December 04, 2004

Value

For those still following, Louis Menand's article in the December 6 New Yorker debunks the myth of the "moral values" tsunami we've been told washed over us on November 2. No less an authority than Jan Van Lohuizen, one of the Bush campaign's own pollsters, is quoted as having declared "'I've seen no data that, in the composition of the electorate, the religious voter was more heavily represented.'" The percentage of voters who attended church regularly declined in both Ohio and Florida, even though the overall numbers of voters increased.

This means two things. First, that blowsy pronouncements from leaders of the religious right are so much hot air; the floosies in our beloved national media can call a halt to their airborne sycophantics, because god-squadders are no more significant, statistically speaking, than they've ever been, wishful thinking and declaration notwithstanding.

Second, it means — as Menand points out — that Bush actually increased his support among non-church-goers since 2000. In other words, it's not just the lunatic fringe who put this team back in office. (And yes, the team is disintegrating; but that's for worse, not for better — we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.) A sizeable number of people who don't take orders from the voice in their toaster voted Bush/Cheney. In the end, this may well be worse news.

The puzzling over what this election has taught us may well continue until it's been buried under another kind of tsunami: that of history, which proceeds apace. There's far less puzzling over what it will give us in terms of policy. The latest alarm bell our press corps have decided to attend is that of the dollar's precipitous decline. It's not news, exactly; the dollar has been in a slide for about four years now. (Curious timing, that.) So I suppose what's waking everyone is that it's not turning around. Everyone, I guess, expected this to be a temporary thing, a minor adjustment to overvaluation — cyclical, as analysts are so fond of calling any unforeseen bump in the macroeconomic road. (If they're cyclical, of course, how could they also be unforeseen?) Americans, and the American press, so prone to the pathetic fallacy, no doubt figured that as soon as the national election angst was behind us — one way or another — everything else would fall into place.

But the operative principle in macroeconomics, as in all else, is inertia. Why would anything change, given that nothing has changed? With the Bush team back in place by virtue of — well, whatever it might have been — the fiscal policy of the US government remains what it was before the election. Which is to say, none at all. Or rather: no sane one. Spending on the Iraq occupation — we can finally call it that, can't we? we can dispense with the euphemisms? — continues to mount, faster even than the death toll, which has itself climbed by nearly 25% (to, by today's count, 1259) in just the last 10 weeks. The administration plans to move ahead with promised tax cuts, making old ones permanent and adding new ones under the banner of "simplification" (this is code, by the way, for requiring those with fewer resources to bear more of the national burden — a kind of rich-folks' liberation policy; and given the oppression under which the brave and steadfast American rich have been laboring, it couldn't come at a better time). There is no systemic spending-cuts plan yet, and one wonders what might be on it even if there were: the lion's share of our national budget goes to defense, and there's no hope of reducing that now. Perhaps the president could offer an "Okay, Wait: Leave Some Children Behind" revision to his first-term legislation, but since the original was underfunded it's hard to know what's left to throw out. Social security and medicare reform will take years to work out, years more to show economic fruit, assuming the seeds actually bear any; and in any event congress has shown zero political will — one might call it moral fiber, but what do I, living as I do in the satanic anarchist northeast, know about that — for pursuing reductions in lucrative porkbarrel expenditures.

What this augurs, of course, is further debt. If you've been reading your local paper during the past week, the mechanics have been spelled out for you, and I'll not repeat them. Suffice to say that the US government has been funding its day-to-day operations with credit. This is like paying your rent and your utilities with your MasterCard, and I'm not talking about the debit MasterCard. It's an extremely bad idea, with an extremely short shelf-life: temporary at its absolute best. Eventually, MasterCard has to get paid. The US government's MasterCard has been foreign investors — most significantly, foreign central banks; and most significantly among these, central banks in China, Japan, Russia and Europe. Because businesses in their nations have benefitted from their support of the dollar — a propped-up dollar allows American consumers to continue to afford their exports — these central banks have been willing to go along. But the math grows increasingly shaky, and worse still — again — there's no plan to revise it. The central banks are becoming nervous. All investment is, at bottom, a kind of bet; we're starting to look like a bad one.

The whole business is compounded by the fact that it's consumption that drives the US economy. The "recovery" of the last few years, such as it's been, rests on three things: spending on the war in Iraq; consumer spending; and real estate investment. All three are fueled by debt. It's an economic house of cards. As a nation, we rely on consumer spending — mostly from the middle class — for our economic progress. Since middle-class wages have been suffering the death-drip of a slow, steady decline, much of that spending comes not in cash but in credit. It also comes by sacrifice of savings, which in the US are lower than in any other advanced postindustrial nation — so low, in fact, as to be negligible. There is precious little fallback should the credit spigot run dry. The middle class has likewise driven the real-estate boom: low interest rates have allowed more of us to buy more expensive houses, which in turn has driven up housing prices, which has increased our net worth, which has allowed us to get more credit and thus buy even more expensive houses. Housing values may not be tied directly to interest rates, but there's certainly strong sympathy between the two. If interest rates were to suddenly and significantly rise, not one but two pillars of our current economy  — consumer spending and real estate — would tremble at the very least. What would that mean?

We may soon find out. It's not hard to understand why Japan and the EU might look at the contemporary US and find its prospects wanting. We don't invest in our future; why should they? We don't save; we don't provide the vast majority of our population with a globally competitive education; we have no rational healthcare delivery system; our policies, foreign and domestic, shift on the increasingly passionate winds of neoadolescent fervors, religious and otherwise. It's not moral fiber we lack, it's vision; direction; a sense of what it means to cultivate a society over the long term. The world has long admired our freedom, our energy, our innovation. But our freedoms are increasingly trivial, reduced to t-shirt slogans and the competitive idiocies of cable TV; our energy looks more like fanaticism each day — or, on the other hand, mere overwork; and our hold on the innovation market has been slipping for fifteen years, if not longer. We're driving our economy and our culture headlong toward neofeudalism, and the last people on the face of the earth who seem recognize it is us.

It's not surprising, then, that Japan, China, Russia, even the EU might consider shifting their investments elsewhere — might buy Euros instead of dollars, for example. Might even apply the Euro as the new global currency standard, devaluing the dollar still more. The consequences for the US economy could be severe: credit would become dramatically more expensive, not just for government but for us all. The Fed would be forced to spike interest rates. We can't say for sure what the effect would be on consumer spending or real estate, but it's reasonable to expect that both would slow, if not come to a screeching halt. Recession is probably the best we could hope for.

Nothing is inevitable, of course. But the principles of inertia still apply: unless something changes, things are bound to stay the same. The Bush administration has said publicly that it supports a strong dollar, but that's just talk; it means little to the domestic audience, still less to the more crucial international one. A shift in policy is the only thing that matters, and there's no sign of that on the horizon.

Here's another cyclical thing: the decline of cultures. We may be learning more about that than we'd like to. But then again, 51% of our voting population put in the lesson request. Too bad it's all of us who'll be forced to attend.

November 19, 2004

Shame on who

I hate to be doing this. Really, I do. One of the major gripes I've always had with the American left — of which, philosophically, I consider myself a member — is its tendency toward self-flagellation. It can seem like (and maybe is) the pitiful legacy of voguish socialism: enormous energy spent correcting the ideological "errors" of one's allies, precious little on countering the enemy. However. I am forced (forced, I tell you) to revisit Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. I give you the following paragraph, from his column of November 17, 2004:

The central question of President Bush's second term is this: Will he shaft his Christian-right supporters, since he doesn't need them any more, and try to secure his legacy with moderate policies that might unite the country? Or, with no re-election to worry about, will he pursue revolutionary changes on the right?

In its own small way, this is a stunning passage. And so by way of response I offer the following comment from a friend:

For whom, exactly, is this a question?  Note the assumption inherent in “secure his legacy with moderate policies”: that moderate policies are in fact the stuff of securing one’s legacy.  How much more evidence does Kristof need to be convinced that George W. Bush is the Christian right, and that he fervently, unironically (was there ever a politician with less of a sense of irony?) believes that his hard right policies are what God wants and the American people (present and future) need, bitter medicine or no?  Kristof’s brand of thinking was forgivable back in 2000, when all the pundits announced, “With such a tenuous hold on the Presidency, given the electoral and popular vote, Bush will obviously have to lead an administration of great moderation (huff, chuff)... a sort of centrist ‘coalition government’ if you will (ahem, ahah)....”  Positing the same sort of hoo-hah in 2004 falls into “Fool me once, uh... shame me twice, er... no... shame me once... fool on me...” territory.

Kristof seems like a nice guy. An unbelievably nice guy — the kind who would, for instance, use personal funds to buy a teenage prostitute her freedom: downright saintly. But the latitude he's given both Bush and Bush supporters pushes "nice" to the territory of "chump." Anyone who witnessed Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission can't call her "honest" without having watched through some deeply rose-colored glasses. More to the point, there's something Pollyanna-ish about the question Kristof's posed here. Was there ever any doubt about the theme of a Bush second term?

Not among the evangelicals. They came out for the election, then they came out to strut — to let the rest of us know, in no uncertain terms, that they'd won the election for Bush (not necessarily true, but it's the stuff of myth now, so never mind), that they'd acquired sizeable IOUs in so doing, and that they fully intend to collect. The sanctimony has been thick.

The mistake Kristof makes — and he's not alone — is in thinking Bush was adopting a pose when he catered, during the campaign, to the right-wing evangelical base. This was not the pose. The pose was what he adopted to cater to moderates; "compassionate conservatism" — that was the pose. The first term, especially the first term post-9/11, revealed this pretty vividly. It's true that the Bush campaign trundled out the tired wheelbarrow of moderate promises for electioneering; and it's true that mainstream media, liberal and right-wing alike, dutifully assisted in sprucing up that wheelbarrow and making it roll. None of this changes the reality that was being disguised, and that should have been (and really, honestly, was) obvious to anyone paying attention.

