Category Archives: Random Blogging

Of Urinals and Impeachment…

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am disgusted by the crazy  self-professed Christians whose recent “Faith and Freedom” Convention was highlighted by the presence of crude racist figurines of President Obama in the urinals.

This crude and childish prank was only marginally more offensive than last Saturday’s call for Obama’s impeachment by the South Dakota GOP. (As a friend noted on Facebook, Article I of the specifications would be “Governing while black.”)

I have a news bulletin for the South Dakota Republican Party: disagreeing with a President and/or his policies is not grounds for impeachment. Like him or hate him, find him competent or feckless, this President has done nothing remotely approaching the high crimes and misdemeanors that warrant impeachment. Impeachment isn’t a recall mechanism.  (Besides, if Dick Cheney wasn’t impeachable, no one is.)

There are lots of reasons why people might disagree with this or any President. And certainly this is not the only era in which toxic partisanship has encouraged unhinged animus toward an occupant of the White House. But in my (long) lifetime I have never seen anything approaching the level of pure hatred, disrespect for the office of the Presidency, and complete and utter irrationality that has characterized the reaction of so many Americans to the Obama Presidency.

Is everyone who opposes this President a racist? Of course not.

But most of those who hate him are. And in their hysterical efforts to deny our first black President any  policy or political successes, these moral midgets are willing to block progress for the whole country. They are willing to keep judicial and administrative positions unfilled for years. Willing to shut down the government. Willing to oppose measures that they themselves introduced and formerly championed. Willing to tear the country apart in order to blame Obama for failing to hold it together.

They are willing to piss on America if just a little of that piss lands on the President.

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It Isn’t Just Me

I know I sound like a broken record on the subject of civic knowledge, but I’m not the only person despairing of the consequences of our civic deficit. A recent article in Salon by C.J. Werleman describes the civic landscape and its implications.

A few of the author’s more trenchant observations:

The health of a democracy is dependent on an educated citizenry.  Political illiteracy is the manure for the flourishing of political appeals based on sheer ignorance.

So let me introduce you to House Majority Speaker Eric Cantor’s Republican Party vanquisher David Brat (R-VI). First thing you need to know about this far right-wing political upstart is he’s a university professor, which means it’s highly probable he’s not an idiot. He also identifies with the Tea Party strain of conservatism, which, paradoxically, means it’s likely he is, indeed, an idiot. And by idiot, I mean wholly ignorant of U.S. history and constitutionality.

In fact, in his victory speech delivered last week to his supporters, Brat demonstrated that he sits among the majority of Americans when it comes to political and cultural illiteracy.

“I wish to restore America to its Judeo-Christian roots,” declared Brat. “God acted through people on my behalf.”

Ignoring the self-delusion of the latter part of the above text, Brat now joins no less than 200 million Americans, according to a number of polls, who believe the U.S. Constitution and our laws are based on Judeo-Christian values. On any given Sunday you will hear Christian-right politicians claim absurdly that U.S. laws are based on the Bible. Spoiler alert: they’re dead wrong. The Constitution’s secular provisions came into being thanks to the Founding Fathers, who shared a deep suspicion of both organized religion and the supernatural. The Constitution was framed with a conscious omission of any mention of God and a prohibition of all religious tests for public office. Moreover, the First Amendment’s declaration that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” embodied the founders’ view that religion has no place in the political domain.

That not a single major media outlet bothered to correct Brat’s ignorance represents America’s continual decline in American civic and cultural literacy.

The rest of the article is equally scathing, and well worth reading, but I want to focus on that last quoted paragraph, because I think it points to one of the major reasons Americans are so uninformed, and so easily manipulated.

We have lost journalism.

What used to be called “the journalism of verification” has disappeared into a sea of Kardashian-watching, Faux News “reporting,” hate radio, consumerism and internet conspiracy theories. The few actual reporters who remain–and I mean few (a couple of years ago I used a textbook in my Media and Policy class titled “Will the Last Reporter Please Turn Out the Lights”)–simply do not know enough to ask what should be obvious follow-up questions, or to provide readers with background and context that would allow them to properly evaluate what political actors are saying or doing.

