson said that the “price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”  As the author of the Declaration of Independence, it might be assumed that he was referring only to external threats, but his admonition should be understood more broadly.  Threats to freedom sometimes come from those who proudly wave its banner.  Indeed, to riff off another great American, Samuel Johnson, freedom is the last refuge of the authoritarian.