This has been a revolutionary regime from its beginning. Note my friend's recollection of the punditry after the 2000 election: given the contentiousness of the process, conventional wisdom predicted moderation and centrism. It made sense if one assumed genuine intentions (a) to govern effectively, and (b) to build a national consensus. The actual intention was (c) to intensify and broaden the right-wing conversion experience of this nation. Appointments of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Card, Rice, and Ashcroft telegraphed this; nominations to the federal bench confirmed it. (And one man's obstructionism is another man's principled stand against — hate to say it — an activist judiciary.)

Powell and No Child Left Behind provided window-dressing through the first term, as did occasional fictive references to the middle class in discussions of tax cuts. All were well and amply deployed — to the point, at least in Powell's case, of depletion. The pretense to moderation returned when it served political expedience; it was received and disseminated with credulity by a press desperate to counter blatantly partisan accusations of partisanship; and then it was tossed aside. This continued right up until the day after this year's election, when Kerry conceded and Bush flashed his gilded tease of an olive branch. The next morning, it vanished for good. "We'll work with those who support our goals," Bush announced, telling the truth at last.

So he has. So he will. Perhaps Kristof — spun, like the rest of us, so relentlessly by this administration — thought he was being twirled across the dance floor one more time. No such luck.

I would suggest the following, to Kristof and the rest of us: no more second chances. No more benefits of the doubt. More than ever, these men are what they are. While you wonder about their "legacy," they're off, in the words of one of their own, "creating new realities." Which is to say they're not catering to the revolutionaries, they are the revolutionaries.

The only real question is this: in four years, just how bad can it get? It would seem we're about to find out.

Common

A friend sent the following link for my perusal:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1103-28.htm

To which I respond: Rah.

Maybe I'm in the minority (even within the minority), but I'm finding sophomoric pep talks like these nearly as demoralizing as Condi Rice's appointment or Gonzales's nomination. They suggest nothing so much as that that the so-called loyal opposition will continue to have its head up its ass and naught but pieties up its sleeve.

Henceforth, to think of US politics as though it were just a matter of knocking on one more potentially pro-union door is to truly misunderstand the disastrous circumstances, economic and political, faced by this nation — and particularly by nonelites in this nation. It's also to underestimate the enthusiasm with which huge numbers of those nonelites are jogging up the gangplank of their own death ship. And finally, it's to overestimate — condescendingly, I suppose — the degree to which elites can, or should, or have been invited to, "save" those who aren't. All anyone of conscience can really do is keep telling the truth as ardently as possible. In the end, if the greater number of the populace continues to select disaster, then disaster is most probably what they'll get.

(And yes, I am aware there's an argument that most people don't get the truth but rather something very different. But I am not convinced. The little channel arrows on the remote go up as well as down. A wide variety of newspapers are available free of charge online, or at newsstands for about the price of your average can of soda. When people feel that two guys pledging troth to one another in a ceremony before family and friends is more of a "threat" to our cultural definition of "marriage" than is, say, "The Bachelor" or "Who Wants to Marry My Dad?" or the fourteen-thousandth People magazine cover on Jen & Ben/Jen & Marc/Jen & whoever-it-is-this-week, I'm not sure all the data in the world on economic change and job depletion, let alone unemployment among young men in the Arab-Islamic middle-east, is going to have any salient impact. Some people may just want to eat cake, especially when they can enjoy a simultaneous side dish of self-righteous resentment of those supposedly hedonistic northeastern elites against whom elections are to be used as a form of fantasy revenge.)

Besides, the strongest bulwark against creeping theocratic fascism from every direction ain't Canada, it's the EU, which has genuine economic clout to rival or exceed that of the US as well as growing political influence. Currently it's the strongest refuge of secular middle-class culture. Canada's just a short nation-building intervention away. Can't you just see it? Baptist sleeper cells creeping north from Oklahoma and Utah, disguised as disaffected Oregonians?

November 15, 2004

Stark Raving

Snippets from responses to Kristof's column last week regarding intimidation of the press:

"So sorry, but they SHOULD be locked up . There is no guarantee of protection for 'sources'. Unfortunately, journalists have proven themselves to be every bit as deceiving and manipulating as anyone else. The old days of trusting you folks is over. Is there really a source? Did the reporter actually report ONLY the truth? What, in view of the disgraceful conduct of the media outlets during the Presidential election, and the hysterical babblings since, (NYT, LAT, and others) we're supposed to get all worked up in outrage over the jailing of possible Jayson Blairs? Hah! Your days of credibility are over, face it."

"You are more than willing to blame judges for an assault on YOUR 'professional' freedoms, but are unwilling to recognize the even greater assault by activists judges on the cultural freedoms the bulk of Americans revere"


Under normal circumstances I'd recommend ignoring this kind of frothing-at-the-mouth babble. I'd advocate a high road approach, write such comments off as the ravings of delusional O'Reilly/Limbaugh brownshirts or else raging psychopaths on a breather between serial homicides. (And speaking of the rabid right-wing's two favorite sons: when the moral values are scored, where do sexual harrassment — sorry; alleged sexual harrassment; have you read the complaint? it's available online at thesmokinggun.com; pay particular attention to the, uh, attention devoted to loofah — and self-confessed addiction to prescription narcotics, with attendant socializing with dealers and other upstanding citizens, come in? I just want to know when I'm trying to reserve a seat on the train to paradise: who sits where?)

But these days we can't ignore it. It's the party line. And they sound exactly like little Bolsheviks as they deliver it, reading (or typing) from the cards. Fox News good, New York Times bad. Christian rights assaulted by libertine freaks who won't let them tell everyone else what to do. Liberals trying to force America to have sex with goats!

Just for the record, livestock had no place on the Democratic platform. Unless you're reading something I'm not in the donkey. (But then, the GOP sports an elephant; that's a brand of math I steer clear of.)

Of the first writer, one wants to ask: If reporters (and op-ed columnists) at the NYT suffer such severe credibility deficits, why the hell are you bothering to read them? Are you unemployed? (If so, I'm sure Bush is on it.) Are you employed but underchallenged, and therefore bored? I don't have time to take in the media I admire, let alone that I'm convinced is shit. Seeking a different point of view may be one thing, and a respectable one. Engaging in what you yourself have deemed a total waste of time is something else. Get a life.

It's the second of these two that's more profoundly disturbing, and probably the more emblematic of the fractured state our state is in. This writer feels put upon. She feels assaulted. Her freedoms, she's convinced, are under attack. She doesn't specify which activist judges, or which freedoms they've taken aim at, so the best we can do is speculate. Maybe she's a practicing Christian, for example, and she lives — unlike me — in a place where they've outlawed the practice of Christianity. She's forbidden to go to church, forbidden to associate with fellow Christians; if she's caught praying she'll be remanded to jail. It's unlawful for her to donate money to representatives of her chosen faith. Christian schools are outlawed, as is reading the Bible to your kids.

Or perhaps she's a heterosexual, and she lives in a place — unlike me — where heterosexuals are not allowed to openly practice their, uh, lifestyle. She's not permitted to date members of the opposite sex. She's certainly not permitted to have sex with members of the opposite sex. And needless to say, the penalties for cohabitation with, let alone marriage to, a member of the opposite sex are severe. Maybe, where she lives, they're even forcing her to spend time with members of the same sex — special time, if you see what I mean. They come to her house and extract her, maybe with weapons, and they take her way out in the woods to a grim cabin with bad plumbing. They make her wear flannel. They threaten to cut her hair.

If these are the kinds of things writer #2 is complaining about, then she's absolutely correct: her "cultural freedoms" are under assault. We ought to find out where she lives and head down there with the pickaxes and shovels. If not, I'm going to need more information. Because I'm inclined to think the "cultural freedom" she'd like to see less curtailed is the freedom to dictate to her fellow citizens how they're to conduct their own affairs.

Tell me I'm wrong. Please: tell me I'm wrong, and convince me.

And last, a note to those of you who climbed into the George Bush boat only to find yourself, less than two weeks later, a little queasy at the prospect of spending serious time with some of your fellow passengers. The note is this: we told you so. And this: you didn't just hand them the oars, you passed along the tiller as well. And finally this: when you've had enough and you miss the country you grew up in, make the leap. There's a bunch of us treading down here in the waters of sanity; we can always use a new pair of hands. One of these days we'll accumulate the wherewithal to build ourselves a raft.

November 08, 2004

Moondate

Not surprisingly, and in keeping with their conduct prior to the election, the administration since has made claims wholly unsupported by actual evidence from planet Earth. Some of the most egregious of these claims involve the so-called mandate given them by voters, and size of same. It's, uh, big, they say. Really big. In fact the biggest.

Like Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; like the liaison between Saddam and Osama; like Colin Powell's influence on US foreign policy, this turns out to be mostly a figment of Dick Cheney's imagination. Or perhaps Andy Card's, or William Kristol's — would that Jung were around to theorize on the collective unconscious of neoconservatives. Would he need body count stats for that?

Examples of administration storytelling prowess: from Mr Cheney: "President Bush ran forthrightly on a clear agenda for this nation's future, and the nation responded by giving him a mandate." From William Kristol: "An even larger and clearer mandate than those won in the landslide reelection campaigns of Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Clinton in 1996." Like I said: Bush's mandate is big; really big.

We'll have to skip the "clear agenda" part; I heard all three debates, and I can't tell you what it might have been. I do know that "Leave No Child Behind" was a jobs program. After that, it's all a huffy blur. Of course, "Leave No Child Behind" came in the first year of his first term. Does that count as an agenda item for the second term? Maybe he meant he was going to reiterate his support for the already-passed "Leave No Child Behind." Yaay! Cross that one off the list: done.  Or maybe he meant he was going to fully fund it, finally — it was his program, after all. Or maybe he meant he was going to start a National Lawn Mowing Corps, thus uniting Non-Left-Behind Children with Jobs. (Good for the middle class, too: some of them have been known to have lawns.)

