Mar 2007- Resurrected blog entries

Peter Sacks

When it comes to the class divide in America, we can pretend that it doesn’t exist. We can pretend that we can become whoever we’d like to be in life, regardless of the family we were were born to, what neighborhoods we grew up in, and what sort of schools we attended. We can believe our opportunities are born from personal choices, cultural values, and our wits.

We can believe what Ruben Navarrette Jr., a conservative columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, believes when he rails against ongoing press coverage of executive compensation scandals. “Americans shouldn’t feel bad about that,” Navarrette says, suggesting that we should just stop complaining about growing income disparities between the rich and ordinary folks, and instead get an education.

“Much of (the income divide) is tied to the decisions that individuals make about how much education they’re going to pursue, and how hard they’re going to pursue it,” Navarrette continues. “Most of the obstacles that people face are self-imposed, and self-designed. We can’t say that enough, especially at a time when too many people in this country look to blame others for their troubles, failings and shortcomings.”

If our failings are as self-imposed as Navarrette suggests, then we are a nation of masochists. Consider educational attainment. The rate of bachelor’s degree attainment for students from low-income families, at a meager 6 percent, has remained virtually unchanged since 1970. The BA attainment rate for students in the second-lowest quartile of family income has stagnated at around 11 to 13 percent over that period. Only those students born into families in the top two income quartiles have experienced a surge in bachelor’s attainment since 1970.

The statistics along these lines are brutally repetitive, suggesting that educational advancement in modern America is becoming far less a story about bootstrapping and far more a story about class origins.

Still, we cling to the nice story, the hopeful one about luck and pluck and individual sacrifice. It’s a story that is repeated and reinforced on a continual and perpetual basis in American society, rooted deeply in our sense of who we are.

In feudal Europe, peasants knew exactly where they stood in relation to kings and the landed gentry. Those class divisions were decidedly unsubtle. Nasty, mean, and brutish, in fact. No pretension was necessary.

I’m not a fan of feudal Europe, but class matters are indeed muddled in highly developed, consumer-driven societies like Western Europe and the United States. The magical and rare beauty of our narrative of the classless society is its subtle power and its ability to structure society without blatant force. Thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams, cultural identities and social habits hold the superstructure in place.

Whether consuming Guns ‘n Ammo or The New Yorker, we take our stand as full-fledged members of the middle class. Ultimately, we can make the personal choice to remain where we are, in the vast middle of our fruitful imaginations, or to pick up and go somewhere else, which, for many of us, does require sacrifice and a new and profound sense of who we are and what sort of life we want to live. In that sense, Navarrette is right. Half right.

Chances are, however, we won’t move. Economists studying changing patterns of generational economic mobility, for example, are finding that Americans are considerably less upwardly mobile than we like to believe. The chances are very good that sons and daughters will wind up in the same social class as their parents before them.

Is that the fault of individuals or is there something systemic going on here?

If only getting a college education were as simple as Navarrette believes. If you are unlucky enough to be born to the wrong parents living in the wrong neighborhoods and attending the wrong schools, every educational, social and economic message you receive from the moment of birth seems designed to cement your socioeconomic destiny.

In my experience talking to children, parents and teachers, the rare and exceptional people who get an opportunity to rise above their class destiny almost always are able to do so because they were exceedingly lucky. And they almost always get help from people and organizations that they can’t get from their own families. Take Ashlea Jackson, who grew up in a trailer park in Boise, Idaho. For Ashlea, it has taken several rounds of intervention from the kindness of people and organizations beyond her family, including Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the Boys and Girls Club, a high school journalism teacher, and Upward Bound, a federal program – on George W. Bush’s perennial hit list of education programs to be eliminated — to help disadvantaged students get on the path to college. (Contrast Ashlea with children of the affluent classes whose parents have mapped out their college careers by the time they are in second grade.)

And even with all the interventions on Ashlea’s behalf, it has taken a brave leap of faith on her part to leave family and friends and move across the state to attend a community college. For children who grow up with parents who never went to college, who have never even stepped foot onto a college campus, this sort of extra bit of public kindness is absolutely necessary for them to see a world beyond their own experience. If you happen to be poor, you can have all the motivation that Navarrette desires, but you’re out of luck in this country if the stars don’t line up just so.

