How Much Damage Has Eight Years of Conservative Rule Done toAmericans' Psyches?
By Mark Klempner, AlterNetPosted on October 29, 2008

When I was a teen growing up in Schenectady, N.Y., during the early'70s, I had an alcoholic neighbor whose favorite saying was, "Thetrouble with people is that they are no damn good." I was friends withhis son, and whenever I'd go over to hang out at his house, his fatherwould sidle up to me as though we were in a cocktail lounge, put hishand on my shoulder, and mutter his cranky credo.I didn't immediately make the connection between his soft-spoken,liquor-laced presentation and my own father's hard, locked-in mistrustof people and the world. But I realize now that if drink could haveloosened my father's tongue, he probably would have said the same thing.As a child, my father experienced the anti-Semitism of the Poles andthen barely escaped the Holocaust, fleeing Warsaw with his family justone week before Hitler invaded. Still, that doesn't explaineverything. Anne Frank, born five years after my father, got trappedin the same genocide he escaped. And yet, holed up in her hiding placewith Nazis prowling the streets below, she wrote in her diary, "Inspite of everything, I still believe that people are really good atheart."I don't think she was naive. On the same page, she writes of feeling"the suffering of millions," of being able to hear the "everapproaching thunder, which will destroy us too." Yet she held onto herbelief in the goodness of humanity.Over the years I've come to realize how much our basic opinion abouthumanity has vast repercussions -- not only on our personal lives, butalso on our politics. If you assume people are "no damn good," youwill probably favor more police officers and prisons, and you may notsee anything wrong with capital punishment. You will also favorfences, walls and barriers of all kinds, and believe that it isprudent and perhaps necessary to own a gun. It's likely you will havesupported George W. Bush in his pre-emptive war against Iraq, maybeeven after you learned that he depended on lies and deceptions tocarry it out. After all, life is about choosing the lesser of two evils.And what if you think that people are "really good at heart"? Thoughyou may be a dove, you will not necessarily be a starry-eyed dreamer.Many of those making the most basic contributions to society fall intothis category: nurses, teachers, social workers, counselors. Theseindividuals typically believe that it's better to rehabilitate peoplethan to lock them up, and that negotiation and diplomacy are betterthan the use of tactics of domination and the last resort of war. Theysee true peace and security arising from goodwill and generosity, andprobably keep a good book rather than a gun by their pillow.I don't mean to suggest that everyone falls solidly into one categoryor the other. We have all internalized both attitudes to some degree,and they vie for ascendancy, depending on what is happening in ourlives, and in the larger world. In times of peace and harmony we findmore people agreeing with Anne Frank. In times of suspicion andmistrust, such as we find ourselves facing now, my alcoholicneighbor's rant has the world's ear.It's not because of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Yes, 9/11 was adefining moment, but there were many ways we could have defined it.The way the Bush administration chose has made us more afraid and hasgiven us more to fear. All the wonderful promise of a new millenniumhas been subsumed by alerts of yellow, orange and red.There are many ways to make our country a safer and more secure place.As Samantha Collier, chief medical officer of HealthGrades, pointsout, far more people die each year from hospital errors than died whenthe Twin Towers fell. According to Collier, "The equivalent of 390jumbo jets full of people are dying each year due to preventable,in-hospital medical errors, making this one of the leading killers inthe United States."But hospital errors, infant mortality, AIDS and a host of otherthreats have not been a priority for Bush. Nor does it seem they willbe for McCain if he gets elected.We are fighting the "War on Terror." Fixated on the "War on Terror."Spending our money on the "War on Terror." Not questioning what itactually means to fight a "War on Terror." Not noticing that the veryexpression "War on Terror" is an absurd Orwellian oxymoron.Granted, 9/11 triggered a big "fight or flight" reaction, and when weare swept up in fear, our immediate and only concern is with security.Aggression is processed in the same part of the brain as fear, and itkicks in during the "fight" response, as was evident in the aftermathof 9/11. When an entire population feels threatened, group psychologycomes into play, increasing the possibility that a strong leader willbe able to exert undue influence upon the masses.The Bush administration took advantage of all these psychologicalvulnerabilities. Knowing that much of our capacity for criticalthinking would get washed away in the adrenaline, they methodicallyexploited our fears in order to push forward their radical corporatistagenda. But beyond the body count in Iraq and other physicalcasualties lies the deeper, invisible erosion of our capacity to love.I don't think I need to make a case that love is as compelling apsychological factor as fear and aggression. Many others have alreadydone this, including the man Bush places his faith in, the one whoexhorted his followers to love their enemies.However, in order to harness the power of love in a civic context, wehave to be able to see the good in others: to