If you are enjoying the mandate fantasy, please avert your eyes. (It sounds sinful anyway.) If on the other hand you'd prefer to clasp your fingers around a small slice of reality (hey, maybe yours is a big slice of reality — no offense intended), see John Nichols's column in the current online issue of The Nation. I'll reproduce some of his most salient data here:

• Bush won a popular vote majority of about 3.5 million. (That's roughly 3 percent. That's so low that if it were a mortgage rate, you'd cut off your left fist to get it. And yes, it would have to be the left fist.)

• Bush won an electoral vote majority of 286-252.

• In presidential elections from 1904 through this year, 21 of 25 victors won by a wider percentage of the popular vote than Bush received on Tuesday.

• Over those same 100 years, 23 of 25 presidential victors won by wider margins than Bush in the Electoral College. The only narrower winners were Bush in 2000 and Woodrow Wilson in 1916. In other words, Bush squeaked by with the third skinniest margin in the last 100 years. And one of the two people he outdistanced was himself.

Nichols goes on to point out that the president with the victory margin closest to Bush's was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Carter's popular-vote margin was identical to Bush's; his electoral margin was larger (297-240). Nobody thought of the Carter presidency as wielding a mandate — in fact, as Nichols reminds us, people thought of it as embattled, beleaguered, just barely scraping by. And the Republicans of the day were not intimidated in the least, in spite of the fact that Carter's congressional majorities were even more formidable than Bush's today.

But I'll also say this: Cheney et al. have faced down the truth by fiat repeatedly over the last four years, and they've yet to see evidence that it won't work. One of the reasons they won at all — by any margin — was their repeated insistence, contrary to all facts and evidence, that Saddam Hussein had provided aid and comfort to Osama Bin Laden. This is a well-demonstrated falsehood, and yet over 70% of those who voted for the incumbents claimed to believe it. They likewise insisted — again, contrary to facts and evidence — that the war in Iraq was a success, that the insurgency was minor and diminishing, and that the invasion as a whole had diminished the threat of terrorism. Demonstrably false, each and every one of these claims. And yet.

If Bush and Cheney and Card and their cohorts declare a mandate (as they have), and if those same people who believed them about Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and Iraq believe them about this (as I see no reason to think they will not), then the mandate, like the second term, will become a reality.

We are in the funhouse now, ladies and gentlemen. Do not underestimate the regime's capacity for deception and scheme. Do not underestimate the population's willingness to go along, especially if it feels good (and spreading democracy with God on your side feels very good). And do not overestimate the power of the truth to fight back. The battlefield now is the American mind, and facts, as weapons, may be of limited use.

Secure

Post-election pronouncements have been little short of apocalyptic on both sides, but the smug assurance of right-wingers is overwhelming given the 51/48% vote tally (it's a smugness reinforced, admittedly, by self-flagellation and extravagant mourning on the left). Democrats are being treated to all sorts of fine lectures about how to court suburban voters, how to court southern voters, how to get in touch with the real America.

As a guy who gets up and goes to work on the subway after a cup of coffee and a baked bread product every morning, I've begun to resent this dismissive condescension. I am not a trust-fund baby; I am not a froth-mouthed radical. I am not immune to security concerns. I live in New York City; I'm not sure security could occupy greater space in my modest brain. When the Republican convention was in town I couldn't walk down a sidewalk for lunch without visions of detonating car bombs. I took the bus instead of the subway, changed the route by which I conducted basic business like purchasing milk (yes, we do conduct basic business like purchasing milk here in Pointy-Headed Elitist Urban Voterland), and called my wife every couple of hours to make certain she was safe. It all felt pretty real to me. I tried to steer clear of the myriad monuments and historical locations that pepper our streets, those much-discussed symbols of the nation and its ideals which are, presumably, thus despised by enemies worldwide: the Empire State Building, the Public Library, Grand Central Station, Times Square. And it seemed as I did so that I was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other hardworking, equally anxious American souls — as real as they could be, each one of them.

Claims of "real America-ness" are also a way of exaggerating the Bush campaign's connection to suburban voters. My brother lives in the suburbs; my mother too. They were both staunch supporters of Kerry. So were their neighbors. This is just another fictitious form of Republican self-congratulation. And a way to normalize themselves, to suggest — to whom? to David Brooks? Spare your breath; he'll convince himself — they didn't get pushed over the top by an evangelical appeal.

Many Bush voters cited security as their issue; and indeed "success" in the so-called war on terror, plus presumably attendant security, were an important part of Bush's sales pitch. It's interesting to note that the people who actually live in places that either have been hit by terrorist attacks or are likely to suffer them in the future — coastal cities; commercial and political centers: Washington, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Seattle, Chicago — voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. We who feel our lives are on the line every day, and who have good historical reason for feeling so, could not disagree more strongly about who we'd like watching our backs. We do not feel safe with Mr. Bush in office; we do not believe he has done or will do a competent job of protecting us, our places of business, our homes. (And why my home as a thirty-something resident of New York is suddenly less valuable, less "authentic," or less authentically "American," than the home of a thirty-something resident of Phoenix escapes me.) It is true that when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center towers they intended a strike at America in its entirety, the idea of America and the reality of America and its place in the world; but it was New Yorkers who died (and here I employ the regional definition, one that includes people from New Jersey, northern Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and so on). It will be New Yorkers, by and large, who pay for the rebuilding, spiritual and material. If we are hit again — America, I mean — it will once more, in all likelihood, be in New York or San Francisco, Chicago or Washington or Boston. It will once again be the residents of whatever urban coastal region who die. It will not be residents of an Iowa suburb, or rural Mississippi, or exurban Indiana. (I know we see news reports from such places depicting fears of immanent attack, but this is, realistically speaking, self-aggrandizing paranoia. And lest I be dismissed as a pointy-headed northeastern elitist for saying so, I'd offer the Al Qaeda record. It suggests a strategy of mass casualties. I'd offer, furthermore, that it's not exactly an enviable position in which to find oneself. Could there really be competition over being a target?)

It's well and good to suggest that we reach out to the midwestern voter, but I for one would first like to see the midwestern voter make rational decisions about allocation of national resources. I won't ask for corn subsidies for farmers in Long Island; they shouldn't ask — as they have, twice now, successfully — that folks in Wyoming receive higher per capita homeland security funding than folks in New York. At the moment, I simply do not trust Red America to make competent choices about my safety. And I'd say the assumption that midlanders understand the security concerns of an urban coastal city at this point in our history ranks higher on the arrogance meter than my own assumption that they don't. Frankly, this particular policy shakedown — the allocation of homeland security funds prioritizing local pork over national threat — bespeaks a severe lack of judgment about the security challenges faced by this nation. I don't care what your congressman has been telling you (he gets paid to do that); I don't care what Dick Cheney has been telling you (he gets — oh, never mind). If you think Wyoming is the homeland's front line, you don't understand this fight.

It's an assumption that ran through a great deal of the reporting on the campaign: that suburban and rural voters had safety as their first concern and thus voted (of course, the implication goes) for Bush, whereas urban voters placed different concerns in the foreground, leading to support for Kerry. I think many urban voters would tell you it was the reverse: that they voted for Kerry precisely because they feel their lives are at stake, and they do not trust Bush to protect them. They were just as obsessed with security as folks in the heartland. They simply reached radically different conclusions about who could and would provide it. And if you asked, I wager most would tell you it was a question of competence. Bush has displayed none; Kerry, though admittedly untested at the executive level, at least held promise. He seemed to approach the subject with thoughtful gravitas, rather than with bull-headed slogans and nasty soundbite quips. Last I checked, bull-headed slogans and quips were unsuccessful at turning Kalashnikovs into bread loaves in Iraq.

This struggle has come down to an argument over the definition of moral commitment — a disagreement over who has it and to what. The irony is that, much as Red America would like to paint us as wild-eyed pushers and pimps who want to drive stakes through the hearts of those who refuse corruption, Blue America's motivating philosophy is pluralism. We're happy to let Red America do as it pleases, so long as what it pleases to do is not legislate our personal moral codes. We don't want to convert and we don't want to be converted. The evidence suggests, we think, that at the end of that road you find Talibanland, and we would prefer to be spared that particular — and particularly lethal — ride.

Sidebar: Former-leftish-now-born-again cadabout Christopher Hitchens is fond of citing fears of Islamic fundamentalist cells working today, in our midst, when explaining his support for President Bush. You'll see this logic pop up even in such unlikely pieces as his discussion, in this week's NY Times Book Review, of Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times. It comes off mostly as a revisitation of McCarthyite ranting — a hysterical justification of Bush and Ashcroft's suspension of habeas corpus as well as god knows what new surveillance schemes. He'll gladly hand over his dirty underwear, if only they'll protect him, protect him. Good luck, Hitch. Maybe you should move to Wyoming. I hear they've got enough homeland security funding there to get every last terrorist out of your soup.

Look for Hitchens to be playing the Walter Winchell role in a remake of They Came From Planet Red, coming soon to a theater near you. Right about the same time one — just one — of the more than 2000 people Ashcroft's Justice Department has arrested and held without trial gets convicted of something other than jaywalking. If they're really doing such a bang up job, Hitch, shouldn't they have acquired some evidence over the last two years? Even the Nassau County Sheriff can manage that from time to time. And if the reason they haven't is because terrorists are really that much more clever, shouldn't we hire smarter guys? Maybe less time in prayer, more time following up leads ....

In any event, even Hitch can't explain how the bungled adventure in Iraq has improved security on the homefront.

But there I go with my pointy-headed arrogant northeastern elitism again — always asking for results, results, when any good American boy, especially nowadays, just has faith.

November 06, 2004

Bad Religion

An email sent to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in reponse to his most recent column ("Time to Get Religion," November 6):

Mr Kristof:

Have to disagree with you, both on principle and pragmatically. If the Dems follow your advice, what would be the point of having a second party at all? The philosophy you outline has already been embraced by moderate Republicans. (Can you say Arnold Schwartzeneggar? Rudy Giuliani?)