But I will give the conservative boot strappers this. While wealth and income inequalities in the United States are vast — and, in fact, are as profound as at any point in our history — we are somehow comforted by the adornments of advanced capitalism. A debt-driven consumer economy and the society of spectacle make little kings and Paris Hiltons of us all. Even when people do get their rare opportunity to rise above socioeconomic destiny, the question remains whether they will seize upon it; the question remains whether they themselves are fully conscious of the hardcore materialism of the class divide. Indeed, unlike the battles over civil rights and gender equality, the class divide in America has been especially troublesome political barrier. While ethnic identity and feminism have become a matter of pride and political power, who wants to be called poor? Anything resembling a poor-people’s movement in America died a long time ago with Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

In the popular mind, class is less a function of how much money you earn or how much wealth you’ve accumulated than what you consume and what you watch on TV. In the popular imagination, class has become less about hard economic assets and conditions of work, education and human capital, and more a matter of culture and taste. In America — the classless society — we’re all now in that vast, indefinable “middle.”

When Lou Dobbs rails at the disappearing middle class, whom exactly is he referring to? The ingenuity of the Dobbsian rhetoric is that most of us openly identify ourselves with this idyllic and meaningless middle, defined by fear and anxiety. Fears about illegal immigration. Anxieties about paying for college. And all the rest.

When I met an obviously affluent man from the San Francisco Bay Area and told him about my work studying the barriers to educational opportunity for people born into the wrong side of the class divide, he immediately turned the subject to illegal immigration as the culprit for educational inequities. Another time this past summer, I attended a wedding chock full of affluent doctors at a mountain retreat. Again, when I told one physician about my work, he attacked the system that made it so hard for middle-class parents (read: affluent physicians like him) to pay for their children’s’ college. For affluent Americans, that is how these conversations about class typically go: Safe, legitimate, and Dobbsian.

Privately, however, we have our doubts about a classless America. We aren’t stupid, and we have eyes. We all know that, ultimately, pretending otherwise is an act of futility.

Philip Slater

An Associated Press article this week featured stories about how much our neighbors hate Californians. This is hardly news. The other seven-eighths of the nation has been dissing us for decades. At least a couple of times a year in print. Is it because most social trends begin here? Trends usually ridiculed right up to the moment the rest of the country adopts them?

Although non-Californians see all Californians as exactly alike, they hate us for wildly different reasons.

To our immediate neighbors we’re sanctimonious busybodies–forever crossing the border to throw up ecological roadblocks when they’re just trying to make a buck polluting their own private property. Or interfering with their God-given right to blow in their friends’ faces fumes from the hundreds of toxic chemicals they’ve just inhaled. (Remember when cigarette smoke actually smelled like tobacco?)

To Middle America we’re hedonistic free-loving pagans who pride ourselves on breaking at least three Commandments a day. In Utah they believe a single Californian, let loose for a few weeks in a God-fearing Christian community, could–like a modern Pied Piper–lead a whole town dancing off to serve Satan if not immediately quarantined. We are implored not to ‘Californicate’ their gun-totin’ Christian communities.

To Easterners, especially New Yorkers, we’re naive, starry-eyed optimists–gullible and not too bright. “You lose ten IQ points when you cross the California border” is a New York bromide. This is due to the unfortunate tendency of New Yorkers to confuse intelligence with depression.

It’s no accident that all these views mirror the attitudes of foreign nations toward Americans as a whole. Some countries criticize our tendency to impose our values on others as a condition of trade or assistance. Others–especially Islamic ones–view us as Godless sensualists. And to most Europeans, Americans are naive optimists–paying altogether too little attention to the basic hopelessness of the human condition.

As Europe is to America, so New York is to California.

And just as Europeans overlook the incredible diversity of “Americans”, so New Yorkers are blind to the incredible diversity of California, which is culturally far more diverse than the Eastern seaboard.

When our neighbors think of “Californians” they’re thinking of Berkeley and Marin County. When Middle America thinks of California, they’re thinking of the Castro and West Hollywood. When New Yorkers think of California, they’re thinking of La Jolla and Santa Barbara. No one’s thinking of Bakersfield, Yreka, Salinas, Victorville, Stockton, El Centro, or Watts.

The one thing that truly sets us off from the rest of the country is that most of the people who live here came from somewhere else. Does that ring a bell?

This makes California the most American part of America. Just as immigrants from the rest of the world brought an incredible diversity and cultural richness to the United States, so immigrants from the rest of the United States have brought an incredible diversity and cultural richness to California.