recognize that thosewhom we perceive as a threat, i.e. "the terrorists," are human beingstoo and might even have their good sides.Take the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Though their members havebeen implicated in suicide attacks and their charter calls for jihad,much of the everyday work they perform involves helping their people.No doubt some of the aid they provide allows them an opportunity toindoctrinate recipients into their ideology. But does that totallycancel out its value?An official document by the Israel Foreign Ministry indicates thatHamas' non-terrorist activities include "an extensive educationnetwork, massive activity in institutions of higher learning,distribution of basic foodstuffs 'for the holidays,' youth camps,sports, care for the elderly, scholarships, sponsorship of lightindustry and religious services under Hamas' sponsorship. "Although I condemn Hamas' terrorist actions and abhor the kind offundamentalist thinking that calls for the destruction of Israel, I'malso aware they are doing good work among their own people, and thushave some human decency. Is this such a terrible thing to acknowledge-- or are we no longer willing or able to handle such complexities?When we read about gang members, whether in nonfiction such asFreakonomics or in the creative work of, say, Richard Price, they arepresented as human beings, albeit human beings who often do terriblethings. Yet the criminals Bush is obsessed with are people fromanother culture who speak another language. There's a lot we don'tunderstand about them, and he and his staff have been able to fillthat vacuum with pure fear. Thus it has been very easy for them todemonize certain people and organizations, and thereby create a vastlymore polarized world.I acknowledge that there have been individuals who are almost entirelyevil. But a Hitler is as rare as a Mother Teresa. To snap everyoneonto either side of the moral grid -- as if most of them don't belongsomewhere in the middle -- is the modus operandi of fanatics,propagandists and warmongers.People with some degree of wisdom understand that nearly everyone isan alloy of good and evil. They recognize, like AleksandrSolzhenitsyn, that "the line separating good and evil passes notthrough states, nor between classes, nor between political partieseither, but right through every human heart, and through all humanhearts." They also recognize that most people do not want to live in aworld where "people are no damn good" and where fear, anger, hatredand war prevail.Perhaps the hardest truth for progressives to face is how the profoundpolitical and moral disappointments of the last eight years haveeroded our own sense of hope and our own belief that the electoratecan become more informed and less divided. We, too, hate "the Other,"but it is the guy in the grocery store with a hunting jacket andsix-pack, or the woman behind us at the gas pump with a "Rush isRight" sticker on her Suburban. We, too, have swallowed the banefullybinary worldview of the present administration that reduces everythingto "us" and "them."This touches on a confounding problem, one that helps to explain howthings have gotten so tangled up: Those of us who have the gumption topush for social or political change encounter formidable obstaclesthat sometimes discourage us to the point of burnout.On a personal and neighborly level, in seeking to love, or at least tohave friendly relations, we inevitably encounter disappointment, hurtand pain. We want to trust, but we're afraid to trust. We want to laydown our arms, but we want the feared and despised other to lay downtheir arms first. We want to create a beautiful world, but we thinkthat there are too many people who are going to mess it up, and wehate them for that, thereby marring our idealistic vision before we'veeven lifted a finger to materialize it.This leads to a lot of disillusioned idealists. Many people who setout to change the world are changed by the world into cynics or worse.Yet it doesn't have to be that way. The most effective socialreformers have been able to transform their idealism into somethingresilient and enduring.I believe that an important prerequisite for this is to have, asMartin Luther King Jr. put it, "a deep and abiding faith in humanity."Indeed, the entire American experiment in democracy would have beenunthinkable had the framers of our Constitution simply believed that"people are no damn good."And yet it is difficult in these times to feel our own goodness. Thevalidity of torture as a political tool is debated on the front pagesof our newspapers, as our president smilingly strips away huge swathsof our constitutional rights. When our highest elected officials actshamefully and irresponsibly in our name, it has to take a toll on ourpsyches. And, indeed, in some ways our reputation with ourselves hasfallen as low as our reputation with the rest of the world. This iswhat happens when one has a government in which corrupt people are ontop while persons of integrity are subservient or shunted aside.The fact remains, however, that there are some truly great people inthe United States, and a multitude of people with high ideals and awillingness to sacrifice for the good of all. Our leadership simplydoesn't reflect us.When Bush got in, all the neocons came out of the closet, but ifBarack Obama wins, their divisive strategies will be challenged. TheWhite House will no longer welcome or be a home to born-again bigots,torture apologists, habeas corpus revokers and the rest of theindustriofascist entourage. I also expect that censored truthcommissions, muzzled