As for Michael Moore, the problem was never the content of his argument. The problem was tone. Howard Dean had the same problem, or was at least successfully portrayed as having it. In addition, I'd wager that if Moore looked and dressed like Jude Law, people would've had far less objection. I know, I know: that's reality, an incontrovertible consequence of the media culture in which we live. We have to deal with it. But it still points to the fact that substance matters less than style and delivery.

With regard to religion, your prescription is fine if we're willing to cede one of the fundamental principles of American democracy, which is the exclusion of theology in the formation and application of law. We may lose this battle anyway — are already losing it in certain instances — but that doesn't mean it's not a battle worth fighting, or that the pendulum won't swing back as it's done before.

The biggest trouble with your prescription, aside from its abandonment of principle in favor of victory, is that the chances of it leading to victory are slim. Republicans are hands-down better at articulating homespun centrism, and hands-down better at portraying their Democratic opponents as principle-free hacks. In polls asking which candidate actually seemed to mean what he was saying — that is, to believe in it — Kerry consistently lost, and by a wide margin. People got the impression he'd say anything to get elected. They weren't convinced he actually stood for something at all. Part of the reason they believed this is that Republicans told them so (and told them so convincingly, using soundbites Kerry helpfully provided). Another part is that Kerry and the DNC have spent the last 15 years following advice much like yours, with the result that their capacity for articulating a coherent vision for the nation has atrophied. No one, including Democrats, has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for. We know what the party historically stood for, but we don't know what kind of world modern Democrats want to shape. You can't say that about Republicans.

And you can't apply Clinton to any other circumstance. Clinton is the most gifted politician of his generation, and his charisma — like Reagan's — transcends policy. There were a whole lot of people who just didn't give a damn what Clinton's politics were; they liked the guy. They still like the guy: if he'd been running against Bush, there's no doubt in my mind he'd've won. It's also worth noting that when he did run, it was against two incredibly uncharismatic, untelegenic, uncharming sourpusses. And the overall political tenor throughout Clinton's two terms, though moderate by today's standards, was still moderately Republican.

Something else about Clinton: if he'd been running, we'd've spent a hell of a lot less time talking about Vietnam. Which brings me to a final point: the Democrats ran, at best, a mediocre campaign. Even before the Democratic convention, I got on the elevator in my office building in Manhattan and was joined by a woman who I'd guess was in her middle-thirties, professional. The news screen on the wall flashed something about Kerry and Vietnam, and the woman said, under her breath but impulsively, irresistibly, "Shut up about Vietnam already." I don't know if she planned to vote for Bush or not, but I do know Kerry had little hope of reaching her after that — especially since Vietnam's presence in the conversation only expanded. If Democrats were out of touch with anything, it was what American voters wanted to hear about. They hemmed and hawed, started and stopped, tried one thing and then another. Sometimes they hit it right and sometimes they missed completely. In the end, it was hard to say what it all added up to. The most consistent support they got was from people who couldn't stand the thought of four more years of Bush.

I think before you jettison the product, you try to revamp your marketing strategy. And you find some better salesmen too. Maybe some who actually know what the product is, and like it, and think others should like it too, and can talk about it clearly and movingly. Then you'll really know whether there's a market or not.

November 05, 2004

The Moving On

And so now Kerry has delivered his concession speech, Bush has laid claim. I've received my thank you notes from the Kerry campaign and from MoveOn.org: consolatory returns on my first-ever campaign contributions. They all insist it's not over. We'll fight on, they insist; it was an excellent start. Perhaps. But today I am of other minds. Something, certainly, is over. And is there something else — for better or worse — that might have begun?

It's customary in the aftermath of battles like this one — protracted, vicious, winner-take-all — for everyone to issue calls for fresh unity. For the defeated, it's the last gasp of influence, a chance to blare, as foot number 2 slides toward the grave, a reminder of what might have been and what might yet be someday. Play nice, it says to the other side, lest the shoe migrate — as it usually does — to the other foot. It's also a chance — a last chance, most probably — to project magnanimity on the grand stage. Such moments are history, after all. We want to be remembered well when we're gone.

For the victor it's simpler, and less costly: a demonstration of good sportsmanship before the raping and pillaging commence.

Kerry and Bush played by these rules on Wednesday, tossing out calls for the burying of hatchets, the mending of fences, other newer-age variants of same. Bush even went so far as to promise to earn the trust of his opponent's supporters. Once again, one has to question his connection to reality. It's a little like an abusive spouse knocking on the door on the sober morning after, pleading for one last chance. The smart money says we'll get hit again.

Still, it's a swell thought. And it's not wrong, at least in spirit: though it was difficult to remember on Wednesday, the country is evenly divided, two almost-halves split by little more than a margin of error. Kerry got 48% of the popular vote to Bush's 51%, and the election really did come down to fewer than 150,000 votes in Ohio. Progressives huddling in near-suicidal disbelief beneath the heavy dark shadow of four more years of Bush-Cheney — plus Republican control of every major branch of government by ever-wider margins — might be forgiven for seeing it otherwise. Nonetheless, it's a fact.

And yet. And yet. It's all just a little too facile. The last eight months have been bitter. And the bitterness has not felt incidental. For Rove it may have been no more than a tactic. (For Rove, everything may be no more than a tactic, except the win itself. Who knows what really drives this man — what he really thinks, really is, in his heart of hearts, if he has one — beyond the all-engulfing need to win.) But for the footsoldiers on each side there seems little question. The divisions were heartfelt. They were profound, material. It may be they cannot be bridged.

The right wing is fond, especially in the mocking aftermath, of telling the left that they "just don't get it." They're not wrong. We don't. I certainly don't. But then again, neither do they. Let me offer the following exchange. It took place on Wednesday morning just after reports of Kerry's call to Bush to concede, on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show, between a guest — Ruben Navarrette of the Dallas Morning News — and a caller, Kathy, from Stamford CT:

Kathy: ... More depressing is the previous caller, who talked about "moral values" and then said, "We don't want homosexuals to get married, we don't want affirmative action" and all those things. If by "moral values" those people mean "we hate everybody who's not like us," then I'd say this country is well on its way to going to hell in a handbasket. If "moral values" meant good things, and taking care of people, and worrying about people who have no homes, no food, no health care, no jobs, then I'd say, "Okay, I'll go with you guys. I'm a lifelong Democrat, but I'll get on your moral value wagon." But every person I know — and that guy was just like one of them — who talks about "moral values," it's a nice code word to mean "I hate this group, I hate that group." And we are increasingly becoming a country of people who hate each other. And that's how the Republicans ran the campaign against Kerry: they tried to demonize him.

Ruben Navarrette: Hey, I don't want to make a joke of it, but I hate callers like that. I hate comments like that. I think that the problem, and the first caller ... brought up this point, that somehow if you come out against gay marriage — I happen to be in favor of gay marriage; I'm an exception maybe in some Republican ranks and some Bush supporters' ranks — but if you come out somehow against gay marriage, you're a homophobe. I think that the left, the elitist left has made a terrible mistake. They come off as arrogant, self-centered; they have an air of moral superiority about them, and they throw around words like "hate." Everybody's a hate-monger. "You hate people, I love people." That's just not the way you win elections.

Kathy: Talking about self-centered. I'm talking about voting — I live in Connecticut. I have plenty of money. But I try to vote in candidates who would vote in health care, and housing, and food. We have empty food banks in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Now that to me is not being self-centered. My food pantry is full. But I'm worried about people who aren't going to have enough money to live through the winter.

RN: It's self-centered if callers like that don't recognize that there's a person in Arkansas or in Mississippi or in Texas who doesn't live in Connecticut and who doesn't have a lot of money but does have a perspective on this presidency and they're entitled to their opinion. And they need not be called a "hater" for it.


Let's note a couple of things about this back-and-forth. Kathy makes an inarticulate but heartfelt attempt to lay competing claim to the high ground of "moral values"; she doesn't put it quite like this, maybe because she's not quite aware it's what she's doing. That's symptomatic of the left in general. We're so suspicious of words like "moral" that we're afraid to acknowledge that we have them. Beheath the clumsy phrasing, Kathy's point is that there is a value system there, and it's strong, and it doesn't waver.

Navarrette calls Kathy arrogant and self-centered; he suggests she's somehow squelching, with her big elitist Connecticut toe, the opinions of those who — what? — object, let's say, to gay marriage. He's pissed that she's calling such folk homophobes. Never mind, for now, that she didn't. First question: if "objection" to gay marriage does not spring from homophobia, then from what, exactly, does it spring? Navarrette can't answer this, because as he's quick to point out he doesn't object. (One would like to hear him explain why not.) But it seems to me you can't have it both ways. Either you think there's something wrong with being gay, and it "upsets" you to see gayness express itself in a state-sanctioned union (John Kerry, by the way, did not support gay marriage either, but he did support civil unions — meaning that those who voted for Bush based on this issue must have objected to more than the application of "marriage" itself: they must have objected to state sanction of gay relationships altogether, mustn't they? or else Kerry's position would have been sufficient) — either you think there's something wrong with it, and you don't want it sanctioned, or you don't think there's anything wrong with it, in which case you don't give a damn. And if you think there's something wrong with being gay, you're a homophobe. That's just how definitions work. As Navarrette himself implied earlier in the show, if you believe a thing, you might as well say it, and you might as well stand up for it consistently. Does that make such people "haters"? I don't know. Perhaps homophobia isn't always hate, or always exactly; maybe it's fear. Or maybe it's just a queasy discomfort rising from a hidden swamp of fear, or hate, or both. (One thing's certain: it involves an excessive interest in what other adults do behind closed doors.) Either way, why would the guy in Arkansas or Mississippi or Texas object to being called a homophobe if he really thinks gayness is wrong? I understand why Navarrette objects — he doesn't think it's wrong; he's not a homophobe. But that other guy, the one who disagrees with both Navarrette and Kathy: why wouldn't he wear a t-shirt with "PROUD HOMOPHOBE" scrawled across the chest, if it's really such a moral issue to him, such a question, in the end, of principle? Why deny, I mean, a conviction you're not ashamed of?