What makes us different is the act of moving. The same vision, energy, and courage that enabled people to risk coming to America, led us, or our forebears, to cross the country and come here.

What Californians really represent is the future–the cutting edge of change, the chaos of possibility, the path to the unknown.

No wonder everybody hates us.

He probably doesn’t have a chance against the slick and well financed campaigns of Clinton, Obama, McCain and the rest of the career liars, but I sure would like to see Dennis Kucinich at a couple of the debates.

My dream 2008 election would feature Dennis Kucinich vs. Ron Paul

My nightmare 2008 election would be Clinton vs. McCain

Sean Penn

Four and a half years ago, I addressed the issue of war in an open letter to our President. Today I would like to again speak to him and his, directly. Mr. President, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice et al: Indeed America has a rich history of greatness -indeed, America is still today a devastating military superpower. And because, in the absence of a competent or brave Congress, of a mobilized citizenry, that level of power lies in your hands, it is you who have misused it to become our country’s and our constitution’s most devastating enemy. You have broken our country and our hearts. The needless blood on your hands, and therefore, on our own, is drowning the freedom, the security, and the dream that America might have been, once healed of and awakened by, the tragedy of September 11, 2001.

But now, we are encouraged to self-censor any words that might be perceived as inflammatory – if our belief is that this war should stop today. We cower as you point fingers telling us to “support our troops.” Well, you and the smarmy pundits in your pocket, those who bathe in the moisture of your soiled and bloodstained underwear, can take that noise and shove it. We will be snowed no more. Let’s make this crystal clear. We do support our troops in our stand, while you exploit them and their families. The verdict is in. You lied, connived, and exploited your own countrymen and most of all, our troops.

You Misters Bush and Cheney; you Ms. Rice are villainously and criminally obscene people, obscene human beings, incompetent even to fulfill your own self-serving agenda, while tragically neglectful and destructive of ours and our country’s. And I got a question for your daughters Mr. Bush. They’re not children anymore. Do they support your policy in Iraq? If they do, how dare they not be in uniform, while the children of the poor; black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and all the other American working men and women are slaughtered, maimed and flown back into this country under cover of darkness.

Now, because I’ve been on the streets of Baghdad during this occupational war, outside the Green Zone, without security, and you haven’t; I’ve met children there. In that country of 25 million, these children have now suffered minimally, a rainstorm of civilian death around and among them totaling the equivalent of two hundred September 11ths in just four years of war. Two hundred 9/11s. Two hundred 9/11s.

You want to rattle sabers toward Iran now? Let me tell you something about Iran, because I’ve been there and you haven’t. Iran is a great country. A great country. Does it have its haters? You bet. Just like the United States has its haters. Does it have a corrupt regime? You bet. Just like the United States has a corrupt regime. Does it want a nuclear weapon? Maybe. Do we have one? You bet. But the people of Iran are great people. And if we give that corrupt leadership, (by attacking Iran militarily) the opportunity to unify that great country in hatred against us, we’ll have been giving up one of our most promising future allies in decades. If you really know anything about Iran, you know exactly what I’m referring to. Of course your administration belittles diplomatic potential there, as those options rely on a credibility and geopolitical influence that you have aggressively squandered worldwide.

Speaking of squandering, how about the billion and a half dollars a day our Iraq-focused military is spending, where three weeks of that kind of spending, would pay the tab on a visionary levy-building project in New Orleans and relieve the entire continent of Africa from starvation and the spread of disease. Not to mention the continued funds now necessary, to not only rebuild our education and healthcare systems, but also, to give care and aid to the veterans of this war, both American and our Iraqi allies and friends who have lost everything.

You say we’ve kept the war on terror off our shores by responding to a criminal act of terror through state sponsored unilateral aggression in a country that took no part in that initial crime. That this war would be fought in Iraq or fought here. They are not our toilet. They are a country of human beings whose lives, while once oppressed by Saddam, are now lived in Dante’s inferno.

My 15-year-old daughter was working on a comparative essay this week (you can ask Condi what a comparative essay is, as academic exercises fit the limits of her political expertise.) My daughter’s essay, which understood substance over theory, discusses the strengths of the Nuremberg trial justice beside the alternate strategy of truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and I quote: “When we observe distinctions between one power and another, one justice and another, we consider the divide between retribution and reconciliation, of closure and disclosure.” I can’t do her essay justice in this forum, but at its core, it asks how, when, and why we compromise toward peace, punish for war, or balance both for something more.