scientists, harassed librarians, boughtappointees and coerced generals will cease to be an issue underObama's leadership. As he extricates us from Iraq, perhaps he coulddeliver us and the Iraqis from the Shock and Awe strategists,Blackwater barbarians and Halliburton robber barons.But none of this can happen without our making a renewed commitment toonce again throw ourselves into the struggle and subject our hearts tothe dizzying roller-coaster whereby our dreams are brought within ourgrasp, but might just as suddenly be snatched away.A crucial part of our work will be to resurrect our essential visionof human goodness, and specifically our own goodness as a nation. Thisis something Obama alluded to repeatedly in his speech at theDemocratic National Convention, reminding us that "we are better thanthese last eight years. We are a better country than this."But what if McCain wins, and we have, to quote Hillary Clinton, "fourmore years ... of the last eight years"? We will then have to askourselves if it is possible to continue to hold out hope for humanity-- for ourselves, our country and the world -- after our hopes havebeen dashed again and again and again.The answer is yes; in fact, this was the attitude of the Holocaustrescuers whom I interviewed, including two who had been arrested bythe Gestapo and ended up in concentration camps. They felt that theNazis may have occupied their country and perhaps even captured theirbodies, but couldn't break their spirits. By continuing to believe inthe goodness of humanity, they implicitly rejected the Nazis' ghastlyworldview and inhumane conception of what it is to be human.Bush's reign of error has not been nearly as horrific -- for thoseliving on U.S. soil, at least -- but he has done more harm than anyU.S. president in my lifetime, and possibly in the history of ournation. It appears that McCain would continue Bush's policies, as wellas the underlying attitudes behind them. For instance, at a recentreligious forum, Obama and McCain were each asked how they would dealwith "evil." Obama stated that evil must be confronted, while notingthat a lot of evil has been done in the name of good, and that goodintentions are not sufficient to ensure a good outcome. McCain gave apurely militaristic response, identifying evil specifically with"radical Islamic extremism" and vowing to "totally" defeat it.Included was his well-worn line to pursue Osama bin Laden "to thegates of hell."Even in the event of a McCain victory, however, we must not sink tothe level of our leadership. And if the outcome of this electioncauses us to adopt a cynical attitude toward humanity and succumb tothe belief that our fellow citizens are hopelessly misguided, ignorantor "no damn good," or that our political process is hopelesslycorrupt, we eliminate the possibility that things will ever change forthe better. On a personal level, we sentence ourselves to never reallytrusting other human beings. Ultimately, we forfeit everything thatmakes life worth living.My father never did find the key to unlock his heart. His body wrackedwith cancer and more emaciated than I'd ever imagined possible, helooked in death uncannily like the concentration camp victim he alwaysfeared he might become. My high school friend found me after more than30 years (the Internet is good that way) and told me, among otherthings, that his father had died 20 years before. We are both fathersnow ourselves: His children are about the same age as he and I wereback in Schenectady, while I, having remarried in my mid-40s, am onlyjust now for the first time raising a family.I'm curious to find out what my old friend thinks about people, havinggrown up with a father whose mantra was that they are no damn good. Asfor me, I'm grateful that, unlike my father, I do not have any deeplyrooted fears born of trauma, and that the life-affirming worldview Istruggled to establish in my youth has stood the test of time. Irecognize, though, that the challenge of calibrating my faith inhumanity is more formidable than I'd once imagined. I wonder whetherI'll be able to impart to my own children an attitude toward humannature that brings out the best in them and everyone whose lives theytouch, while preparing them for their inevitable encounters withvarious forms of evil.When I look into my baby girl's trusting eyes, or see the ecstaticsmile of my 3-year-old son playing with his friends, I can't help butbelieve that people are really good at heart. When I read the historyof civilization, I am reminded that they often are not, especiallywhen they act en masse. And when I watch the news, I have to questionwhat business I have inflicting a world like this onto my children.I suppose I could cycle back and forth between these positions untilmy children are on their way to college and I'm on my way to thegrave, but instead I'm going to recommit myself to what I think is thespiritual bottom line: that it is up to each of us to infuse life withmeaning -- to choose life. Anne Frank, young as she was, understoodthis. The sentence that follows her quote about people really beinggood at heart reads, "I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundationof confusion, misery, and death." And neither can I, or you, or anyone.Mark Klempner is a social commentator, historian and author of TheHeart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. Hewould like to thank James McConkey and others who commented on anearly version of this piece: Amy Denham, Paul Glover, Gerry McCarthy,Alice McDowell, Nicole Sault and Richard Silverstein.http://www.alternet.org/story/104906/