Lastly, who's really the arrogant elitist in this picture? Who's really exuding the "air of moral superiority"? Did I miss the part of the story in which Kathy travelled down to Arkansas, or Mississippi, or Texas, and found this guy and put a gun to his head, dragged him out of the house and down to city hall, forced him to marry some burly stud from up the block? Because if she did that, I'd agree: no question, Kathy's attempting to deny that poor soul his opinion on gay marriage. But it seems to me Kathy's position is precisely the opposite. It seems to me Kathy's not trying to mandate gay marriage, but only to permit it to those who choose. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas is completely free, in Kathy's universe, to make his own decision about whether or not to engage in gay marriage, even whether or not to like gay marriage, or think it's a good — a moral — idea. Which is to say Kathy's not imposing values on anyone, with one exception: the value of pluralism. And when you think about it, pluralism, as a value, is rather anti-elitist by nature and by history. The man in Arkansas-or-Mississippi-or-Texas, on the other hand: it's hard to suggest he's not legislating morality. If anyone's demonstrating an "air of moral superiority," it's the guy convinced he knows what's best for all of us, and trying to pass a law to back it up. And more important for conservatives, it's the guy using government to suppress the expression of opinion, and feelings, and values. Because constitutional amendments banning gay marriage employ the state to stop consenting adults from undertaking a wholly private negotiation that has no material impact whatsoever on others. Navarrette's man: he knows right from wrong, for us all. If that's not arrogant, I'm not sure what is.

It's hard to see where the common ground might be, harder still to see the incentive for hunting it. And really, this applies to both sides. Conservatives are in charge now; they don't have to listen. For three years they've steeped themselves in the rhetoric of nonnegotiation: you're either with us or against us. Given this, someone who doesn't agree with them might be forgiven for interpreting calls to work together as calls to come over to their side or to get, once and for all, out of the way. Unable to bring himself in line, a person who does not agree might see little point in "working together," even symbolically; and he might focus instead on honing his opposition. He might reasonably assume that the next four years will be an even fouler train wreck than the last, and that a great many of his fellow citizens have seen to it that he has few options remaining by way of mitigation.

The day after the concession/victory speech working-together double-whammy, Bush gave a news conference in which he said more or less what henchmen Rove, Cheney, and Andy Card, among others, had been saying since early Wednesday morning: we're in charge now, full steam ahead. It was a preview. Every time a reporter dared ask a multi-point question, Bush tossed barbed jests about how they hadn't been "listening to the American people," who had, he implied, now given him license to do what he'd already been doing anyway, which was whatever he damn well pleased — including not answer multi-point questions. The dynasty is complete as far as they're concerned, and Bush has already been quoted describing, at pre-election fundraisers, the rush they'll embark on to change political life as we know it before he starts, to use his own words, "quacking like a duck." So much for reaching across the aisle.

Hendrick Hertzberg, political editor for The New Yorker and one of the authors of its unprecedented endorsement this year of John Kerry, described the "coldness" of the distance between the two Americas, and called it unlike anything he's felt in his lifetime — different even, he said, from the '60s, and worse. The alienation is profound. It is of course more than political: it is deeply cultural, deeply personal. As one friend put it, "it's like discovering a member of your family is a serial murderer." Perhaps it's a sign of the atomization of our society that no sense of shared history survives it, no understanding of common identity, purpose or goals. This may be especially true in the northeast. Much has been written about the electoral college and its distortion of our campaign process — all energies, all philosophies directed at a small sliver of voters in the middle west — but none of it captures the feeling we have here that this campaign had little to do with us. Certainly, northeasterners voted in tremendous numbers. And passions here ran high before, during, and after the race. But for the most part our concerns were not inscribed on the map, and except for the Republican convention — during which we were invaded by strangers who, though personable enough, either hate us for being sin-infested devil-worshippers or view our city as a theme park through which they might pass like one of the "lands" at Epcot, all the while pimping us, willingly or not, as a symbol of the war they're so enamored of and that will, we can rest assured, never be brought home to them (though it already has and may well again be brought home to us) — aside from this, we played no role in the proceedings.* One side took our votes for granted, the other dismissed them. In a very real sense, it was not our election. And it is not our government that results.

I think it's fair to say, too, that this alienation is exacerbated by an intense region-bashing that was central to the campaign. By debate number three, Bush was spitting the words Massachusetts liberal at Kerry like a schoolyard epithet, and the implication went broader and deeper. You can hear it in Navarrette's response to Kathy. Whether it's the northeastern elite or Massachusetts liberals, they mean us, and they're not being complimentary. I'm sure some of their best friends are from up here, but that didn't stop them from publicly using the part of this nation we live, work, love and, once in a while, play in as a personal and political insult. We seem to be the boogeyman invoked in middle and southern states to frighten wayward kids, and they don't seem to mind admitting it. Can you imagine the fervor if Kerry had talked about Texas rednecks or Okies or South Carolinian white supremacists? He'd've been accused of fomenting civil war. Yet it's common practice for Bush & co. to employ — and appeal to — similar sentiments, and to my knowledge no one's ever seriously called them on it.

The general impression now — my impression — is that no one remotely connected to the northeast will be elected, ever. Even Rudy "Rambo" Giuliani may be too secular, too tainted by all those years of doing business with the pencil-necked northeastern elite to pass muster in the heartland; and you can forget altogether about democrats. We will thus be governed for the forseeable future by people who have no connection to our region, may even openly disdain it, and who don't need to — and won't — address us in any significant way during campaigns. Why wouldn't we feel disconnected from the process?

A topic that's come up repeatedly in the aftermath of the election (and more than a few times before it) is northeastern secession. Most people aren't serious when they offer this, but I'm beginning to think it's worth consideration. A stunning thought, I know. But ask yourself: why not? It seems there are fundamental differences in social philosophy. It seems those differences are growing — we're diverging rather than coming together, and there's increased intransigence on each side. And it seems that we in the northeast are precluded, structurally and by prejudice, from a base of power sufficient to compel negotiation. We're facing deTocqueville's tyranny of the majority. Why not simply leave? Given current (and probably future) sentiments, it seems a mutually satisfactory course. They'd get rid of an annoying, pointy-headed and sin-drenched thorn in their sides; we'd get to return to actually having our votes matter. They could get to work building the brave new theocracy they're so excited about, and we could return to enjoying the Enlightenment-based, pluralistic democracy we inherited. There's no reason the separation needs to be rancorous — hey, they don't even like us, and I'm sure folks in Iowa (see footnote) would be happy to stay right where they are rather than wasting time re-educating New Yorkers. What's really to be lost? The economy is global now anyway. True, most of their states are receiver states under the current arrangement — they get more money out of federal coffers than they put in — but given their feelings about federal government, that has to keep them awake at night with rage. This could be their opportunity to reform. And it could be our opportunity to stop subsidizing folks who hate us and who hate big, subsidizing government. As for daily business, we could negotiate highly favorable trade agreements, liberal (uh, sorry — generous) border crossings, excellent diplomatic terms. The northeast would become like a second, more populous Canada, with an even funnier accent. What's so bad about that? Personally, I'd love to figure out a way we could include a few of the Great Lakes states — Illinois in particular — as well as California and the Pacific Northwest, but that seems logistically impossible. They may have to go it on their own. (Though I'd point out that the current United States includes non-contiguous Hawaii and Alaska.)

Who knows? In this freshly-formed republic, Giuliani might actually have a shot.

Food, as they say, for thought. In the meantime, what to do? I myself intend to take a page form the conservatives' handbook. I intend to pause, take a look around, and draw comfort from the culture that surrounds me. Call it New York, call it the northeast; it is a complete culture, diverse and vibrant, shuffling and scuffling. It absorbs the world, relishes it, gives it back. It has more than a few irrational moments, but at its core it is, as the United States was, a child of the Enlightenment: humanist, rational, pluralistic. It is a place of pragmatism and compromise. And rather than study the darkness that lies beyond it, detesting, I intend to immerse myself in it. I intend to celebrate it, and sustain it, and to let it sustain me. America may be busy redefining itself, but the idea of America has never been so fully expressed as it has been — and is — right here. And I love the idea of America.




* Speaking of the Republican convention: now there was an opportunity to learn about arrogance, self-righteousness, and elitism. Here's just one juicily instructive nugget: the Times reported on a man standing in line outside Madison Square Garden, where protesters had gathered with chants and signs. The man was a delegate from Iowa. "What they need here in New York," he said, "is some people from Iowa to come here and teach them what life's all about."

Maybe he wasn't aware of the vast percentage of New Yorkers who came here, in fact, from places like Iowa — to escape. And yes, they do teach us what life is all about — as do the people from Ecudaor, Somalia, Jamaica, Italy, Uzbekistan, North Dakota, Laos and South Orange. But we sure are grateful for the thought.

The only part of the country that might have taken harder shots than the northeast is northern California. That same Times article reported on another Republican guest who, upon his arrival, exclaimed, "It looks like New York has been taken over by San Franciscans." Now what could that possibly be code for?

So many depraved cities, so few Iowans with time to spare ...

November 02, 2004

Everything Must Go

Reports again of trouble in southern Florida, prompting hard thoughts of a potential firesale of the entire state to Cuba. Think of it more along the lines of a merger; the terms could be simple: Castro steps down. They'd get millions of relatively prosperous lost sons, prime real estate, lucrative theme parks, and an aging but by and large wealthy bunch of white folks that our health care system can't support anyway. We'd get rid of Castro, then get a good night's sleep. And oh, yeah: as a bonus to us, they keep Jeb Bush.

Spoils

So far the only good news is that Nader is polling under 1%. Once upon a time I would have hated to see myself write a thing like that; but then months ago I heard Ralph responding to The Nation's open letter asking him — asking him, you understand: it was a plea, a grovel, really, among old friends, signed by the entire editorial board (read it here) — and it dawned on me that he'd truly disappeared into the funhouse of personal ambition. He seemed to be accusing them of virtual imprisonment — human rights violations, fascism, hate crimes and whatnot. It was vitriolic. It was hysterical, even. He was talking about The Nation, for god's sake; Stalinism still whispers through their rafters from time to time, like little puffs of stale dust. Nader had shaded past rant into rave. Throughout the whole subsequent process he's been living proof that you can be right and yet still be terribly wrong.