This may focus another soft spot in the rhetoric of both sides. We’re told not to engage in the “politics of attack.” To “keep away from the negative”…Well, Mr. Bush, when speaking of your administration, that would leave us silent, and impotent indeed.

So, in conclusion, I address my remaining remarks to the choir: We all played nice recently at the sad passing of former President Ford. Pundits and players on all sides re-visited his pardoning of Richard Nixon with praise, stating that a divided nation found unity. But what of that precedent on deterrence now? Where is justice now? Let’s unite, not only in stopping this war, but holding this administration accountable as well. Without impeachment, justice cannot prevail. In our time, or our children’s. And let’s make it clear to democrats and republicans alike that we are not willing to wait on ‘08 to hear them say again: “If I’d known then, what I know now.”

Even in a so-called victory, what we saw yesterday was a House of Representatives that couldn’t bring itself to represent either conscience or constituents. It’s a tragedy that the Democratic Party’s leadership in Congress refuses to allow the House to vote on Barbara Lee’s amendment for a fully funded, orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of this year. Elites circled the war wagons against this proposal, and postponed the day of reckoning that must come as soon as possible – a complete pullout of U.S. military forces from Iraq.

There are presidential candidates who understand this. We do have candidates of conscience. As things stand today, I will be voting for Dennis Kucinich, who has fought this war from the beginning. You might say Kucinich can’t win. Well, we have an opportunity to re-establish the credibility of democracy as viewed by the world at large.

We can fire our current president. We can choose the next president. You and me, the farmer in Wisconsin, the boys at Google, and Bill Gates.

It’s up to us to choose. Why don’t we choose?!

From remarks at Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s March 24 Town Hall Meeting on the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

First it was Newsweek that felt Afganistan was too hot a topic for the front cover of the US version.

Now, Time magazine finds it necessary to give the US audience a different cover than that seen by the rest of it’s world readership.

Washigton Post
Friday, March 23, 2007; Page A17

It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author — who would have preferred to be named — is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author’s attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.

The Justice Department’s inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue “national security letters.” It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision — demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval — to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.

Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand — a context that the FBI still won’t let me discuss publicly — I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.

Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn’t abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.

Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.

I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.

The inspector general’s report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI’s actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general’s report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency — in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.

I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn’t been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general’s report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.

I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I’ve now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point — a point we passed long ago — the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government’s use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

By MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer

Fri Mar 23, 3:41 AM ET

LONDON – New “landmark” research finds that alcohol and tobacco are more dangerous than some illegal drugs like marijuana or Ecstasy and should be classified as such in legal systems, according to a new British study.

In research published Friday in The Lancet magazine, Professor David Nutt of Britain’s Bristol University and colleagues proposed a new framework for the classification of harmful substances, based on the actual risks posed to society. Their ranking listed alcohol and tobacco among the top 10 most dangerous substances.

Nutt and colleagues used three factors to determine the harm associated with any drug: the physical harm to the user, the drug’s potential for addiction, and the impact on society of drug use. The researchers asked two groups of experts — psychiatrists specializing in addiction and legal or police officials with scientific or medical expertise — to assign scores to 20 different drugs, including heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, amphetamines, and LSD.

Nutt and his colleagues then calculated the drugs’ overall rankings. In the end, the experts agreed with each other — but not with the existing British classification of dangerous substances.

Heroin and cocaine were ranked most dangerous, followed by barbiturates and street methadone. Alcohol was the fifth-most harmful drug and tobacco the ninth most harmful. Cannabis came in 11th, and near the bottom of the list was Ecstasy.

According to existing British and U.S. drug policy, alcohol and tobacco are legal, while cannabis and Ecstasy are both illegal. Previous reports, including a study from a parliamentary committee last year, have questioned the scientific rationale for Britain’s drug classification system.

“The current drug system is ill thought-out and arbitrary,” said Nutt, referring to the United Kingdom’s practice of assigning drugs to three distinct divisions, ostensibly based on the drugs’ potential for harm. “The exclusion of alcohol and tobacco from the Misuse of Drugs Act is, from a scientific perspective, arbitrary,” write Nutt and his colleagues in The Lancet.

Tobacco causes 40 percent of all hospital illnesses, while alcohol is blamed for more than half of all visits to hospital emergency rooms. The substances also harm society in other ways, damaging families and occupying police services.