Werleman is dead-on when he concludes:

In other words, when Republicans say there is no such thing as gravity, and Democrats reply that gravity is real, CNN and the like say, “Look, Democrats and Republicans are fighting again,” which not only exacerbates the nation’s anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, but also increases the likelihood of extremist views and falsehoods taking hold in the national electorate.

We’ve replaced fact-checkers with “he said/she said” stenographers, and in the process, we’ve created a political world in which there are no facts–only opinions.

It’s a recipe for disaster. Ignorance isn’t a survival strategy.

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Correlation is Not Causation

Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Indiana’s Governor has been emphasizing the importance of strong families, and promising that measures taken by his administration will be “family friendly.” (Well, to be accurate, they’ll be friendly for heterosexual families…)

Family is a key indicator of success and we’re looking for ways that we can encourage more young people to get married, to stay married, to wait to have children until they’re married is very important,” he said.

Very nice. Unfortunately, the Governor’s cart is in front of his horse.

There is a raft of research showing that people who enjoy financial security are more likely to stay married. There’s a reason for the statistic the Governor shared, to the effect that upper-income folks and college graduates are more likely to have stable marriages–people who aren’t sweating the rent are more likely to stay married.

The Governor also said that his administration has been putting “the interests of strong families at the very center of our policies on development.”

Sorry, but without policies that help the working poor make ends meet, that’s just blowing smoke.

A living wage is what enables and facilitates stable marriages. It isn’t the other way around.

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Your Assignment for Today…

…is to read Don Knebel’s most recent post at the Center for Civic Literacy blog.

You need to read the post in its entirety, but here’s the lead-in, to whet your appetite:

When some American reporters described the recent election in India as a victory for the Hindu Nationalist Party, an Indian comic tweeted that Indian reporters should begin referring to the Republican Party as the “Christian Nationalist Party.” The tweet was sarcastic, but nonetheless close to home. As the primary defeat of Virginia Representative Eric Cantor emphasizes, the current incarnation of the Republican Party is increasingly both Christian and nationalistic.

Don notes that today’s GOP is most popular among citizens with the least education and the lowest incomes, and posits that those are the Americans who are also the most fearful– those most threatened by immigration and social change in general.  He also notes that those citizens are also more likely to be Christians. (I would add a few descriptors: older, white, male, heterosexual…). And he concludes:

Ironically, the Republican Party, long considered the party of the rich, seems increasingly to be the party of the poor or at least the working poor. While Republicans continue to advocate for lower taxes and less government spending, because of the correlation between a state’s poverty and its likelihood of voting Republican, eight of the ten states most heavily dependent on federal assistance also voted Republican in the 2012 Presidential election. Who would have thought?

Read the whole thing.

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It’s the Culture, Stupid!

One of the many ways we might “slice and dice” humanity is to describe the wide gulf between people who understand the importance of systems and those who see the world entirely as a creation of individual actors and actions.

I don’t want to minimize the importance of leadership, because ultimately it is leaders and those they persuade who move the culture, but folklore to the contrary, that kid who stuck his finger in the dyke did not singlehandedly avert the deluge.

I understand the temptation to attribute social ills to personal failures. Saying “that guy is poor because he’s lazy,” is a much more satisfying analysis than one that tries to quantify the role(s) played by an inferior education or economic shifts that made his skills obsolete or bankrupted his employer–let alone public policies with unintended consequences.

There are two possible responses to a recognition of the immense influence of culture and social systems: you can shrug your shoulders, accept the brutal truth that you cannot change the world or even a small portion thereof, and spend your days cultivating your own garden (a la Candide); or you can join with others working for systemic changes, recognizing that life offers no guarantees. If and when change comes, its form will be unpredictable, its trajectory uncertain and its emergence maddeningly slow.

A lot of us struggle with that reality, and that choice, every day.

My garden is pretty appealing….and the magnitude of the cultural change we need is pretty daunting.

Withdrawal is tempting.

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