Rush Hour

I climb out of the subway at Broadway and Wall Street, just in front of Trinity Church, down-Downtown, sacred ground in Manhattan in more ways than one. It is a shudder-inducing place to visit, not least because it is beautiful, lined by Federal grandeur and chilled by short water-winds that prowl up the canyon from the thin island's tip. Money always gets the best address — money and lawyers, of course, the latter of which I'm here to see.

Down here streets are busy. There are tourists and there are the young and dully rich, those anxious and restless souls who make money for the sake of making money — men and women both, driven to it, addicts of a sort, pure of heart in their own heartless way. It is not the sort of place one expects to hear thumping of bibles. And yet I do: a man on the sidewalk at the top of the steps, leatherbound volume, well-worn, clutched aloft in his hand. He's a burly guy, middle-aged and ordinarily white. He stands facing the street on his toes. His cheeks and forehead have gone red, tendons taut down his neck, as he bays into the rushing noon crowd. The words are not entirely distinct, though their meaning's clear enough. It's a monochromatic hurl of language boiled up from his nether parts. It's a torrent, a hot pouring forth. He's not speaking to anyone in particular, just shouting into sky, into street. He is a machine of holler. It is as if he contains an engine, a thing that makes steam and bitter heat and forces it up to his head and then out in red bursts. And there are other men with him, other members of the team; and they stand at opposite corners of the intersection carrying leaflets, but they are, by comparison, chumps. They are the bat boys, the gardeners to his noble stoic horseman. By New York standards you can't really call them aggressive — they're easier to duck than the handers-out of restaurant menus, free papers, gym memberships and comedy-club lineups. It is the talker who is the main event.

It's an impressive performance. Anonymity is the shared condition of our streets — mental, physical, spiritual most of all — and rather than transcend this he has transformed it. He connects with no one but this — connection — doesn't seem to be the point. There is no point, really, except to unleash the flow. He has come to deliver a verbal bludgeoning. It's not that he seems angry — in fact he seems beyond anything as personal as anger. Words simply spill forth, hard and flat and inflectionless like sunbaked stones. They don't represent anything you could call rational discourse. This is not an attempt at persuasion, a first step in some hopeful dialogue. It is the recitation of edict. It comes packaged in certainty, even a little in threat — hints of a speech from some hoary patriarch enraged. This man has come down here to what might be called enemy territory — though of course what do I know? — to offer not cajolery, not seduction, but rather a good hard and unembellished shove.

People seem to take him in stride. One more nut, their — what, rueful? bemused? — expressions seem to say. There is no crowd gathered, no ring of the stonyfaced to gawk. Even on his slowest day the Robot Man gets more passing regard. And yet, to me, he could not seem more inexplicable. Of all the strange things I have seen in this city the man with his book is among the strangest, the most inscrutable. And it's not the God thing per se that separates us. I am an atheist now, but I was raised on a mild but consistent New Testament Christianity. I went to Sunday School; I spent many mornings on hard benches in the struggle to stay awake, sit up straight, stop fiddling with the back of the seat in front. I don't believe in God but I understand, in a fundamental sense, what it means; and more importantly still I understand the moral philosophy the church provides, the principles of empathy and generosity of spirit and community. Really, they're what guide me to this day.

But of course not much of this is in evidence out here on Wall Street. The water in this man's river of talk roars with anything but empathy; his message never reaches generosity. Instead it's all fire and brimstone, a long list of threats presumably transcribed from the almighty and meant to induce — what? some prostrate plea for mercy on the street? The details are unclear but the gist is plain enough: he's recruiting; he wants us to join up. And this of course is where the vast distance lies.

Once I might have said it was conviction that divided me from a man like this. I might have said that he has, by all appearances, by his own sidewalk testimony, an assurance — literally, a faith — that I don't and can't. He's free of doubt, is how I might have put it. And as such my reaction would have been a common one, tinged with hints of admiration. It's how we in the mainstream have long dismissed fanatics: a chuckle, a slight shake of the head, a wry comment about how we wish we could feel that kind of conviction. We ceded the lowlands of belief in order to hold the high ground of rationality, normalcy, social peace.

Now I look at it differently. I don't, for example, think I'm any less certain of principles than he. I have a belief system; it just doesn't come with a handbook, or a television channel, or a well-funded army awaiting command. Yet it's got me no less convinced. I've no more doubt, I mean, that I'm right.

The difference lies in our notion of community. It lies in our understanding of the basic tenets of human interaction, and in our expression — or lack of expression — of respect for those who find themselves our neighbors. In one sense, he doesn't have any: respect, I mean — for those around him. They're not so much fellow humans, fellow strivers travelling roads of toil and fulfillment as they are numbers in the calculus of his personal achievement. He won't be satisfied until they're converted. Which is another way to say he won't be satisfied until they're just like him. This strikes me as an expression either of the greatest possible narcissism or the greatest possible insecurity, I can't decide: this imperative to remake the world as reflection, either to indulge in forever being surrounded by self or to remove, also forever, all possible challenge. Either way, it's about as complete a denial of the agency of every man, woman, and child walking down that street as one could imagine.

It's not conviction that divides us but rather an understanding of community as a place of negotiation, a zone of jostle and compromise, argument and counter-persuasion. It is a respect for the divergence of experience, the honesty and reality and value of alternate perspective. It is an embrace of the richness of difference and a belief that all learning has not already been done. It is a commitment to rational discourse in the public sphere. And it is, above all, a conviction that browbeating and thuggish intimidation — bullying, spiritual or political or physical, worst of all — are the enemies of a healthy society.

This man on the corner is not a terrorist, of course; he's just a man, just standing there, spouting his routine. Yet the line between him and, say, the Taliban seems to shorten every day. Terror, after all, is not a belief system as such. It's merely a tactic, a means to an end. These days it serves men whose goal is to silence opposition. It serves men determined to eliminate difference. It serves men who cannot rest until the world, in so far as they can reach it, becomes a reflection. And this, really, is the fulcrum of our time.

Sooner or later, we're going to have to choose which side we fall on. And sooner just might mean today.


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On another, not entirely unrelated note: yet more evidence of the Republican commitment to democracy: in South Dakota, they've been following Native American voters out of their polling places. They've been taking down their license plates, trailing them home. It took a court order to stop them. Another court order has let them into polling places in Ohio, and thereby opened the door to similar mischief. Call it the first step toward selective disenfranchisement.

November 01, 2004

Contempt

If you are an American citizen, here, today, is where you stand. Your nation may be on the verge of reelecting one of the most divisive, corrupt, and incompetent administrations in its modern history. Your fellow citizens are fragmented, split — irreconcilably, perhaps — between those who see a mythically grand new dawn approaching and those who are so cynical, so depressed, so alienated from mainstream political discourse and practice that only outrage can motivate them to participate — if that. Always viewed as a mixed blessing even by its closest allies, your country has ceased to lead through moral suasion; it retains influence on the world stage only as a bully might, by threats and bribes. It is in fact viewed by most of the rest of the world as precisely that: a bully, and like most bullies it tends to be the recipient of much ill will, spoken and un-; and this is most assuredly a new thing, an unprecedented thing. Worse still, our leaders seem to take pride in such isolation (when, that is, they're not pathetically denying its existence, as Bush did in debates 2 and 3).

Though it is easy, sitting here, at home, in front of the television, to pretend otherwise, your country is mired in a simmering guerilla war that demonstrates to anyone who'd been wondering that nothing whatever was learned in the thirty years since the Vietnam conflict stumbled to its ignominious halt. Men are dying. Men are being forever maimed. Worse yet, women and children, most utter innocents, are also being maimed, also dying. The daily reality for hundreds of thousands of others, soldiers and citizens alike, has been recast as a slog through high levels of Dante's hell. Power and clean water are a struggle. Fear is the air they breathe. Civil war, assassinations loom in the near future, turmoil without predictable cease. Rage percolates in every alley, and divisions grow sharper with each passing day. You can call it freedom if it salves your nerves — sitting here, at home, in front of the television — but surely what it feels like to them is the collapse of hope. And they had little enough to begin with. Is it any wonder so many are now deciding they have nothing left to lose?

Meanwhile, at home, off the television — absolutely off the television — a war of another kind is well underway, sprung from the same authors' pens. You — most of you — are its target, or your "way of life" is. Pause for a moment to consider this phrase. We use it often but its meaning passes by us, not so much forgotten as unremarked. We are a middle-class nation. When we talk about our way of life — this sacred thing — we're referring to a decidedly middle-class set of circumstances, ambitions, ideals. It's modest, really: what we expect above all else is fairness. Reasonable compensation for services rendered, including labor; reasonable assurance that advantages are evenly distributed among competitors, and disadvantages as well, or at least that the lone cause of uneven distribution should be chance. We expect that in return for our abidance by the social contract, our contributions to the common good, we will be reasonably, fairly served by the commonality in our turn: by police and military, whose salaries our taxes pay; by schools we fund; by programs and institutions into whose coffers we dump not insignificant portions of our earnings. Justice: hard work, fair play will be rewarded — this is what we expect.

Such values are now under assault. Consider the following: "The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy... estimates that the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate dividends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. On wages and salaries it’s about twenty-three per cent" (The New Yorker, November 1, 2004). There are a lot of inferences to draw from such a statistic, but one of the most compelling is the observation that earnings from work — whether it's intellectual, physical, skilled or not — are now taxed at more than double the rate of earnings from speculation, which is to say not work. Which is to say that if you actually do something to get your income, you are being made to carry a greater share of the national revenue burden than are those who do nothing to get their income — or nothing other than gamble, however loftily. Investment is, after all, a glorified form of speculation. I don't mean to dismiss this: it's an essential element of our economy, one of the means by which companies are able to sustain themselves and grow. But so is work. So is labor. Companies themselves — you know; you probably work for one, or have — companies themselves are fond of telling us that, in fact, their greatest asset is their human capital. Sound familiar? It's in the management textbook, this phrase. It's in the manual, page 7 or 8. And for a moment let's not be cynics: let's take the managers and executives at their word. The greatest asset of the American business community is its human capital. Why then are that capital's efforts doubly taxed?