Nutt hopes that the research will provoke debate within the UK and beyond about how drugs — including socially acceptable drugs such as alcohol — should be regulated. While different countries use different markers to classify dangerous drugs, none use a system like the one proposed by Nutt’s study, which he hopes could serve as a framework for international authorities.

“This is a landmark paper,” said Dr. Leslie Iversen, professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. Iversen was not connected to the research. “It is the first real step towards an evidence-based classification of drugs.” He added that based on the paper’s results, alcohol and tobacco could not reasonably be excluded.

“The rankings also suggest the need for better regulation of the more harmful drugs that are currently legal, i.e. tobacco and alcohol,” wrote Wayne Hall, of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, in an accompanying Lancet commentary. Hall was not involved with Nutt’s paper.

While experts agreed that criminalizing alcohol and tobacco would be challenging, they said that governments should review the penalties imposed for drug abuse and try to make them more reflective of the actual risks and damages involved.

Nutt called for more education so that people were aware of the risks of various drugs. “All drugs are dangerous,” he said. “Even the ones people know and love and use every day.”

Jacob Bernstein

The Wall Street Journal said yesterday that compact disc sales dropped 20 per cent in the first quarter. As usual, the decline was attributed mainly to teenage kids, who stole approximately one billion songs on file sharing sites between January and March, according to recent estimates. And as is customary in business pieces about the state of the music industry, no one seemed to consider the possibility that its own executives might be partially to blame for its current troubles.

Four months ago, I wrote an article about a young rap artist named Lupe Fiasco. Fiasco is a 24-year-old skateboarding Muslim from Chicago who raps about his distaste for the rampant materialism currently dominating hip hop and his desire to bring the troops home from Iraq.

Though he received Grammy nominations in prestigious categories like Rap Album of the Year and Rap Single of the Year as well as rave reviews in practically every publication that is supposed to count, he has not even gone gold.

While I was doing the piece, I called up Tom Silverman, the head of Tommy Boy Records, which was responsible for launching the careers of De La Soul and Queen Latifah. He said that while he thought Fiasco was a formidable talent, the current state of the market made it all but impossible for him to succeed.

“It’s great that someone’s taking a chance on a socially conscious hip-hop artist like Lupe but the economics are not as good as they once were,” he told me. According to Silverman (as well as several other people I spoke to) the problem is not so much file sharing (which has been vastly inflated) as it is the consolidation of radio (which has largely gone ignored.)

To back this up, Silverman explained to me that even though people are spending as much time in their cars as they used to, consumers have been turning off music stations in droves. 27 per cent since 2001, I believe, about on par with the declines of CD sales.

You would think this means people are just listening to stolen music played on their Ipod Nanos, but consider this: Sales from independent labels are actually holding steady.

To oversimplify things just a little, this indicates that the labels have been putting out a steady stream of prepackaged junk in an effort to appease the radio programmers and that consumers have been rejecting it.

Of course, it’s analogous to what happened in the film world, but then people like Harvey Weinstein and Bob Berney figured out that there was a consumer who wanted to see smarter movies. And so they made them (or bought them) and distributed them. And they got rich. And life was good again.

Then consumers got bored with what the networks had to offer, so HBO, F/X, Showtime, Bravo!, and Comedy Central stepped in with shows like the Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, The Daily Show, South Park, The Colbert Report, and Project Runway. And they too got rich. And life was again good.

But this being the music industry, where the closest thing to a boldface maverick is Edgar Bronfman Jr, panic masquerades as ingenuity. So the A&R guys develop an endless series of facsimiles of what were robots to begin with. Here comes Ciara: The Crunk Beyonce! Next up, Rihanna: the Caribbean Beyonce! Don’t like her? How about Cassie: The minimalist Beyonce! Or try Stephanie Edwards: The Beyonce of American Idol.

Oh, wait. She got clipped last night. Perhaps that’s why.

Meanwhile, the original robots (See: Britney, Mariah, and Whitney) begin to combust. They marry losers and develop drug problems. They have nervous breakdowns. It turns out they don’t like being robots so much, after all. “I feel like I’ve been missin’ out,” Spears told her soon-to-be-ex-husband, shortly before she went off the “deep end.”

With these tried and trued manufactured divas cracking up (or literally cracked out) the labels have no choice but to hire lawyers and sue the kids who are “stealing” their music. What else can they do? They are not going to bite the hand that feeds them and go up against Clear Channel. They are not going to fire themselves. But they are merely fending off the inevitable. Their time has come.