SWITCHEROO
Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin, what if things wereswitched around?.....think about it. Would the country'scollective point of view be different?Ponder the following:What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage,including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenagedaughter?What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard LawReview?What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduatingclass?What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severedisfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to hisstandards?What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a longaffair while he was still married?What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addictedto pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitableorganization?What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five?What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?What if Obama was the one who had military experience that includeddiscipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?What if Obama was the one who was known todisplay publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beerdistribution?What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?You could easily add to this list._ If these questions reflectedreality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close asthey are?_This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizespositive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualitiesin another when there is a color difference.Educational Background:Barack Obama:Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization inInternational Relations.Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum LaudeJoseph Biden:University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)vs.John McCain:United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899Sarah Palin:Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semesterNorth Idaho College - 2 semesters - general studyUniversity of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalismMatanuska-Susitna College - 1 semesterUniversity of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in JournalismEducation isn't everything, but this is about thetwo highest offices in the land as well as ourstanding in the world. You make the call.

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com. Posted October 31, 2008.
Obama has a lot to offer, but until our education system is fixed or religious fundamentalism withers, anti-intellectuals will flaunt their ignorance.

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?
Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter -- stumbling a little, using long words -- carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -- men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton -- were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many U.S. citizens become so dumb and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of U.S. politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion -- in particular fundamentalist religion -- makes you stupid. The United States is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication of Origin of Species, for example, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the United States with the brutal philosophy -- now known as Social Darwinism -- of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people from being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation, according to the doctrine; gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable to the public from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian Right. Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and accept the pseudoscience of Social Darwinism.But there were other, more powerful reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The United States is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the Southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the South," Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest Protestant denomination in the United States, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the South stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that 1 in 4 of the state's public school biology teachers believed that humans and dinosaurs lived on Earth at the same time.This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishization of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary; all that is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements, like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason why intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day, men like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.The specter of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the elections of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite -- like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush -- has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an overeducated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the right-wing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.Obama has a good deal to offer America, but none of this will come to an end if he wins. Until the great failures of the U.S. education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.

From Rally to LYNCH MOB

Make no mistake that i truly appreciate John McCain trying to defuse the volatile rallies that both the senator and his vp pick Sara Palin created just a week ago. By irresponsibly liting the fuse of hate has created a fire storm of controversy that threatens to consume his very campaign. Reminds me of some of the same rallies you would see in the 1960's. Sara Palin's irresponsible statement of "Barack pallin around with TERRORIST" goes to show you how she would lead should the time would arrive (God forbid). Now Mr. McCain has the unenviable task of getting his kindergarden like pep rallies back together like a teacher past his usefulness trying to control his classroom.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itEucdhf4Us

DICK CHENEY BOOTCAMP

TRICKLE DOWN

Katie Couric interview

BAILOUT