Three factors have accounted for the small and sluggish upward slog of the American economy over the past two years. One is real estate — home sales, along with home starts and the construction they entail. Another is consumer spending, volatile to be sure but still the prime engine of economic activity in the American economy; it has slowed but it has not stopped. The last growth factor has been spending associated with the war in Iraq. This means not only soldiers' salaries and weapons systems but also civilian contractors, equipment, transportation, and all attendant materials and activities. Investment is not what has led to our recent (and rather less than impressive) growth: investment has been up and down, but slumped overall; stock and bond markets remain cautious at best. To the extent that corporate health has improved, it's done so not by growing so much as by pruning, cutting expenses — really, in many cases, by asking ever dwindling numbers of that all-important human capital to take on additional responsibility without the customary additional pay. When you hear that American workers increased their productivity, this is the translation: fewer people doing the same amount of work. As corporate healths go it's not bad. But it's not as good — for anyone — as growth. It means net job losses rather than net job gains. It also does less to inspire investment. Genuine improvements in corporate health boost investor confidence, which increases investment; in this case, that hasn't happened. Investors know the difference.

So when President Bush claims credit on behalf of his tax cuts for the economy's recovery, ask yourself which of these three factors — real estate sales, consumer spending, or spending associated with the war in Iraq — were assisted by those tax cuts. The answer, more or less, is none of them. Certainly rich folks — and by that I mean really rich folks, not the ordinary run-of-the-mill well-off — they're a part of the economy, too, their habits reflected in both real-estate and consumer spending. But they're a small part of those statistics. Even vast changes in their behavior won't precipitate fundamental shifts. By contrast, the middle class represents an enormous portion of our economy; small shifts in its behavior do have seismic repercussions. In a consumer economy like ours, the very rich constitute a factor not much more significant than the margin of error. The driving force is the middle class. This is why George W.'s father famously called trickle-down fiscal policy "voodoo economics," and why, when Reagan pursued it anyway, it did not work. If you want to affect the course of the American economy in a significant way, tend to the middle class.

But the middle class was ill-served by Bush's tax cuts. The richest 2% of Americans — those in possession of what most of us would consider to be staggering sums — they were served quite well. This makes no economic sense; one person can only eat so much, have so many clothes, stay in so many hotel rooms and fly on so many planes. The goal is to have extravagant numbers doing such things modestly rather than modest numbers doing them extravagantly. Given that, one wonders why they did it. Bush & company are fond of accusing their opposition of fomenting "class warfare." They actually use that phrasing; and they actually use it against mild-mannered (and wealthy) contemporary democrats like Al Gore and Howard Dean. But members of the much-discussed American middle class, along with those who merely have an interest in the future economic prosperity of this nation, may want to ask themselves which class is truly waging war.

And when you do it, you may want to consider more than your taxes. You may also want to consider your political voice. You may want to consider your place in what has for most of your life been admired as the world's leading democracy.

Let me state it plainly: we are now governed by men who have no respect for, no internal devotion to the practice of democracy. They'll tell you otherwise, of course. Of course. And maybe they're even sincere; maybe they mean well and are only misguided. I don't know. But I am skeptical, given that the evidence suggests they'll tell you anything, and by that I mean anything at all. The evidence suggests that as scarce as their respect for democracy may be, their respect for truth is scarcer still. What the evidence suggests, in fact, is that they are ruthless and habitual liars.

An example: long after the 9/11 Commission had announced there were no "operational ties" between Al Qaeda and Saddam's regime (the wording itself, by the way, was a concession to White House arm-twisting; what they wanted to say was that there were no substantive links at all, meaning the two were not in league), Vice President Cheney continued to trumpet Saddam's involvement in the 9/11 attacks during campaign speeches. He did this with cameras and microphones present. It was duly reported in the press. And when he was called on it later, he denied it. When his denials were challenged, he growled that he'd never before met John Edwards. That turned out to be a lie as well. Some 40% of the American public remains convinced to this day that Saddam was in league with Osama; a similar number believes that Saddam's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the US invasion. The first presumption was investigated and found false by the 9/11 Commission, the second investigated and found false by Charles Dulfer. Cheney, of course, announced — surreally, but with conviction, and with remarkable effect — that both findings supported rather than contradicted his claims.

Another example: Condoleezza Rice before the 9-11 commission. She declared, memorably, that the administration had had no prior warning of the attacks. "It was not a particular threat report," she said. When the now-famous Presidental Daily Briefing was produced, she maintained her denial. When she was compelled to read its title — a vivid and devastating contradiction, to wit: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike within the US" — the expression on her face could have cracked stone. And in the very next minute, she said, again — having just read that title &mdash that the memo "did not warn of attacks inside the United States."

But this of course is what they do. They tell us black is white, they tell us night is day. They insist; and they do it with an implacably straight face. They told us that Kerry, a decorated war vet who got his medals the way anyone else got his medals — commentary by superiors and eyewitness testimony to back it up — was a coward and a traitor. It's worth mentioning that these accusations were sponsored by men who, excepting Rumsfeld, had gone to considerable and sometimes questionable lengths to avoid service themselves — worth mentioning not to cast aspersions on them for so doing, but to cast aspersions on them for having so little respect for the men who did fight that they'll resort to third-party smears of their reputations. (If Kerry's medals are not legit, whose are? How can we know? These same men, through other minions, had already impugned the record of John McCain; one can only wonder what they might've said about West Point graduate Wesley Clarke.)

The linguistic gyrations are, in the classic phrase, Orwellian. They are the soul of deception itself. We got a Clean Skies Act that eviscerated controls on pollution. We got a self-professed "good steward of the environment" who invited energy industry executives to craft their own regulations. This is qualitatively the same as inviting crack dealers to revise drug sentencing laws; yet Bush and Cheney are still polling close to 50%.

Perhaps the most damaging mendacity has surrounded the war. We invaded Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction; we invaded Iraq because they'd been in league with Al Qaeda; we invaded Iraq because it would be easy, would help bring peace and stability to the middle east. When all of these turned out to be false, of course, and when stagecraft couldn't put a stop to real killing, we decided we'd invaded Iraq because of our desperation to liberate the Iraqi people. Maybe it was easy to convince Americans of this, but it has not been easy to convince Iraqis.

There are material consequences when our government lies to us, of course, and those can be — surely are, in this day and age — very bad. But there are deeper significances, more serious causes for concern. Fundamentally, lies are gestures of disrespect. They suggest we don't deserve the truth. More disturbingly, they suggest that truth is something these men — our elected officials, our stewards, our trustees — don't believe they owe us. As citizens this shouldn't just bother us, it should anger us. And it should frighten us as well. The very essence of representative democracy is the accountability of governors to the governed. That accountability extends well beyond the vote; the contract we make with leadership obligates them not only to explicate their decisions but also the reasoning behind them, if not in excruciating detail then at least with clarity and candor. It also obligates them to estimate consequences — honestly. We make exceptions in certain rare cases having to do, most often, with national security; and we do so reluctantly, and with scrutiny, as we should. A government not so obligated to its citizenry — not accountable, that is; not transparent — drifts toward dictatorship of one kind or another. This is why we've long criticized such behavior in South American regimes, or regimes in Asia, Africa, even in parts of Europe. It's the kind of behavior we see now in the Bush administration.

Consider a leader who is not elected by the majority of his nation's citizens. Think of a leader who then refuses to speak to his nation's citizens; who hibernates, eshewing conventional (and admittedly imperfect) means of communication like the press conference, by which he can use one of the nation's chief sources of pride — its "free" press — to conduct business with another — its citizens. (Bush gave only 12 press conferences through April 2004, at which point campaign rhetoric overtook whatever meaningful exchange there might have been, which was never much.) Consider a president whose deputies, including the vice president, develop policy in unprecedented secret sessions with committees whose members they refuse to name, even to nonpartisan entities like the Congressional Budget Office, and even under legal threat. It doesn't really matter what reason Cheney gave; no reason is sufficient. This is what, as an American citizen, you may wish to consider.

Consider a president who forces attendees at his campaign rallies to sign loyalty oaths. Loyalty oaths, yes, that's right, as in Joseph McCarthy and Martin Dies: and what might be the purpose of this if not to sew paranoia and distrust, a kind of militant bigotry between those inside and those left outside the tent? Security is the excuse, but it's a hollow one. Surely no one believes that the sort of men who hammered planes into the World Trade Center towers might be deterred from mischief by a piece of paper.

But now consider a president who in addition to oaths uses secret service — his paramilitary bodyguard force — to extract potential dissenters from the proceedings. He won't allow them to participate. Put another way, this means that the president — your president, the president of these United States — will not countenance dissent. Consider that for an American moment. He won't allow it; he banishes it; and yet he asks you to make him the chief executive of a legendary democracy, a place that has since its inception been proud haven to all manner of political dissent, from the mountains to the mud.

Consider a justice department, the very symbol of our commitment to the rule of law, whose chief officer not only sanctions but encourages — you might even say celebrates — the trampling of legal institutions achieved quite literally through the spill of blood. The writ of habeas corpus, older than our nation itself: out the window. The right to counsel, to speedy trial, the right to a jury of one's peers: null and void at the president's whim. What is such behavior if not kinglike in nature, expressions of royal caprice, unassailable by any means at the disposal of ordinary men? Is this not what Jefferson, Jay, even Hamilton most feared: capriciousness in the exercise of justice, willful application of the law? Was this not what they abhorred, spoke and eventually took up arms against against? What is a man's safeguard against tyranny if not the law, and what is the law if it does not apply equally, to each of us, always? Don't ask Ashcroft. He doesn't give a damn.