RJ Eskow
03.21.2007These are strange days for our system of justice, but they serve to remind us of the political usefulness of absurdity. On one side is noted pornographer Kenneth Starr, who spent $40 billion in taxpayer money collecting and disseminating lewd and irrelevant information about Bill Clinton. The man who once spread obscene material throughout the media for no purpose other than political embarrassment is now being paid to argue for the suppression of non-salacious (and seemingly nonsensical) speech from a high school student. And the student’s speech didn’t cost billions, but was literally “free.”

Based on the first day of hearings in the “bong hits” case, Starr has an ally in the the increasingly eccentric Antonin Scalia, whose public utterances in recent years have become as hallucinogenic as this young student’s. (Remember “quack quack”?) An unlikely set of interests stands against them, one that apparently includes Samuel Alito as well as Jerry Falwell, the ACLU, and people like me.

You know the details by now: Students in Juneau are dismissed from class to watch the Olympic torch pass by. Some students unfurl a banner across the street from the school that says “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” One student is caught and given detention. Said detention is increased when he refuses to name his co-conspirators.

(First they punish this kid for speech. Then they punish him for not speaking.)

Everybody wants to know: What does “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” mean? Personally, I’m enjoying the fact that nobody knows. The spirit of Surrealism that was pioneered by Breton and his colleagues in Paris nearly 100 years ago is alive and well in Juneau, Alaska.

This case illustrates the political usefulness of absurdity, too. It forces Starr and his colleagues (including the Administration) to argue vehemently for the suppression of speech they don’t even understand. That’s a perfect way to iillustrate the Kafkaesque nature of all repression of our civil liberties.

Bong hits 4 Jesus. Were they saying that you’ll see God if you get stoned? Were they echoing Marx’s critique of religion as “the opiate of masses”? Or did they just come up with something meaningless that sounded funny to them? I’d guess it’s the last one, but I think it’s better for America if nobody knows for sure.

They might even be saying, through the use of irony, that drug use is antithetical to the values of a Christian nation. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

To his credit, Joseph Frederick isn’t explaining it. My best guess is that they were listening to Cypress Hill when they came up with it. Cypress Hill are the L.A. rappers known for “Insane In the Brain” (”insane in the membrane”) and “Hits From the Bong” (wherein they observe that bong water smells bad when it gets on the carpet.)

Cypress Hill may “glorify drug use,” but at least they make sense. That’s more than can be said for Starr, Scalia, and their allies on this case. There are only two possibilities, after all: Either this speech had meaning and was political in nature, in which case it’s protected. Or it had no meaning, in which case the principal had no valid reason for supressing it and punishing Mr. Frederick.

There’s no third option. That simple fact renders Starr’s entire argument absurd. In fact, the notion of censoring speech you don’t even understand should cause embarrassment to any thinking person – but Starr’s past behavior has demonstrated that he has a high tolerance for embarrassment.

A number of evangelical Christian groups have joined this case because they’re afraid that proselytizing speech could be banned from schools should the Juneau School Board win this case.

They’re right. It could happen. In fact, since these students weren’t on school property, students could be forbidden from talking up the benefits of religion – or atheism, for that matter – anywhere they go. The School Board’s asking for a ubiquitious ban on young people’s rights of speech anywhere as long as they are enrolled in school.

Even abstract speech could be banned, since this banner was in fact abstract in nature. By “abstract,” I mean that ts content and meaning are not readily apparent and are subject to various interpretations. Starr, the Administration, and the Juneau School Board are suppressing it in the belief that they have a vague sense of its meaning and intent, despite the fact that they can’t decipher its actual content.

By logical extension, a student could be suspended for drawing a line on the grounds that it might represent a penis, or a triangle on the grounds that it might represent a woman’s … you know what. (They don’t like the “v” word in Starr-land.)

Mr. Kandinsky, it’s my duty to inform you you’re under arrest for distributing pornography.

What are Starr and his employers at the School Board smoking? Whatever it is, Scalia’s been taking hits from the same bong, judging from his questioning during the case’s first day. As this report indicates, Scalia thinks the school board has the right to suppress speech that contradicts the board’s position on drugs – even if the speech takes place off-campus. The New York Times’ coverage makes clear that John Roberts feels the same way, while Alito appears sympathetic to the student’s free speech position.

But none of the justices appeared ready to go as far as the Bush Administration, which took a radical anti-free speech position in this case. Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler argued that the banner was “disruptive” under the precedent of the Tinker case, solely because the banner’s message contradicted the school’s position on drug use.

It’s important to note yet again that the banner’s message has not been decoded, rendering Kneedler’s assertion meaningless. That aside, his position was so extreme that even Scalia didn’t appear to endorse it. The Administration is apparently arguing that students don’t have the right to express opinions that contradict their school board in any public place.

Hasn’t Mr. Kneedler or his boss Alberto Gonzales read the Constitution? (Forget it: it’s a rhetorical question.)

Don’t they realize that their position flies in the face of our civil liberties? On a practical level, it will alienate their conservative and evangelical allies. What are they thinking?

They must be insane in the membrane.

By James Carroll | March 12, 2007

SIXTY YEARS AGO today, Harry Truman went before a joint session of Congress to announce what became known as the Truman Doctrine. “At the present moment in world history, nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life.” With that, an era of bipolarity was inaugurated, dividing the world between forces of good and evil.

The speech amounted, as one of Truman’s advisers characterized it, to a declaration of religious war. In the transcendent struggle between Moscow and Washington, “nonalignment” was not an option. Truman declared that the United States would actively support “free” people anywhere who were resisting either internal or external threats to that freedom. The “free world” was born, but so, eventually, were disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam.

The occasion of Truman’s pronouncement was his decision to militarily support one side in the civil war in Greece, and with that, the deadly precedent of American intervention in foreign civil wars was set. Fear of communism became a driving force of politics and a justification for vast military expenditures.

Nine days after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president issued an executive order mandating loyalty oaths and security checks for federal employees, the start of the domestic red scare. The “paranoid style” of American life, in Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, was set.

That style lives. Democrats are lining up to attack the Bush administration’s catastrophe in Iraq — not because that war was wrong to start with, but because it has turned out so badly. The administration, meanwhile, has repudiated its go-it-alone militarism in favor of nascent diplomatic initiatives with North Korea, Syria, and Iran — not because the virtues of diplomacy are suddenly so evident, but because everything else it tried led to disaster. Bush’s failures are prompting important shifts, both by his critics and advisers. But no one is asking basic questions about the assumptions on which US policies have been based for 60 years.

More than adjustments in tactics and strategy are needed. What must be criticized, and even dismantled, is nothing less than the national security state that Truman inaugurated on this date in 1947. The habits of mind that defined American attitudes during the Cold War still provide consoling and profitable structures of meaning, even as dread of communism has been replaced by fear of terrorism. Thus, Truman’s “every nation must choose ” became Bush’s “You are with us or against us.” America’s political paranoia still projects its worst fears onto the enemy, paradoxically strengthening its most paranoid elements. The monstrous dynamic feeds itself.

The United States has obviously, and accidentally, been reinforcing the most belligerent elements in Iran and North Korea, but it is also doing so in Russia and China. Last week, for example, alarms went off in Washington with the news that China is increasing its military spending by nearly 18 percent this year, bringing its officially acknowledged military budget to $45 billion. Yet who was raising questions about massive American military sales (including missiles) to Taiwan, whose defense build up stimulates Beijing’s? Speaking of budgets, who questions the recently unveiled Pentagon total for 2008 of more than $620 billion? (Under Bill Clinton, the defense budget went from $260 billion to about $300 billion.) Even allowing for Iraq and Afghanistan, how can such an astronomical figure be justified?

When the United States announces plans to station elements of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, why are Russian complaints dismissed as evidence of Vladimir Putin’s megalomania? On this date in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, in violation of American assurances to Moscow that NATO would not move east from the unified Germany. Now NATO looks further east still, toward Georgia and Ukraine. And Putin is the paranoid?

Last week, the Bush administration announced plans for the first new nuclear weapon in more than 20 years, a program of ultimately replacing all American warheads. So much for the nuclear elimination toward which the United States is legally bound to work by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Washington simultaneously assured Russia and China that this renewal of the nuclear arsenal was no cause for them to feel threatened. Hello? Russia and China have no choice but to follow the US lead, inevitably gearing up another arms race. It is 1947 all over again. A precious opportunity to turn the world away from nuclear weapons, and away from war, is once more being squandered — by America. And what candidate running for president makes anything of this?

James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.