This president resisted the formation of the 9/11 Commission. I have often wondered why there's been no more discussion of this fact. The greatest attack on our nation in its history and the president didn't feel it was worthwhile to conduct an inquiry into the events surrounding and leading up to it. Ladies and gettlemen, hedidn't want to talk about it. When he could no longer avoid talking about it, he appointed as the commission's chair another king — the king of backroom dealings, quite possibly a war criminal: Kissinger of course, a man skilled at making unpleasant realities disappear. When that effort at scuttling was itself scuttled, he resisted testifying. Finally, famously, he did agree to testify, but only on condition that he be permitted to appear jointly with Vice President Cheney. You know all this, of course; the question is why you are not up in arms about it. Look at it this way: we have a president who needed a nanny in order to testify before congress. Or this way: we have a president who intended deception but could not keep his story straight — was not trusted to pull it off, perhaps did not even trust himself. Think about it. Why did they insist on going in there together? So that their testimonies could not be used against one another. So that one would not inadvertently expose the other in a lie. So that we, the American people, would not inadvertently stumble onto the truth. Such is the esteem in which this administration holds democratic process.

It's trite to complain about the venality of politicians. It's trite to disdain them, view the entire lot as a necessary evil, tolerated but unloved. But circumstances call for more than triteness now. History will not forgive us if we do no more than retreat with our practiced weariness into the trite. So never mind their incompetence; never mind their arrogance toward the community of nations. Never mind their fanaticisms, their misguided evangelical fervor, their bigotry disguised as patriotic resolve. Never mind their intransigence, their refusal even to admit mistakes much less dissect them for fresh wisdom. Never mind their utter refusal to take what they themselves would surely have called "personal responsibility" for anything at all. What you should consider, for a moment, is whether you think it's wise to entrust our nation to men who have demonstrated chronic contempt for its most fundamental moral and philosophical tenets — for the concept of an open society, a pluralistic democracy in which governors are truly the servants of the governed, accountable to them and their interests in everything they do, and obliged to weigh the whole good and the good of the whole when they make policy or otherwise act.

So consider all that, and then do what you can to rebuke them for holding you — for holding us — in such contempt. As of today, you still have that option.

August 02, 2004

Terrortown

Some people say they’ll be stopping every train heading into Penn Station — every train, northbound and south-, from Connecticut or New Jersey, Long Island, whatnot. Others guess they’ll stop trains randomly — that, oh, sure, they’re saying they’ll stop them all: but they won’t, of course they won’t, they never could. They just want to scare them. Them? The bad guys. Terrorists. Right?

Other people are saying you won’t be able to get near Madison Square Garden. That they’ll be running metal detectors on every corner in a six block radius, passing us through them, funneling commuters like cattle in a chute. Some are saying you’ll have to get ID’d just to walk down the block. What good the ID check would do is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’ll have Secret Service on hand, guys with phenomenal memory, entire mugbooks of terrorists, known and suspected, perused, digested, stored in their heads — guys who can take one look at you posed under bad DMV lighting and compare it with the entire mental file.

Many are taking that week off, August 30 through September 3, fuck it, who needs the hassle. Makes sense. But imagine it: New York: Republicans flooding in, New Yorkers flooding out.

It makes sense.

You get jumpy walking down the street. You get jumpy in the subway, on the bus. You were probably jumpy anyway — this is New York; but now you’ve got eyes in the proverbial back of your head, and they are wide. Because people carry stuff in this town: backpacks, boxes, shoulder bags and grocery sacks, whole crates. The stuff is bulky, heavy. It’s got gravity. Once, even recently, this might have been counted one of the great things about New York — that you could see, at any given moment, anyone hauling anything. I’ve seen people moving entire apartments by subway, doing it cheap, one box at a time. I’ve seen air conditioners, stereos, sporting equipment. I’ve seen computers. I’ve seen laundry, suitcases, dogs and cats in portable houses; mice, birds, snakes. Sometimes you have no idea: it’s just a giant leather bag, or a giant plastic bag, or a giant cardboard box holding god knows what. As always, you try not to look — or at least you try not to get caught looking. But whatever it is, whatever you can imagine, you’ll see it. Everything — that’s what you’ll see: everything; and it will be out here among us, being hauled.

So what was once one of the great things about New York has now become ominous. Even backpacks — even those thin little rectangular computer packs, very sleek: they portend. What’s in there? Why so heavy? Why so secret, so covered up?

We had our first suicide bomber this week. He was homegrown, but that hardly matters. Damage is damage. Potential damage is damage. Not terror, this one, but not unrelated: a New York City policeman, injured, distraught over friends and colleagues lost on 9/11, descended into self-loathing and depression, genuine organic mental disorder — so they speculate — that had always been there, got worse. Became despair. Is this what passes for irony these days? The cop had been a rookie on that day. Afterward, he could no longer function. He was losing his job, being pushed into early retirement, permanent disability. He loved the brotherhood, but he let the brotherhood down; and then the brotherhood let him go.

Who knows how people think? We know this: he made a bomb. He carried it, allegedly, into 42nd Street. That’s Times Square station, the New York City subway system — possibly the busiest warren of musted and urine-fouled tunnels on the face of the earth. He wanted to kill himself. And he wanted to take some of us with him — many of us, because let’s face it, there’s never a time when there are only a few. A peculiarly American thing, that: disgruntled civil servant takes page out of Palestinian handbook. The other Middle Eastern export. But of course the psychology, in America — the motive — is always personal.

Why did he do it? We don’t know why. We will never know why. There is no explanation for a thing like this, no trail of logic as we properly define it that would lead us to his conclusion, make us say Aha, so that’s the reason, now we see. We can’t see. This is what makes it unpredictible. This is what makes it — dare I breathe the word? — this is what makes it terror.

So the cops, the sane ones anyway, they’re out on the street again, as they were when the war on Iraq began, as they were in the wake of the attacks themselves. We are getting used to them. The sight is not unpleasant. They are regular guys and regular gals, as far as we can tell; they’re tough, sardonic, forever a little pissed off. Some, believe it or not, are jolly. They joke and laugh with one another. They seem confident. And the mere fact of their presence tells us something is being done.

But, really, what can be done? Spend a little time here and you will wonder. Look around; walk; observe; and ponder. See the crowds, the sheer torrents of people, so many sizes, shapes, colors and styles, so many directions they move in, so many thoughts behind so many unreadable eyes. Just: so many. It is not possible to watch them all, let alone to search them, frisk them, x-ray their clothes and their bags. What can be done? You can’t know where they come from. You can’t know what they want. Most of all you can’t know what they carry in their bags, in their hearts.

What can be done?

We all think of it: how easy it would be. How unstoppable, how fast. We all think of it, all the time; and we don’t want to say what we think because we’re afraid. What if they haven’t guessed? What if they haven’t yet stumbled upon whatever simple yet infallible scheme we’ve dreamt up idly on a late-night ride or a midtown walk? Ridiculous, of course: that we could outwit men who think of such things and only such things all day and all night, devote their lives to it, take pride — monks of death, scientists of the furtive assault. But we are reluctant just the same. We tell our loved ones under cover of darkness, we tell our friends after bottles of wine. We look afresh at the things we do ourselves, and we try to imagine: what if ...?

Example. What if I rented a car. What if I drove it up the West Side Highway, onto the Merritt Parkway, out of state. What if I visited friends in a town, a small city even: Providence; Portsmouth, New Hampshire. What if my friends gave me a package. Let’s say they packed it in a suitcase and we put the suitcase in the trunk. Back I come, down the Merritt Parkway again, through the Bronx and past the George Washington bridge to the West Side Highway: Manhattan now, me in my rented car. The traffic is thick; I try to keep up. No one has time to notice me. They are busy, distracted, important people; and in my car I am small, cheap, generic, unworthy of remark. No one will stop me. No one will search me. No one will check my loaded trunk. I know: with the exception of the package, I have done exactly this, more than once. Into the city I come, up 96th Street and over to Central Park West. How easy it is; how convenient. I sail to Central Park West and find parking on a side street — 93rd, 94th, 95th. I leave the car and take my suitcase from its trunk. There is a subway stop at 96th: down I go. Ten minutes later I am at 42nd Street. Two minutes after that I am at 34th. And on and on. You see?

What keeps this from happening? It’s not cops. It’s not military. It’s not that no one ever thought of it but me. It is the simple fact that no one, yet, has had the desire. And we can rely on that no more.

So we don’t talk. We don’t tell each other these thoughts because we are terrified of the distance between unstoppable and inevitable — the mysterious math that we live by these days which suggests that if a thing canbe done, then sooner or later it will be done. And so if we can think it, they too can think it; and if they can think it — in their unknowable heads, their unknowable hearts — then it can be done. And if it can be done, then why, given the leave the world has taken of all logic, will it not be?

We don’t talk. The MTA does not talk. The police do not talk, and god knows the administration does not talk. Facts are scarce. Want to know what security precautions are planned for the convention next month — in this city, our city, where we live, work, love and panic; where we’ve already been attacked and will, we are told, over and over, inevitably, be attacked again? Visit the homeland security department’s web site. There you’ll find strong words, confident words, much bluster; but no plans. Visit the MTA site. Schedules, rules of conduct, maps; but no plans. Visit the official site of the City of New York — laudable information about affordable apartments; but, alas, no plans. You won’t find them on the official Republican National Convention site, either; or on the Madison Square Garden site, or the Port Authority’s. Maybe they’re coming. Maybe they’re in the works. We’ve got thirty-eight days to go, after all. But in the meantime those of us who live here — we’ve little but our rumors. We’ve little but our sense that they (they again: this time Bloomberg; Bush; Karl Rove and the symbolmongers at the RNC) have added dayglo orange to the rings of the target we were already wearing; that they have made it not only easier but more likely that something — something awful, irreversible — will be done.

The Republicans will come. They will have their convention; and they will have, too, their security. They will turn Madison Square Garden into a fortress. They will reroute traffic, stop trains, box protesters and frisk whomever they wish, recent judge’s orders notwithstanding. They will be safe.

The question is, what about the rest of us?